Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington
Readings – Acts 9. 36-43; John 10. 22-30
“My sheep hear my voice.”
“OK, sheeple!” I don’t know how many of you have heard of the term “sheeple”. If you spend too much time on the internet, you might have! It is used in conspiracy theory circles – the sort of people who think the moon landings were faked and that Covid was invented so Bill Gates could implant us all with microchips under the cover of vaccines. In the conspiracy theorist part of society, the rest of the population is ridiculed as “sheeple” whose acceptance of received wisdom about the world is read as a sign of conformity and lack of independent thinking.
Coastal Flock by August Friedrich Schenk (1865)
While we shouldn’t lose too much sleep about what conspiracy theorists call us, calling someone a sheep isn’t normally meant a compliment. A sheep blindly follows their leader, is afraid to take a stand, lacks critical thinking, and probably isn’t the sharpest tool in the box.
Everything in our culture encourages to think of ourselves as being the opposite of sheep. We’re encouraged to think of ourselves as independent minded free spirits, who become the people we dream ourselves to be through the power of self-will. We don’t want to be sheep, and we don’t even particularly want to be shepherds. We romanticise the Lone Ranger sort of figure, the iconoclastic anti-hero who loves to do it all “my way” and refuses to let convention prevent them doing good or having a good time. The strange thing is that most people who think of themselves as self-willed free thinkers are desperately conformist, but that’s another story for another time.
In that view of the world, of course, there’s nothing positive to be said about being one of the sheep. But let’s be fair to our fluffy friends, they have their positive side, and not just as a delicious Sunday lunch. Sheep are part of a community, and while our individualism has brought us many blessings, its dark side has been that the bonds of our communities have become much weaker. Staying part of a coherent community doesn’t require dull conformism, but does need sensitivity to the needs of others, adaptability, and mutual trust.
Now, I think we’re right to be suspicious of leaders, in the Church or anywhere else, demand unquestioning obedience. Good shepherds don’t suppress individuality, but bring out the individual gifts possessed by members of their flocks. And without trustworthy, honest, and wise leaders, any group, country, or culture, is doomed to drifting and then falling apart. Ironically, the same people who reject religious practice because believers supposedly put blind faith in our leaders are usually the same people who get terribly upset because people today have started rejecting the leaders that they want us to follow, the scientific and technocratic experts.
I have quite a degree of scepticism about the experts myself, but I’m also worried that one of the things that defines the times we’re in is that we don’t seem to trust any authority at all. A degree of scepticism about those in power is healthy in any society; but when that drifts into bitter cynicism it becomes corrosive.
When Jesus was confronted by constant crowds seeking teaching and healing when he began His ministry in Galilee, the Bible reports Him as being moved with compassion for them, because they were “like sheep without a shepherd”. They were people living under foreign occupation, whose own leaders, despite the fine principles they liked to espouse, seemed all to be complacent, corrupt, collaborators. Those who rejected their leadership, on the other hand, too easily drifted into violent fanaticism, completely deluded about their capacity to threaten the might of the Roman occupiers, launching armed rebellionsthat were inevitably crushed, bringing misery rather than liberty in their wake. In some ways, it was a very different political and cultural context to our own—but in others very similar. We too are sheep without a shepherd.
And it is in that context we need to understand the strange conversation that comprises today’s Gospel. The pious Jews who surround Jesus in the Temple, abuzz with all the news and rumours about Him, ask if He is the Messiah. He says His works prove that He is, but then says they won’t recognise this because they aren’t of His flock.
The Messiah was expected to be a God-sent figure who would fuse both genuine religious holiness with political and military power. Needless to say, such a Messiah would drive out the hated occupiers, while also restoring honest leadership and proper care for the poorest.
But Jesus is saying something different, that a Messiah isn’t a warrior king, but more like a shepherd – someone who tends and feeds the sheep, keeps the flock together, and will ultimately risk his life for what are his most precious possessions. A shepherd is also someone who, in relation to empires and nations and their armies, has almost no power.
Jesus is subverting our idea of what a leader should look like—not a conqueror of nations but a nurturer of life, not barking orders but setting a direction, not sacrificing others for himself but sacrificing himself for others.
Here’s another thing. Remember the old saying “Preach the Gospel, use words if necessary.” The idea is that the Gospel is primarily something we do rather than something we preach. It’s one of those sentences that sounds really attractive when we hear it—especially for very moderate Christians like us in a country where it isn’t done to push your religion too hard. It sounds good to think we can just be kind to people without talking about our faith, especially when we aren’t always good at articulating why we’re Christians.
It sounds good until we think about it—then it falls apart.
Start with this—the idea that good works alone could convince people of the Gospel is a bit conceited,because it implies that only Christians do good works. None of us believes this, or at least I hope we don’t. We all know atheists and agnostics, Jews and Muslims, whose lives are marked by a great deal of kindness towards and concern for the needs of others.
And Jesus explicitly rejects in today’s Gospel the idea that works alone will get anyone to believe that He is the Saviour.
Of course, doing good works is valuable in its own terms. Faith without works is empty. Jesus did plenty of good works, and commanded His followers – us – to do the same. We know that we feel good – about ourselves and about the world – when we do things for others. Dorcas, the subject of today’s reading from Acts, is a great example of a holy life spent in good works; the widows she helped, so vulnerable in the misogynistic society of the ancient world, cried when she died. But good works aren’t a substitute for preaching the Gospel. We have to do both. We have to be people of both word and deed. What we do and what we say both matter.
The words, as we know when we recite prayers together in Church, are part of what keeps us together. And what is the “us” that is kept together by saying our prayers? Another group of sheeple so weak they need to be told what to think? Not at all—in a world where people are losing faith in every human leader, we follow a Great Shepherd who gave us a different vision of leadership, and promised to lead us to a future far greater than any earthy leader can properly imagine, let alone promise.
Now thanks be to God the Father, who has given us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Top image: part of “Our English Coasts” by William Holman Hunt (1852); hangs in the Tate.
