Poolesville Presbyterian Church
07.21.2012; Rev. David Williams
Of all of the animals we hear talked about in the Bible, perhaps the most common is the sheep. Of the exactly two hundred references to sheep in scripture, things start out at the beginning of the Bible being pretty basic.
When the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, talks about sheep, ninety-nine times out of one-hundred, it just plain old means sheep. It’s just providing details about those quadrupedal, ruminant mammals, which means they walk on four legs and chew and rechew their food. They are Ovis ares, members of the order Artiodayctla, the even toed ungulates, which means they put most of their weight on their third and fourth toes, tippy-toeing around in the fields like four-legged ballerinas. Female sheep are ewes, the males called rams or, more archaically, tups. We call male sheep wethers if we’ve...um...un-maled them.
We’ve raised these critters as livestock for thousands of years, for their fleece and for their meat, which we call lamb when we roast them young and tender with rosemary, garlic, and a side of mint jelly. We call it mutton or hogget when we eat it later, which confuses me a bit. Generally, we call meat by names designed to distract us from the reality of what we’re eating...like beef or bacon or pork or hasenpfeffer or Soylent Green.
But lamb? Why isn’t that like calf or little baby bunny? Well, in the case of lamb, evidently tender trumps cute. Whichever way, sheep have been a part of human identity for millennia.
But a funny thing happens the further we read through the Bible. After we pass through the stories about sheep as plunder from battle in Torah, and the details about what sort of animals should be sacrificed, suddenly the term sheep stops being mainly used to describe sheep. Instead, sheep become almost entirely a metaphor. But...for what?
Well, in Song of Songs 4:2, sheep are a poetic metaphor you use to describe the teeth of a girl you’re flirting with, although I will not be recommending this to my boys should they ever write poems to women. In my experience, no matter how good the poem, women don’t like to be told that their teeth are fluffy and smell like a barn.
This may have been different in fifth century Judah.
But mostly, sheep are used in the Bible as a metaphor for human beings. That’s certainly the intent of the familiar Psalm 23, or the reading from the book of Jeremiah. The people of Israel are described as a flock, over and over again. The psalms and the prophets use the term almost exclusively to describe human beings, as does Jesus. They are the sheep of the pasture, sheep without a good shepherd. We get lost, and we need a shepherd.
Unfortunately, I think we have a problem with that. Sheep? We don’t want to be sheep! Here in the You Ess of Ay in particular, we have no desire to be thought of, considered, or imagined as sheep. In fact, the term “sheeple” has come to be a popular way of collectively insulting folks who disagree with us. Clearly, “sheeple” are just following along with the crowd, unlike us and the crowd we happen to find ourselves in.
We Americans are ferocious, mighty, independent, and free. We want to be thought of as some sort of noble animal standing backlit in silhouette against the setting sun, like mighty eagles or dangerous bears or the majestic moose. But not a herd animal! We are nothing at all like a herd animal, spending our lives penned up in small cubicles and being moved around every day in vast slow-moving flocks...um...wait. For some reason, that makes me think of the Beltway.
As much as we’d prefer not to affix that label to ourselves, it does still stick a bit. There’s a reason Jesus used the image repeatedly in his teaching. We hear it seventeen times in John’s Gospel, fourteen in Matthew, and four in Luke. Mark, being short and blunt as always, just tells us of two uses of the image, here and in Mark 14:27.
What is perhaps most striking about the way Jesus uses this image is how radically it contrasts with our understanding of what it means to be sheep, and how sheep are treated. We tend to assume that sheep are easily manipulated and controlled, and that the only reason to keep them around is to either fleece them or eat them. But as Mark’s Gospel uses the term, it is woven up with two things. First, compassion, and second, teaching.
Jesus expresses these two reactions to the people at a point of fatigue. The disciples have just returned from being sent out to spread the message of the Kingdom of God, and their movement out into the world has born fruit. It’s gotten really busy, as more and more people have responded to the message of transformation they preached. So busy, in fact, that Jesus tries to get the disciples away for a retreat to catch their breath. But even as he does so, they are noticed, and as people come running to see this person they’ve heard tell about, suddenly their isolated retreat is filled with Judeans.
What Jesus encountered as he moved through Judah were a people who were broken, divided, and confused. Politically, they were sheep without a shepherd. Their leadership was a mess, a divided and corrupt disaster. Spiritually, they were even more divided. Their leadership was divided between Sadducee and Pharisee, between the hierarchical power of the temple and the arguments in the local synagogue. Amid the tensions and uncertainty that their lack of collective direction created, they were a lost people.
So as he encounters them, he is moved to teach them about the Kingdom. What’s important here is the nature of that motivation. It isn’t the desire for power or control. It isn’t the desire to profit from their weakness. His motivation is compassion. He sees and feels their shatteredness and their confusion as a people, and from his awareness of their broken state, uses his teaching to empower them. With the giving of the Gospel, he’s showing them how to live in a way that will end that confusion.
From the heart of his own compassion, he is offering them the power of that compassion. What he teaches, they can teach. As he heals, they can heal. His disciples, after all, have just returned from doing just that. The story moves on, beyond these verses, but the essence Christ’s compassion for a scattered and broken flock shouldn’t be lost on us.
It particularly shouldn’t be lost because we struggle to embrace the reality of our togetherness. We are a people divided, driven in a thousand different directions. Our binary political system tears us from one another, setting us into adversarial relationships that don’t allow us to recognize even the most basic things we share. Our economic system fragments us into countless demographic microcategories, until we are so broken apart that there’s little room to interact with one another. From that division, we find ourselves more and more isolated, and less and less able to look out at other human beings with the same compassion that Christ felt for us.
And our inability to see our fundamental interconnectedness takes our society down some very dark paths. Those places of fear and anger and madness are all too familiar.
We are not sheep. We’re not. But we were, as human beings, created to be in community with one another. We’re created to be connected, to family, to friends, to neighbors, and even and especially to those who are not like us.
We are not sheep. We’re human. But in Christ, we are called to be human together. Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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