Psalm 23, John 10:11-18
The story goes that Tommy was sitting in his 3rd grade Sunday School class, getting ready to do a drawing. His teacher came up to him and asked him what he was preparing to draw. "God," he said. "I'm drawing a picture of God." "Why, Tommy, you can't draw a picture of God," said the well-meaning teacher. "No one knows what God looks like." "They will after I'm done with my drawing," Tommy said.
I like the sassiness of the imaginary Tommy, who has the audacity to draw God. But, in truth, we’re always doing that. God is Mystery, ineffable, beyond all imagining. And yet we have to imagine the Divine, we have to “draw” God some way. We have to use words, concepts and images because they're all we mortals have -- blunt instruments though they may be. In other words, all of our language about God is inherently metaphorical.
One of the most-beloved metaphors of the Divine, humanity and the relationship between us is that of the shepherd and the sheep. It was a common metaphor in the Bible, mentioned more than 80 times – sometimes referring to the King of Israel as a shepherd of his people, but more often referring to God as the good shepherd, the one who – in Isaiah – feeds his flock like a shepherd, gathers the lambs with his arm, carries them in his bosom, and gently leads those that are with young. It reaches its peak of metaphoric perfection it the 23rd psalm, which is probably the most beloved psalm in the Bible. I’m guessing many of us know that by heart, too.
In the New Testament, the author of the gospel of John picks up this potent metaphor from the Hebrew Scriptures and uses it to describe who Jesus is. This is Jesus speaking:
10:11 "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the
sheep.
10:12 The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the
sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away--and the wolf
snatches them and scatters them.
10:13 The hired hand runs away because a
hired hand does not care for the sheep.
10:14 I am the good shepherd. I know
my own and my own know me,
10:15 just as the Father knows me and I know the
Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.
This image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd has become so beloved you’d be hard-pressed to find a Protestant church that does stained glass windows that does not have one of them devoted to a beautiful, pastoral image of Jesus holding a lamb. The problem with much-beloved metaphors, however, is that they can become old, hackneyed, sentimentalized -- too familiar. Metaphors at their best open a window into a truth we hadn't realized before or at least hadn’t realized that profoundly. They shake us up a bit. At their worst, metaphors dull our perceptions. Our eyes glaze over. We've heard it all before, and there's nothing there that makes us see things anew.
I fear the latter is more often true of this shepherd-sheep metaphor. It's been used a lot, and it’s easy to sentimentalize the idea, easy for it to lose its edge. For instance, have you ever noticed how pictures of the Jesus shepherd and sheep are always remarkably dirt-free? The shepherd, Jesus, is wearing flowing robes that look like they just came back from the dry cleaners, and the sheep are spotless, "white as snow." In fact, we usually don't even see grown sheep, just lambs. Innocent, playful, cute lambs, whom the shepherd is cuddling in his arms. It's a lovely -- and unreal -- pastoral scene.
Let's peel back the layers of this metaphor and see if there's anything new there. We can start with the shepherd: shepherds (both then and now) were dirty. They didn't bathe much, if at all. Gretel Ehrlich, a writer from Wyoming who lives on a sheep ranch, tells of one modern-day sheepherder named Fred who showered so infrequently that his body hair had grown through his long johns.[1] Now if that repulsive piece of information doesn't shatter the “shepherd as Mr. Clean” image, I don't know what will.
The reason shepherds are so dirty is that they live a hard life, away from any of the comforts of home, completely exposed to the ravages of both sunshine and storm. Sheep need grass to eat and water to drink, and lots of it, and the search for such will take a shepherd into far hills and meadows, whether we are talking about 1st-century Judea or 20th-century Wyoming. The same Gretel Ehrlich found herself one Wyoming summer serving as a substitute sheepherder when one of the regulars quit. And so at 5 o'clock one morning, with a mare and a border collie, she rode off to find the herd of 2000 sheep who were grazing somewhere in the middle of nowhere. For the next several months, alone, she let her flock wander over 90 square miles of pasture land, wherever they wanted to go.
And where sheep want to go is often where they shouldn't go, she found – down into crags or ravines or, if they are in a panicked run, which sheep seem to be in often, right over a cliff. Sheep become easily lost, and once lost they are defenseless. They are easy prey for wild animals and thieves. The idea that a shepherd might have to lay down his or her life for the sheep is not an exaggerated claim. In 1st-century Palestine, it was not uncommon for a single shepherd to have to fight off bands of thieves. In 20th-century Montana, Ivan Doig – another sheepherder turned writer – tells of his father fighting off a bear to protect his sheep, and almost getting killed in the process.[2] This is why today’s passage from John speaks so scornfully of the hired hand, who will not do what is needed – that is, risk his own life – to protect the sheep.
Perhaps there was more to this willingness to risk life than just economic concern. In ancient and present-day Palestine, at least, sheep are raised for their wool. And thus, sheep are often with a shepherd for years. The shepherd grows to care deeply for them, giving each of them names and knowing when even one of them wanders away.[3] As our passage for today says, accurately, “I know my own and my own know me.”
One traveler to the Holy Land wrote this description of a shepherd that beautifully summarizes all I’ve just said: “On some high moor, across which at night the hyenas howl, when you meet him, sleepless, far-sighted, weather-beaten, leaning on his staff, and looking out over his scattered sheep, everyone of them on his heart, you understand why the shepherd of Judea sprang to the front in his people’s history; why they… made the shepherd the ultimate symbol of providence.”[4] The people of the ancient Middle East were so impressed with the vigilance, courage, love and care of the shepherd that they gave that name -- shepherd -- to their rulers, to their God and eventually to Jesus.
What a beautiful, and gritty, metaphor of God’s or Jesus’ affection for us: fierce, protective, tenacious, willing to endure whatever it takes to see us through to green pastures and cool waters. It’s a metaphor you can climb inside, take comfort in. Put me under the care of this God, this Good Shepherd, and I shall not want.
There’s only one catch. If God is the Shepherd, what does that make us? Baaaaa. The sheep, obviously. And here the going gets a little more rough, in terms of this metaphor. Because there’s some hard facts to face about being sheep.
Sheep are easily thrown off balance and have difficulty righting themselves again, with catastrophic results. Ivan Doig tells a story of he and his grandmother being left alone for two weeks one summer to tend a herd of 4000 sheep, while Ivan’s father was away. No sooner had the father left, than grandma and Ivan noticed that not all of their new charges were happily grazing. A few were on their backs, legs stiff in the air, dead as stones, he writes. Soon, they figured out that the sheep had ticks and were rolling themselves on the ground to scratch themselves. “The roll easily carried them too far onto their deep-wooled backs to be able to get up again, and within minutes in the summer heat, their struggling would bloat them to death.” Gases build up in the stomach, and as these expand it cuts off blood circulation to the body. Sheep die this way, and fast if it’s hot. So Ivan and his grandmother spent every daylight hour of the next 14 days patrolling the sheep and heaving them over onto their feet when they spotted the kick of hooves in the air.
It’s not just ticks that cause a sheep to turn bottom up, by the way. If an extra woolly or fat sheep happens to lie down in a small depression in the ground, and roll slightly to its side to stretch out or relax, the center of gravity in its body can suddenly shift so that its feet no longer touch the ground. It panics and starts to paw frantically, which of course, makes things worse. It rolls over even further onto its back and now has no hope of regaining its feet.[5] Sound like any humans we know? There’s whole days when I feel like this.
Unfortunately, there’s more: As I mentioned earlier, sheep get lost quite easily and want to wander into places that aren’t good for them. They are also easily panicked. In one story I read, a tiny Pekinese pup jumping out of a car parked was enough to send the 200 terrorized sheep bolting across the pasture, away from the 8-pound menace.
And finally, sheep are notorious creatures of habit. If left to themselves, they will follow the same trails until they become ruts; graze the same hills until they turn to desert wastes; and we will pollute our own ground – I mean, sheep will pollute their own ground until it is rife with disease and parasites. I’ll leave it to you to draw any parallels between sheep and humanity.
However, sheep have one saving grace going for them – they are obedient. They know and understand their shepherd’s voice, and they do what she asks. In addition, they won’t listen to the voice of a stranger. Another traveler to the Holy Land, W.M. Thomson, writes this, “The shepherd calls sharply from time to time, to remind the sheep of his presence. They know his voice and follow on; but, if a stranger calls, they stop short, life up their heads in alarm, and if the call is repeated, they turn and flee, because they know not the voice of a stranger. I have made this experiment repeatedly.”[6] Can’t you just see W.M. Thomson scaring sheep all throughout the Holy Land with his experiment?
Now, so far, you may have been going along with this metaphor of humans-as-sheep. You may agree that is a large part of the human condition to be easily unbalanced, easily lost, easily panicked and that we easily make a big mess of things.
At obedience, however, we tend to draw the line and say “That’s it. The metaphor is over.” Our modern American temper not only celebrates individualism, in which we bow to no authority other than ourselves, and in the process, the idea of obedience has lost favor. In crossword puzzles, the clue “act the robot” is supposed to yield the four-letter answer “obey.” To obey is to not think for oneself, to mindlessly go along. And it is true that the excuse “I was just obeying orders” has been used to justify many an unjust act. Obedience, then, is yet one more pathetic trait that we hope to cure ourselves of so that we can enter true spiritual adulthood.
Joan Chittister is a Benedictine nun who took the traditional three vows that all nuns and monks take, one of which is a vow of obedience. But she is anything but a mindless robot. She is a woman alive with passion for the poor and with indignation at any institution – especially her own church – that propagates injustice. She is a champion of women's rights and environmental justice. She is considered a renegade, and I'm sure most of the Catholic hierarchy would wish she would just be quiet. But, Joan would say, “I can't be quiet. I took a vow of obedience.”
Chittister points to the fact that the word "obedience" is derived from the Latin word that shares its root with the verb "to hear." So listening and obedience are very closely connected. In fact, to obey, Chittister suggests, means to listen closely to the voice of God in life, and then to act on what we hear. Like sheep, we need to become so accustomed to that voice that we hear it clearly over the others that call to us. So we hear the voice that calls us to the good, to the just, above the voices that call us to power, to respectability, to cynicism, to fear, to despair. Unlike sheep, however, there’s a variety of ways in which we can hear that voice. We may hear it in quiet times, when our spirits is stilled -- whether that happens on a church pew or on the Muni or in a city park. We may hear it in Scripture and other holy books. We may hear it when we listen to ourselves, paying attention to that ache in our back and realizing it may be telling us something about the stress and tension of our lives. And, we hear the voice of God in one another: in the “members of our communities, both old and young; in the person we married, all of whose jokes we know by now; in underlings and children; old parents and boring in-laws.”[7] If we get really good at hearing, we can hear the voice of God in the person we most disagree with, who pushes our buttons, whom we find it hard to love.
To be obedient, then, means to cultivate the spiritual discipline of listening – to listen in such a way that we develop a sensitivity to the call of Christ within the context of our daily interactions.
Because, like sheep, we do need a shepherd. We do need a guide. We know we can drive ourselves a bit crazy – over cliffs, into ravines, onto our backs, kicking wildly, fearful of the least sound. Obedience – the willingness and ability to hear the voice of God when we’re feet up, when we’re heading for that cliff – obedience is what will save us. Obedience is what will enable us to stay on the right paths, the paths that lead to life. May we hear the voice of the shepherd even more clearly. And may it guide us to green pastures and still waters, to the overflowing table.
Amen.
__________
[1] Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces (New York: Penguin Books, 1986).
[2] Ivan Doig, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978)
[3] William Barclay, The Gospel of John, Vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press), 1975.
[4] Quoted in Barclay, p. 53.
[5] Phillip Keller, A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1996).
[6] Quoted in Barclay, p.57.
[7] Joan Chittister, The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages (New York: Crossroad, 1995).