John 10:1-10
When I was a teenager I worked in a grocery store in my home town in Montana. I was a “box boy”, which meant that I packed groceries and carried them out to the customer’s car. We didn’t have plastic bags or reusable bags, just boxes that had once held canned goods and paper bags. My average weekly salary was 12:50.
There were shepherds in the hills around my hometown. Many of them had emigrated from Basque country in Spain. They lived in wooden covered wagons that could be pulled from meadow to meadow. They were hired hands, and I doubt that there were any shepherds who owned the sheep they took care of. And I have to say, they smelled like their sheep. They would come down to the grocery store about once a month to stock up on flour and sugar and canned goods, and I suspect they stopped at a liquor store before returning to their jobs. And they lived very solitary lives.
The whole tenth chapter of John compares Jesus to a shepherd, or as you see in this gospel, a sheep gate. Shepherds in Palestine would gather their sheep together and herd them into a box canyon or other enclosure for the night. The shepherds would take turns guarding the sheep; the one doing the guarding was the gate for the sheep. Now if Jesus is the shepherd, we are the sheep. There are three things that we and sheep have in common.
First, we and sheep like to gather together. We are herd animals, so are they. There are obvious advantages to living in groups and our whole civilization could not exist if we didn’t have an instinct for seeking out the company of each other. And that’s why Jesus founded his church. He started out with the apostles, gathered together many more disciples, and after his death and resurrection, we can read in the Acts of the apostles how those first Christians lived. It says they held everything in common, and those who owned property would sell what they owned and lay the proceeds at the feet of the apostles. And very soon the apostles began to divide up the labor needed to take care of their flock -- they appointed deacons. It seemed as though in those first days of the church converts were being admitted in overwhelming numbers. The church is where we can gather together, where we can enjoy the company of each other, where we can look around and see fellow Christians. At every weekend liturgy we should feel at least a little solidarity with our fellow Catholics.
The second thing sheep and us have in common is that we can distinguish our master’s voice. When sheep were kept together overnight, in the morning the shepherds would call their flocks, who would recognize their voices and sort themselves out. Now this is a concept that has fallen by the wayside, but in the early days of the Church, and even into the middle ages it was recognized that there was something they called “sensuum fidei” , the sense of the faithful. If you are a baptized Christian free of mortal sin, you have the ability to recognize authentic teachings and reject those that aren’t authentic. Of course to be faithful means to be educated in our faith, then we are able to recognize when something doesn't fit. I think of the time when there was a claimant to the papal throne in Avignon, one in Rome, and a third who had been selected as a compromise. The people weren’t having any of it, and prompted by Catherine of Sienna and others, decided which pope they would follow. And of course every time there is a martyr it’s because that person had a sense of what was true and what was false. We can tell when our master is speaking.
The third thing is that sheep and humans like to follow a leader. Cattle need to be driven, with dogs and whips and loud noises. If you do this to sheep, they scatter, and it’s hard getting them back together. Sheep follow their shepherd because they have experienced his leadership in the past -- as it says in the psalm, “in green pastures he makes me lie down, by restful waters he leads me.” the shepherd earns the trust of the sheep. We humans will follow a leader who has earned our trust.
ON Good Shepherd Sunday it's worth reflecting on this shepherd that we are following; we are saved, not by ourselves, but in our community. We need to gather together so that Christ will be present-- he said that’s how to do it. We can’t be “spiritual but not religious”. Our very nature makes us gather. Our shepherd teaches us. The Church, His bride, has two thousand years of experience in applying his message to the current times, the current situations. We have bishops who were ordained by other bishops, all the way back to the apostles, who are our teachers. And we have our shepherd who has proven himself trustworthy -- after all he has conquered death for us and intercedes for us with the Father.
Some people think sheep are stupid. But stupid sheep wander off and get in trouble. Smart ones stay near the shepherd. It’s true of us as well.
