The Beat up Good Shepherd

We have an image in our heads about the Good Shepherd, don't we?  Or, at least, those of us who go to Good Shepherd do.  That is, that he looks like this:

This is a great picture, mainly because it shows the real lack of understanding that we have about incarnational Christianity.  There are two key things to notice here.  First: look at Jesus.  And yes, all the pictures of the Good Shepherd are pretty much like this.  Notice what he look like.  Look at his pristine robe.  Look at his white garment, which goes all the way to the ground, and is intensely unstained.  He looks great, like he just got dressed that moment.  He looks for all the world as though he just hopped out of a tide commercial and walked into the first century AD.  I hate to be this guy, but I don't care for the pristine Jesus on a good day, and even less so in the story of the good shepherd.  The whole idea with the good shepherd, and specifically in this week's reading is that Jesus goes to retrieve the sheep from where it has gotten lost.
Now, unless I'm much mistaken, and I rarely am, sheep don't get lost in convenient places.  That's sort of a misnomer, really.  If you've lost your sheep, odds are fair to amazing that that sheep has gotten lost somewhere drastically inconvenient.  Jesus talks about it in other places, saying:

 "If any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the

 Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out?

Matthew 12:11

The Good Shepherd has to take hold of a sheep and lift it out of a pit.  Have you ever tried to lift an animal out of a pit?  In the images of the Good Shepherd, he's always walking back with a sheep in his arms, and the sheep is clean, and Jesus is clean, and nobody looks like they've just been in a pit.  Now, you may question why this is such a big deal, but it is:  It's a big deal because it plays very heavily into our notion of what it means to have an incarnate Christ.  What was he incarnated into?  Was it a beautiful world in which everything was nice, or was it this world in which all sorts of things were bad and rotten? Was it a world in which people told dirty jokes, were racists, and hated each other? A world in which people didn't think too much of ripping each other off, and did their best to avoid working too hard?  Yes, he came into that world, because that world is this world, except with less toothpaste, soap, or deodorant.  And if a sheep wanders off, where is the sheep going to wander off to? Somewhere gross, probably.

I've said it before, but the single worst smell I've ever smelled in my entire life was out at Stan and Chris Vuksic's cabin, where their dog, Deacon, rolled around in what I assume was dead fish.  It smelled so bad that I thought I might actually vomit, and that's the first time I've ever felt that way from smelling something.  It was unbelievably, shockingly bad.  Deacon didn't seem to mind, but that's the deal with having an Australian Shepherd: They're going to get into some grossness.  

Sheep are doubtlessly going to be the same way.  Every image we have of a sheep on Jesus' shoulders or whatever, always has the sheep looking placid, and spotless, like the worst that it did was to just get a bit confused and stand in a pristine meadow, waiting to be picked up by the shepherd.  But the Bible tells us specifically that these sheep are wandeirng into pits, they're getting themselves caught up in thornbushes and brambles, they're muddying things with their feet, and trampling down the good pasture land until it's a muddy mess.  This is exactly what the sheep do.  They're gross, and they're going to wander into gross places.  That's what they need to get rescued from.

Okay, and there's a second problem with the picture we all know of the Good Shepherd:  He's in too the cat will fight you.  Most of the injuries I get from this exercise aren't from the thorns or brambles, they're from the cat himself.  The image we have of the sheep passively sitting in the Good Shepherd's arms being escorted back home, and everyone's as calm as anything, and the Shepherd is in great shape, well, I don't know about that. I figure it would be much more like this:
good of shape.  No, not that he works out too much, something else.  Now, I've never tried to get a sheep out of a pit, but I do have a cat, and I do know that my cat, uh, how to politely say this, he's an inside cat who drastically overestimates his ability to be outside. If he sees an open door, he flings himself at it with hopeless abandon, only to stop his wild charge as soon as he gets under the bushes at the side of the house.  He has been doing this since he was a kitten, and he really hasn't gotten much better at it.  But there's something else that happens.  Cats aren't dogs.  They don't really come when they're called, with any reliability, at least.  And if you try to get a cat down from a tree, or from under a bush, or from, essentially anywhere, not only will you get messy, but, and this is important here,

Did you see that ram?  He wasn't messing around!  And this is how we react to Christ, as well!  When the Good Shepherd comes to bring us home, we don't want to go!  And we'll fight anyone who comes near to us, regardless of whether they're there to help or not.

I hadn't thought much about this until I heard the reading from Ezekiel for this last Sunday, which said 

21 you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them fa
r and wide,

Ezekiel 34:21

The rams have horns, and they have them for a reason - to fight, to thrust with horn and push with

side and shoulder.  And, and here's where the juice is loose: the juice gets loose where the sheep, the rams, heck, us, we cause the injury to the one who is trying to save us.  We're so used to the idea of the good shepherd being attacked only by the wolves, but honestly, that's only part of his difficulties.  He's being set upon by the sheep he came to save, too.  He's probably going to be every bit as beat up as Steve-O and Ryan Dunn, trying to soothe the savage beast.  Long story short, the very real risk that Jesus runs is the risk to himself from us.  Think about who called for his crucifixion, and who nailed him up.  Think about who was wanting to stone him to death, and who was seeking to throw him off a cliff.  Not Satan, or some vague spirit, or some prowling lion, or whatever.  No, it was people, the sheep he came to save.  If he's beaten up and dead by the end of the Gospels, it's because the sheep, no, the rams, have been roughing him up as he tried to save them.  This is a trustworthy saying, and true, that when Jesus came to save sinners, they didn't recieve him well, and still don't.  The image of the Good Shepherd, that sheep should have horns, and the shepherd should be waaaaaaay more beaten up.  

So why the rescue?  Why bother bringing back to safety an animal who wants you to crumble before him?  Why any of it? Because he loves us and cares for us, even as we hurt him.  It's the same reason I continue to coax my cat out of trees even as he claws my arms.  It's the same reason that the Vuksic family washes their dog gently with pert plus even as he reeks so bad folks down the block feel uneasy.  The shepherd is good.  He loves the things that hurt him.  He has to fight not only the wolves, but the rams themselves.  And he does this becasue he loves us, and loves us extremely.  

PJ.