July 21, 2024
Jeremiah 23:1-6
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
If you search Biblegateway.com for the word “shepherd” in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, you get 109 uses. I’m afraid that some of those appear in the occasional subheadings that modern-day editors have helpfully added, so the original numbers are somewhat lower. Still. 87 uses in the Old Testament, 22 in the New Testament. “Shepherd” is an important word.
One of the reasons for that was the cultural self-image of the Hebrew people. They saw themselves as shepherd people, those who followed the flocks of sheep and goats and therefore spent relatively little time in a fixed abode. Somewhat like the rivalry between the farmer and the cowhand in the Rogers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma. Do you remember the song “The Farmer and the Cowhand Should Be Friends,” which basically feeds the bad feeling between them? Well, the shepherds were the ancient equivalent of cowhands, and the farmers and city dwellers of the eastern Mediterranean had a similar rivalry.
A fair number of those “shepherd” references in the Old Testament are variants on, “We’re shepherd people, and that’s the best thing to be.”
The Israelites also liked the image of “shepherd” for their national leaders. It might refer to priests or senior civic officials, but the favorite reference was to the king. David, of course, made the metaphor obvious, since as Psalm 78 says,
“He chose his servant David
– Psalm 78
and took him from the sheepfolds;
from tending the nursing ewes he brought him
to be the shepherd of his people Jacob,
of Israel, his inheritance.
With upright heart he tended them
and guided them with skillful hand.”
The one who really liked to compare kings to shepherds was Jeremiah. He used “shepherd” nineteen times, more than any other book of the Bible. And nearly always, he used it as we’ve heard it this morning. “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the LORD.”
Jeremiah really didn’t have a high opinion of the kings of his day. Or a mediocre opinion. Low opinion is… getting close. He thought they were awful.
He did, however, provide us with an admirable summary of what a monarch, or a leader, should do and be: “he shall reign as king and deal wisely and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.” As we come up to our primary election, with the likelihood that a number of our state and county races will be decided by this ballot, I humbly suggest that you vote for the candidates who display the attributes of wisdom and have the capacity and desire to execute justice and righteousness in the land. If they don’t… vote for somebody else.
Maren Tirabassi writes at her blog, GiftsInOpenHands:
I do know that every four years,
(with a tear-drop more anxiety this time around)
I want to believe verse four –“I will raise up shepherds over them
who will shepherd them,
and they shall no longer fear or be dismayed,
nor shall any be missing, says God.”even knowing that the Holy One,
is looking right at me
to be less of a hand-wringer,
and take responsibility for the raising-up.
But if you want a real shepherd, the place to look is the sixth chapter of Mark.
Earlier in the chapter, Jesus commissioned his disciples to widen his work, dispatching them about the villages and towns to teach and to heal. As they did so, word came to Jesus, and to the people of Galilee, that John the Baptist had been executed by King Herod. When the disciples returned, still excited about their success, Jesus took them off to go on retreat. They needed a break. They needed to tell their stories. They needed to do some grieving for John the Baptist, whose ministry still influenced them all.
Instead, they found a crowd had anticipated them and arrived before they did.
As Cheryl Lindsay writes at UCC.org, “Mark seems the least concerned with character development. We find out who Jesus and his disciples are by what they do and what they teach. Yet, even in this account, Jesus does a remarkable thing by prioritizing rest in the midst of impactful ministry and gathering crowds. This time, it is not his own rest, which he has already modeled as a spiritual practice. Jesus is as concerned with his disciples adopting a routine of rest within the rhythm of their coming and going.”
Jesus “had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and he began to teach them many things.”
It has always impressed me that Jesus, despite his need and his disciples’ need of time to themselves, gave that up in order to serve the people who needed more. As we’ve been reading Mark’s Gospel this year, I’ve been struck by the number of times this happened to Jesus, that he tried to take time away and couldn’t. It’s a minor theme of the gospel, but it’s there. Jesus didn’t have a lot of luck taking time off.
I’m also struck by the appearance of that word, “shepherd.” As Matt Skinner writes at Working Preacher, “‘The system’ has failed the people who flock to Jesus, as evidenced in Herod Antipas’s lethal fecklessness (6:14–29).2 They are vulnerable in a predatory world. No one, it seems, guards their human dignity. They have to fend for themselves. What kind of society places people in that kind of condition?”
I hate to say it, but a lot of human societies do precisely that, and explain it away as… the way things are.
Jesus, however, seeing people in need of leadership, stepped in to provide it. That’s what you’d expect of a Messiah, come to think of it. A Messiah is a leader, a general, a king. “Let’s get together, people! Form up in ranks. To Herod’s palace, march!”
Only… he didn’t do that. At all.
He taught them. Remember what Jeremiah said a shepherd does? Deal wisely? Jesus is a shepherd who teaches wisdom.
I have to assume that some of the people on the beach came seeking healing, because that’s nearly always the case in Mark. Later in the chapter, when Jesus and his disciples, probably still looking for that private retreat, landed near Gennesaret, it was abundantly clear. They brought the sick out to the marketplace. They reached out to touch the fringe of his cloak, just like that woman with the hemorrhage. They were healed.
I say this a lot. People are impressed with power, with glamor, with fame. We tend to defer to people with those things whether their ideas are good, indifferent, bad, or downright horrid. Why, I wonder, don’t we value leadership like that displayed by Jesus? Why do we vote for the self-aggrandizing and power hungry, rather than the wise and the compassionate?
Jesus stepped onto the shore from the boat and saw the vacuum of power, the dearth of governmental concern, the absence of good shepherding. He saw a need. Then he filled it.
But he didn’t fill it with glitz. He didn’t fill it with glamor. He didn’t fill it with the coercive power which is a government’s most treasured privilege. He filled it with wisdom, with compassion, and with healing. Oh, and bread. That first beach they landed on, the one where Jesus saw them without a shepherd? At the end of the day Jesus fed all five thousand of them with five loaves and two fish.
Now that’s a shepherd. There’s one who really cares for the sheep.
Not all of us will take positions of leadership in society. There’s not room for everyone to be mayor, or governor, or president. There’s not even room for everyone to be pastor, or moderator, or a member of one of our governing boards of this church – though I will say that there is definitely room, and the nominating committee is hard at work to find those shepherds of our congregation for the next year.
Jesus didn’t commission his disciples to become mayors or governors or presidents or monarchs, or to be their supporters. He didn’t commission them to become generals or courtiers. He commissioned them to be apostles, teachers and healers. He commissioned them to be the same kind of shepherd that he was.
That is our summons, too. To follow Jesus as people who value and share wisdom, who do our level best to provide healing, who refrain from the acts that divide people and scatter them so that they are no longer cared for.
Because we are cared for by the one who is a true shepherd, guiding us in wisdom, justice, and righteousness, all the days of our lives. That’s a shepherd.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric sometimes ventures away from his prepared text. He hopes he’s improving things.
The image is The Good Shepherd, a 4th century mosaic in the Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta in Aquileia, Italy. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2239686.
