From sheep to human

Sermon by Canon Kathryn | Holy Communion, Sunday 18 July 2021

Jeremiah 23.1-6

Mark 6.30-34; 53-end

What does tomorrow mean to you? Is it freedom day, and a cause of rejoicing? Is it the beginning of a time of fear or uncertainty? Or are you feeling conflicted and confused?

As my family will confirm, usually with an eye roll, I am a person of decided views. So it makes me particularly uncomfortable to realise that I have been struggling to know what to think or feel about all this. But I have been greatly helped this week by Giles Coren, a pretty forthright personality himself, who nonetheless observed a few days ago that although journalists, and people who express opinions on social media, find it much the easiest path to come down on one side of this or the other, most of us are probably in a muddle at the moment, and experiencing a strange mixture of emotions and views, somewhere in the middle of the line between fear and celebration. The idea of ditching masks is wonderful; the constraints under which we’ve been labouring have had far-reaching and damaging effects, so we need to do something about them; we want our lives back. But then again, the rate of infection is going up, some people are still becoming seriously ill and dying, and after all this time, I’m going to feel really strange behaving as if the threat has gone away, when it hasn’t.

And on top of this is a hefty dollop of a related but different sort of psychological unease, stemming not from the details, but from a tension between security and autonomy. For the past 16 months, we have been told what to do. Now, we are being given back our heads, and called to make decisions for ourselves. And that in itself is uncomfortable. Most of us will have had the experience at some point in our lives of being institutionalised, whether at school or in hospital or perhaps in the armed forces on an exercise or deployment. To start with, you will probably kick against it. But once you get used to it, there is something strangely comforting about knowing exactly what you’re doing next, and not needing to think about how to behave or which way to structure your time. Once it stops, and you’re out in the world by yourself again, you might feel a bit lost – like a sheep without a shepherd.

This feeling of being lost can make you queasy. It can give you butterflies in your stomach. It can put you off your food. So it’s no surprise that when Jesus, who takes on the fullness of our humanity, witnesses a crowd of people milling about in just this sort of aimless, disoriented way, it hits him in the guts. The Greek word which is here translated as ‘compassion’, is visceral – it’s a reaction in your innards. He feels gutted for the wandering sheep. And this is something for us to process in our guts: for all those moments including now, when we feel like this, he feels like that.

This physical gut-wrench is the kind of compassion which translates into action. In response to the crowd’s predicament, he teaches them, he feeds them, he heals them. And in doing this, he empowers them to become more than simply wandering sheep: he gives them a sense of direction. Jesus doesn’t make decisions for them: he equips them to make decisions for themselves. He has been recognised before. But now that people have been taught, and fed, and healed, that recognition enables people to know their Shepherd, and so to decide what to do. So they rush to bring to him people for healing. Because they are able to orient themselves, knowing their leader, they are able to think for themselves and to make wise choices.

So the people are not distracted and aimless any more. But neither are they blindly following orders, as we might do when we’re institutionalised. Instead, knowing their source of authority means that they are both directed and autonomous.

If that sounds like a contradiction in terms, then a clue as to how these two things can hold together lies at the beginning of our reading. ‘Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place’, says Jesus, ‘and rest awhile’. This is the only time in Mark’s gospel that the disciples are referred to as ‘apostles’ – messengers who are sent out – and this invitation to withdraw and rest points to an essential part of our Christian ministry as messengers of the Good News. We need sabbath time – not just time off, but different time: time spent with God in prayer and adoration and worship. This time enables us to become fully ourselves – and as ourselves, to be rightly aligned with God, and so with other people. It is through paying attention to our Shepherd that we can know where he is leading us, and that we can freely choose to do his will, so that we are both directed and autonomous.

As we hear in our reading from Jeremiah, earthly shepherds can all too often fall short. Living and leading in the mess and confusion of the world, it is not surprising that they do. And even when we are faithful in listening to God, knowing what to do is not always straightforward. But if we keep trying – if we make it our practice – then we will know that fellow-feeling, that compassion of Jesus which translates into action. We will be taught, and fed, and healed. And so we will be empowered to fear no more, nor be dismayed, and neither shall we be lacking. Behold, the days come.

Amen.