First of all, the nature of farm animals themselves - why do you raise farm animals in the first place? Yeah, you know why you raise farm animals. Unless that animal is a horse, you raise it up for one prime reason - for food. As you all know, life is nature's way of keeping meat fresh, and farm animal life is no exception. For you see, Whether it be dairy cows or egg laying hens, sooner or later, that cute fuzzy farm animal is going to end up being eaten. At the end of its useful days, that sheep that you gained wool from for years, well, she's going to end up as mutton, and that's the end of it. And gosh, if the cute little lambs were enough to get Lisa Simpson away from eating meat forever, we get to ask ourselves what we're doing with our continued snackage on them. Any and all farm animals are raised to be eaten. That's why we raise them, to be eventual food.
And so, if you read through this passage, where Jesus talks about being the Good Shepherd, it might alarm you, given that you know what farmers do with their sheep eventually. They kill them and eat them.
Are there any farm animals, bred for butchery, that are not killed, but are instead rescued, fed, and raised in comfort and peace? Why yes, yes there are, and they exist in the happiest place on earth. That's right - Disneyland. What you may or may not know is that every year, the President of the United States of America, at Thanksgiving, is presented with just a massive turkey, and every year, the President officially pardons said turkey. That turkey is allowed to live. But here's the thing, if you're president for eight years, you're going to have eight turkeys strutting around the white house, gobbling in the oval office, and that just won't do. So if you're not going to eat these massive birds, what do you do with them? Well, you send them away to Disneyland to be the grand marshall in the Thanksgiving day parade, and then away to a petting zoo. And that's the life of the pardoned turkey. In every way, that's like us. We are raised for destruction. Conceived in sin, we as human beings are all destined for damnation, riddled with guilt and shame as we are. Just like the 45 pound turkeys given to the white house, we are destined for destruction, to be broken down and consumed. But this is where Jesus comes in.
He is the Good Shepherd. And the Good Shepherd reverses the order of things. We're used to the sheep laying down their lives for the shepherd, but in this case, the shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He tends them, cares for them, and loves them entirely to his own detriment. In this one particular case, they're not destined for death and consumption, they're like the presidential Turkeys, in that they're raised for life and prosperity.
But there's something else, something else that comes into the minds of people when they read this passage. They look at this and say 'I'm not a sheep.' Yes. We look at the situation and say 'we're not sheep, we are masters of our own domain. Sheep are dumb, they follow whomever, they are easy to herd around, and they just go the way that things seem to be going.
Yup. And we are different how? Here's a sad truth that none of us want to hear, which is that we are sheep. We're going to follow someone. we are going to be led around by someone. It'll either be by God himself, or it'll be by each other. And that's a hard thing to hear. We all want to think that we're forging our own destiny, but we really aren't. We're just following one another around, to one extent or another. We roam aorund, and we follow whoever seems to know what they're doing. This is how trends get started. It's not as though we all spontaneously decided that granite would make a good countertop surface, or that stainless steel was the best material was the best appliance material. It's not as though we all spontaneously decided that bell bottoms were out, and then were back in, and then were out again. We follow each other. We are herd animals. But, as the scriptures say, when the blind lead the blind, they both fall into a pit. When we lead each other around, we all stumble and fall. That's what we do. We are going to lead each other into danger, into trouble, because instead of following the shepherd, we're following other sheep. That's what we do.
Following the shepherd seems dull, but there's one thing it isn't, and that's dangerous. It's the only safe place for us to be, the only security we have in a frightening, eternal existence. The fact that the shepherd has our best interest at heart above his own. Honestly, you're going to follow someone, so it might as well be the one who laid down his life for you.
Finally, we get to talk about what this means for us today. It's not as simple as just 'Jesus died for you,' thought that is a core message. No, it's bigger than that, because the next step is always 'now what?' Well, the epistle reading talks about that, talks about what we are now to do since we are
Okay, here's how it works. And it's not too hard to figure out, really. Most of the time you can face the things you do on a daily basis, and convince yourself that they're not that important. That your entire life is pretty mundane. If you're going to do something important, you'd better be the president of the United States, pardoning turkeys and the like. You, in your tiny sphere of influence, knowing the people that you do, doing the job that you do, you're not important enough to make any sort of difference, right? Well, you're wrong. You get to make all the difference. Who is it that Jesus tells you to love? Your neighbor. The person who is around you all the time. The person who is in near constant contact with you. And this is where the work of God is done, not in grand sweeping gestures, but moment by moment. When you have the opportunity to care for the other sheep. When you have the chance to be good to those around you. That's what you are called to do, to not ignore the pleading of the other sheep, but to love them in deed, not just in thought and word. We are called to love and care for those around us, those whom we know, those whom we encounter, and Jesus gives us a promise attached to that - No matter when we do that work, we are doing his work. If we weren't forgiven, redeemed children of God, then it could be that these things we do for each other honestly wouldn't matter. But they do. They matter because the people we love and care for, the people we put up with, they are forever people. The promise of life everlasting means that the decisions we make for each other, the help we supply each other with, that's the stuff that matters, that counts. Empires come and go, nations rise and fall, but the human beings, the redeemed children of God, they're forever. It's not what we would expect, but it's the way things are. When you are present in kindness for a friend, when you do the best job you can possibly do in your employment, you're doing God's work. You are caring for forever people. You are making the only decisions that will matter.
It's funny, because we spend a lot of time working on the inanimate, and less time working on the animate, which we are called to do. We are called on to care for each other, to build each other up, to not just love in thought and in word, but in deed. And we are most especially called to do that by the Gospel, which gives us two promises. First, that we are forgiven for not doing this well when we fail, and seondly, that through the death of Christ, our decisions have eternal consequences. The charity that we do for those around us desperately matters. For eternity.
PJ.
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