‘But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd’. This image of Jesus seeing the crowds that flocked to him, whilst he went about the cities and villages, as ‘fainting’ and ‘scattered abroad’ is vivid and strong. We only find it in the Gospel of Matthew, although for the most part in this passage the Evangelist follows the same account given in the earliest Gospel – of Mark, but somehow it resonates with the anguish we’re seeing expressed, and may be feeling ourselves, about the reaction to recent knife crimes, the violent demonstrations these have provoked, the ongoing debates about national security, about the control of social media over against the rights of the individual, and also in oversees conflicts which if anything seem to become more entrenched and unresolved, with far-reaching and possibly long-lasting effects on the world as a whole. ‘Fainting’, ‘scattered abroad’, or in a contemporary Bible translation, ‘harassed and helpless’, all seem quite apt terms in summing up how these ongoing issues affect us all.
But the really key term in the Gospel accounts of both Matthew and Mark together regarding Jesus’s compassion for the multitudes is: ‘as sheep having no shepherd’. This metaphor for humanity’s relationship with God (or the lack of it) is deep-rooted throughout the Hebrew scriptures and Psalms, and we hear Jesus apply it to himself in the Gospel of John: ‘I am the good shepherd’. We might feel some reserve about that image, as though it demeaned our human dignity; after all, in this individualistic age we like to think of ourselves as self-made women and men. But there it is in the text of the ‘Old100th’ – I’m referring not to the great hymn paraphrase with which we opened the service, but the original 100th psalm: ‘Be ye sure that the Lord he is God; it is he that hath made us and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture’.
If we can swallow enough of our earthly pride to accept this metaphor, we come to see it not as making us abject, and without freedom or agency, but rather as fundamental to a thankful response to the gift of life from our Creator, and to the taking on of our human nature by his Son, and His standing alongside us.
The sheep-shepherd relationship, properly understood, actually gives us considerable agency and responsibility. The Old Testament prophets often condemned the leaders of the Israelites for failing in their duties to shepherd their people faithfully, and Jesus clearly felt the same about the Temple authorities of his day – that they left their sheep ‘shepherdless’. The covenant between the Lord God and the Israelites was not primarily about land and entitlement, but about their relationship with him, and their standing for him in the world. This was powerfully expressed in the passage we heard – about their being brought out of slavery, from Exodus earlier: ‘Ye have seen…. how I bare you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself… Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me….a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation’. This same wording would be taken up in the First New Testament Epistle of Peter to describe the role and calling of Christ’s Church.
The Apostles in our Gospel were sent out by Jesus, firstly with a sobering estimate of the vastness of their mission: ‘The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest’. He then instructed them: ‘as ye go, preach, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand”. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give.’ Following Jesus the Good Shepherd requires us to manifest the kingdom of heaven in our times and to strive to cast out the ‘devils’ and ‘unclean spirits’ of our day, reaching out with compassion to all who are ‘fainting’ and are ‘scattered abroad’.
Our Area Bishop, +Anderson, has set a commendable example in this responsibility. Himself a person of colour from a racial minority, he’s nonetheless willing to identify with the aching sense of abandonment felt by some who find themselves left-behind in our society and ‘talked-over’ in political debate. He’s written that many he’s spoken to who went on various recent marches and demonstrations (though admittedly before the riots that have made the news over the last week) came along because they needed ‘to connect’, and ‘wanted to belong’. He’s spoken of the need to find a way of dismantling what he calls ‘the exhausting “us” and “them” binaries of our current culture, and finally begin to live the “us” that God always intended’ – to realise our divine interconnectedness. He highlights the fact that the values of our Christian faith are not conditioned by this political world, making it uniquely positioned to ‘bridge this divide’, and he writes: ‘At a time such as this, the Church’s ultimate calling is to discover how, rather than mirroring the divisions of the world, we can truly become the healing, unifying presence for which this nation so desperately aches.’ So may we be alert and responsive to the need for labourers in this harvest.