There was a lot to enjoy in my early job in a guitar shop. But there were a couple of things that pained me in contrasting ways. Stocktaking was tedious. The compensation was listening to music and doing it in company with others.
The other thing was about the customers. Some of the most gifted musicians I met, gigging musicians, lived difficult lives in penury. They would buy single strings, not full sets. The people who bought the most expensive instruments and gear were often more collectors than players. And to this day I ache to remember one person who seemed to be trying to bind their wounded heart with guitar straps. How many do you need?
In the last judgement passage from Matthew, Jesus paints a word picture of stocktaking sheep and goats. It seems to me, that revisiting this passage in the context of scriptural images of beasts, cattle, sheep and shepherds—good and bad—is an invitation, an invitation to take stock of our place in the kaleidoscope of humanity’s need, indeed the needs of all creation.
First, I say our place because anybody of any experience knows the scale of need is truly overwhelming. Sometimes the sharing of a cup of cold water and the interaction that goes with it is enough, and sometimes it really isn’t.
It’s not that material needs don’t matter, but we know there’s more to the hierarchy of needs. Feeding the hungry, supplying drink for the thirsty, welcoming strangers, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, and visiting those in prison, a list far from exhaustive that stimulates further reflection.
We know the structures of the nations of the world cause a lot of the misery and needs of the vulnerable.
We know everyone has needs. We know nobody who reads this reflection is likely to sell all they have and give to the poor. We know the radical redistribution of resources among the trillionaire and everyone else would not solve everything. We know, even in our nation of plenty, there’s the need of systems to address a lot of need.
Commentators readily remark the resonance of Jesus’s sheep and goats judgement with Ezekiel 34.11-16 and so on where the Lord God ‘will search for my sheep and will sort them out… they shall lie down in good grazing land, and they shall feed on rich pasture… I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strays, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them [all] with justice.’
I don’t want to get into Zionist debates, so I’ve left those bits out.
My interest today is in how the near kingdom of heaven Jesus proclaims can liberate and empower us. We can be liberated from an obsession with our personal final destiny. We can be held in the promise of the good shepherd who will rescue us from the places we are scattered to bring us to lie down in good places.
We can also be liberated from the overwhelming sense of knowing too much about the apparently insurmountable needs of the world. It is empowering to know that not all the problems are mine or even ours to address. I know it might be a novel reading, but there is this from the good shepherd passages, John 10.16: ‘I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold.’
It is empowering to remember a sheepfold is a place of shelter and safety for a particular subset of sheep, particular to the cultures that use them. Folds have varieties of designs, suited to their local environments and climates. Lucy Lind Hogan reminds us ‘the good shepherd decides who is in which sheepfold, we do not.’[i]
When it comes to needs, there is a tension we live with as the church. I can’t remember who put it this way, but it’s something like this: every Christian faith community is made up of people seeking safety and rest. At the same time, that community is called to share and to serve. None of us can do it alone. None of our communities is adequate to the whole task.
As for me, I’m glad to belong to a worldwide network of congregations and agencies responding to the needs of our situations, according to our calls and insights and capacity.
And I’m happy the Good Shepherd has not asked us to sort out the sheep and the goats.
[i] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fourth-sunday-of-easter-2/commentary-on-john-1011-18