Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot
Readings – Acts 4: 5-13; John 10: 11-18
“…he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth.”
The Good Shepherd is one of the most familiar Bible passages, and the imagery is so beautiful, that we can fall into using it as twee spiritual wallpaper. When we look at the text more closely, it has a harder and more interesting edge, especially if we consider the different lives of the shepherd and the hireling.
The shepherd owns the sheep; they are both his savings account and his working capital. They are how he earns his living, and also where he stores his wealth. To others, his flock may seem modest, but for him it is the fruit of a lifetime’s hard graft. Indeed, it may even have been handed down to him by his forefathers, the result of generations of sleeping out alone on cold mountaintops as wolves howled in the darkness.
The hired man, who works for the shepherd, is in a different position; he has no capital, no savings, he lives from payday to payday. He may have no particular reason to show loyalty to the shepherd, whose wealth may seem modest to people like the fancy Temple clergy in Jerusalem, but still like a king’s ransom to the man whose wages he pays. The shepherd may have started out with advantages in life that seem extraordinary and even unfair to the hireling. The hireling may be a hard worker, he may be loyal to and genuinely friendly with his boss, but things get really tough, like when a pack of wolves attacks on a bitter winter night, he has no skin in the game when it comes to the flock. Looking after these sheep is just another job, and not one that comes with the sort of pay-cheque that’s worth risking your life for.
Now, St Peter may have started out life as a fisherman, but by the time Jesus said “I am the good shepherd”, Peter fancied himself very much as Jesus’ co-shepherd. He was Jesus’ best mate and self-styled Second-in-Command. When Jesus said, “I lay down my life for the sheep”, Peter was going to try to emulate him. So, at the Last Supper, Peter told Christ, “I will lay down my life for thy sake.” But Jesus knew Peter better than he knew himself, and told him that before daybreak, he would deny Jesus three times. Jesus, obviously, was right. When it came down to it, when the metaphorical wolves of the Temple were circling, Peter turned out not to be Jesus’ fellow shepherd, but just a hireling there for the payday he thought the Messiah would bring him.
