“Vs. 27

“My sheep listen to my voice;
I know them, and they follow me.”

A priest was teaching a Sunday school class about the 23rd Psalm. He told the children about sheep, that they weren’t very smart and needed lots of guidance, and that a shepherd’s job was to stay close to the sheep, protect them from wild animals and keep them from wandering off and doing dumb things that would get them hurt or killed.

He pointed to the little children in the room and said that they were the sheep and needed lots of guidance. Then the priest put his hands out to the side, palms up in a dramatic gesture, and with raised eyebrows said to the children,

“If you are the sheep then who is the shepherd?”

There was an awkward silence.   Then Jennie, a young second-grader, said, “Jesus: Jesus is the shepherd.”   The young priest, obviously caught by surprise, said to her, “Well, then, who am I?”  Jennie thought for a moment, and then said with a shrug, “I guess you must be the sheep dog.”

It seems in Australia sheep dogs are being replaced by modern technology.

While doing my sermon preparation this week I came across and article that caught my attention. The article was about E-Shepherd.

Sheep ranchers in Australia have embraced cutting-edge technologies with regards to shepherding their flocks. The shepherds rod and staff have been replaced with a Bluetooth headset in ear, a Blackberry PDA, a computer and a GPS receiver. WHY you ask? Because ranchers are attaching tiny GPS transponders to the ears of baby lambs. By attaching these transponders to the lamb the rancher can observe the lamb’s growth via a computer monitor.

They not only can watch their growth they can control their growth. Along with the Bluetooth, blackberry and computer the ranchers have installed electronically controlled gates. The rancher opens and closes these gates to move the flock from one pasture to another, to move them beside still water. These passageways are just wide enough for one sleep to pass through at a time. As they pass between fenced-in zones, their transponders alert the shepherd where they are going and when. As a fully grown sheep passes through, a side gate opens sending it into a yard for those animals headed to market.

Bill Murray, spokesperson for the Australian Sheep Industry, not the comedian said, “We can keep tabs on a single sheep from the time it is a little lamb to the time that it becomes lamb chops. However, the main advantage is in sheep handling, because the transponders allow the sheep to make their own decisions, without being hassled by people or dogs.”

This method of sheep ranching is indeed very different from the kind Jesus speaks about when he said,

“My sheep listen to my voice;
I know them, and they follow me.”

Jesus makes a clear distinction between a sheep rancher and a shepherd. Thank God for us Jesus is NOT a rancher but a shepherd. There is a vast difference between a sheep rancher and a shepherd.

The time is the festival of Dedication, or Hanukkah (v. 22) — the Jewish celebration of the rededication of the Temple The place is the portico of Solomon (v. 23) — the only remaining relic of Solomon’s sacred temple which still stood, and the place where the Jewish king would make judgments and exercise justice.

Jesus reveals the kind of shepherd he is in the very place where God’s kings had always spoken to God’s people.

Jesus, our shepherd is a:
• Shepherd who works in the “Father’s name.”
• Shepherd whose “sheep” hear his voice.
• Shepherd who knows the sheep.
• Shepherd whose “sheep” follow him.
• Shepherd who gives to his followers eternal life.
• Shepherd who defends his “sheep,” because “no one will snatch them out of my hand.”
• Shepherd who is one with the “Father.”

Jesus is no e-shepherd who engages his sheep remotely. Our shepherd, Jesus maintains intimacy with us in order to meet our needs, the needs of his sheep. He is at least within voice-distance (v. 27). Jesus is a hands-on, high-touch Shepherd.

Jesus doesn’t fit the shepherd stereotype and it’s probably fair to say that we aren’t the brainless herd animals that we assume sheep to be. But the biblical metaphor is still timeless and rich, ultimately giving us a picture of the relationship, protection and provision our shepherd Jesus provides for us.

"My sheep listen to my voice;
I know them, and they follow me.”

In the highlands of Scotland, sheep will often wander off into the rocks and get into places that they can’t get out of. The grass on these mountains is very sweet and the sheep like it, and they will jump down 10 or 12 feet, and then they can’t jump back again, and the shepherd hears them bleating in distress.

They may be there for days, until they have eaten all the grass. The shepherd will wait until they are so faint they cannot stand, and then they will put a rope around them, and he will go over and pull the sheep up out of the jaws of death.

Why doesn’t the shepherd go down there when the sheep first get there? “Because,” replied one shepherd, “they are so very foolish they would dash right over the precipice and be killed if they did!”

The moral is that all too often like sheep we have gone astray, too often it’s only when we give up trying to “go it alone” that we’re ready to receive some help.

As the Good Shepherd, Jesus is always ready to provide the help we need. In order to receive that help we need to LISTEN to His voice and FOLLOW Him.