Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington
Acts 2.42–47; John 10.1–10
“…the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.”
Driving sheep along a major road near Khochkor, Kyrgyzstan, © Gerry Lynch, 27 September 2025
What could be more American than a cowboy? The rough-hewn frontiersman, driving his cattle along the untamed frontier, encapsulates both the American Dream and American nightmares. The courageous individualist risking everything to get the job done in a place far from government support, where the added risk is an acceptable price to pay for freedom, is as American an ideal as it gets. The wresting of the land from the Native Americans to make the cowboy possible was one of America’s original sins.
What could be more Kyrgyz than a nomad? If you went to my photo talk the other week, you’ll have learned that the nomadic pastoralist with his herds of sheep, horses, or yaks is at least as powerful a symbol of national identity in Kyrgyzstan as the cowboys are in America – and the same is true across the Central Asian ’stans and Mongolia. We could also talk about the gauchos of Argentina, Kenya’s Maasai, or the Bedouin of the Arab world.
The idea of the nomadic animal herder as the incarnation of the nation seems remote and alien to us in this more settled country, even though Wiltshire was one of the last places in these islands where this way of life survived, dying out less than a hundred years ago.
But for Jews in the Ancient World, some of their greatest national heroes and holy men had been shepherds before God called them to lead flocks of people – Abraham started out as a herdsman, and Moses famously kept his father-in-law’s flock after he left Egypt the first time.
Most of all, it was the greatest king of Ancient Israel who symbolised the importance of the shepherd to Jewish identity. When the prophet Samuel went looking for a new king from among the sons of Jesse, it was assumed that the youngest son wouldn’t be of much interest, so David was left to tend the sheep. When he was eventually called in after none of the other brothers proved suitable, David turned out to be, as the Authorised Version puts it, “ruddy, and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to”—so they made him king.
For David, Abraham, and Moses, time spent looking after the sheep was the perfect formation for leading a human flock who wandered where they saw fit, sometimes into dangerous places, and sometimes got themselves hurt. A flock that sometimes did a lot of bleating and didn’t always show much sign of great intelligence. A flock that needed to be shown toughness as well as tenderness. Shepherds had to be tough, also, to deal with wolves, and thieves, and bandits. Real shepherds have to be harder-nosed people than our romantic notions allow us to imagine.
They also need to have a strong and commanding voice, for a flock of sheep isn’t driven, it is led.
More than that, Psalm 23, which we sung in paraphrase a moment ago, was traditionally believed to have been written by David, and says “the Lord is my shepherd.” Not only did Jews of Jesus’ time associate shepherds with their greatest and holiest kings, but a shepherd was an established metaphor for God.
Jesus is consciously taking all that on Himself when He declares “I am the good shepherd.” He is saying not just that He is a caring and loving, if necessarily tough, leader of His flock. He is saying that He is in the line of the greatest kings of the Jewish people’s most golden moments, and hinting that He may even be divine.
In fact, Jesus is hinting at His divine nature not only through identifying Himself as a shepherd, but also by using the phrase “I am”, which is particularly and powerfully significant in John’s Gospel. Now, obviously sometimes “I am” is used in a literal and obvious way, but there are around a dozen cases in John’s Gospel where Jesus uses this statement to hint heavily that He is God – and two where this is unambiguously the case. One is when He was nearly stoned to death because He told the mob – “before Abraham was, I am”; the other is when Jesus is about to be arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, and when told the police were looking for Jesus of Nazareth, simply replies, “I am” – and everybody falls to the ground. Remember, that when Moses asked God in the burning bush His name, He replied “I am who I am.”
So a Bible reading that we don’t usually pay all that much attention to and tend to read as, “God is nice, like fluffy sheep, and will lead me if I am also nice”, is actually one where Jesus hints that He is, in fact, God, and also that God’s nature is like a shepherd – tender and caring, sure, but also a leader who gives firm and clear directions, and also tough enough to protect the flock from those who would try to snatch them away.
Now, the work of a shepherd is never done. Sheep aren’t the sort of animals you can train up so they can eventually just look after themselves without supervision.
But people are different, right?
Our first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles, is set very soon after the first Holy Week – perhaps in that very first summer and autumn in the history of the Church, when the number of Christians in the entire world was likely in low triple figures, or fewer, and all of them devoted their lives entirely to Christ. They sold their worldly possessions and distributed the proceeds to everyone according to their need, broke bread at home and prayed in the Temple for large swathes of every day.
This must have been a beautiful moment, and they were clearly living a very attractive lifestyle, because the Bible tells us that they were making new followers every day. In every generation since, Christians have set up communities seeking to live as the few followers of Christ in that first Christian summer.
This vision is one of the mainstays of Christian monasticism, for starters, but after the Second World War and again in the ’60s, there was a wave of communities set up for people who did not want to take monastic vows, including married couples and families, but did want to try and fulfil this vision of how the very first Christians lived.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could live like this forever? Well, maybe. Monks and nuns will certainly tell you that living in community and sharing your worldly possessions is a lot harder than people imagine. And while some monastic communities have survived intact for more than a thousand years, the communities involving families or singles without religious vows tend to have a much shorter shelf-life and some of them go spectacularly wrong.
The first Christians were no different – it’s obvious from some of the things that Paul writes that they were plagued by freeloaders, and not long after this golden phase, Ananias and Sapphira, a married couple, mysteriously dropped dead at history’s first church committee meeting when they were caught with their fingers in the till.
Our culture encourages us to think of ourselves as independent-minded free spirits, who become the people we dream ourselves to be through the power of self-will, rather like the cowboy. But the reality is that we’re more like sheep than we like to admit: prone to wandering, prone to bleating, prone to getting ourselves into trouble. That’s why we need to listen for the voice of our good shepherd, taking time for prayer to do so, for it is only He who can lead us to the rich pasture God has marked for us.
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.
