“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want” (Psalm 23:1)
This coming Sunday is ‘Good Shepherd Sunday’. Every year at this time we revisit the 23rd Psalm and read excerpts from the tenth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint John which talk about Jesus as the ‘Good Shepherd’.
It’s also ‘Mother’s Day’ this Sunday, and that might seem like a happy coincidence, as the roles of mothering and shepherding seem to have considerable overlap. Even so, there is an important point of distinction between the Ancient Near Eastern shepherd and your mum. Shepherds smelt terrible!
Christian iconography tends to depict shepherds as genteel figures, nurturing baby lambs or carrying lost sheep on their shoulders. Shepherding was actually a very rough job in Biblical times. It meant sleeping in the fields or in the entrances of caves where you’d use your body as a barrier (John 10:9), keeping predators from the flock
By definition, these shepherds were pastoral figures (‘pastor’ being the Latin word for shepherd) but we shouldn’t let the modern concept of pastoring disguise the fact that Biblical shepherds were uniformly men of blood.
You may recall the dialogue between King Saul and the young shepherd-boy, David (recorded in the first book of Samuel, chapter 17), where the teenager is volunteering to do battle with Goliath, but the king is expressing doubts about the young man’s standing as a warrior. David’s response is, “Hey! I’m a shepherd. I kill lions and bears for a living”. That’s a paraphrase of 1 Samuel 17:34-37, of course, but I think it’s an accurate one. Shepherds knew how to fight and kill.
Ancienty Near Eastern shepherds were rough, hairy men who lived on the outskirts of society. Predictably, they were not highly esteemed by the social elite, which perhaps makes it surprising that the shepherd became the dominant Biblical metaphor for political leadership. Yes, a mother or a teacher could be a shepherd, but the metaphor was most commonly applied to the king (eg. Ezekiel 34, Psalm 78).
Biblically speaking, our leaders are our shepherds. Does this mean we should be electing warriors who can withstand the heat of battle? Perhaps, but our Lord Jesus distinguished between good and bad shepherds, and “the good shepherd”, He says, is the one who “lays down his life for the sheep.” (John 10:11)
This is the distinguishing mark of the good shepherd. The good shepherd puts their body on the line. The good shepherd has skin in the game. The good shepherd doesn’t have other people do the fighting for them. The good shepherd leads from the front and, if the fight is lost, the good shepherd will be amongst the first to fall!
In Australia, we’ve just re-elected our Prime Minister, and, in Rome, a new Pope has been elected. Will either of these men prove to be good shepherds?
I saw that the Progressive Jewish Council of Australia has called on the Prime Minister to openly condemn the modern state of Israel’s brutality and to cut ties with their genocidal regime! I suspect that would require our shepherd to lay down his life for the sheep!
In truth, I’m not sure how much we can expect from our current crop of shepherds and, indeed, I fear many of them are actually wolves in sheep’s clothing (if you’ll forgive the mixing of metaphors). At any rate, it is Mother’s Day this Sunday, as well as Good Shepherd Sunday, and we may have to be satisfied with seeing in our mums something of the Good Shepherd, while we pray that our shepherds grow to more closely resemble our mothers.
As broadcast on The Sunday Eucharist – May 11th, 2025
