Jesus’s images often have us looking in the opposite direction. Usually because we’re looking the wrong way.
There’s this line in the gospels I always mishear.
It says that Jesus looks at the crowds and has sympathy for them because they look “like sheep without a shepherd.”
The phrase doesn’t just evoke Jesus’s caring for these crowds of people. It carries the baggage of judgment. Where’s the shepherd?
And then a literal-metaphorical judgment: since the religious leaders are shepherds, they’re obviously slacking.
The context is even more frustrating.
Jesus has been teaching for hours/days with little break. Literally thousands of people are begging for attention and hanging on his every word. And now, Jesus is trying to get a break, Sabbath. He is exhausted. And he turns to this huge crowd who have been hearing it all – and yet are still so aimless. That’s when he feels the sympathy.
The function of their being like sheep without a shepherd is really a statement about the lostness of the sheep. Because Jesus is the shepherd here. We call him the good shepherd and even in his presence, they feel lost. As if he were already gone.
Those of us who are shepherds, literally or metaphorically, carry the weight of responsibility. I always hear this passage with a twinge of guilt. That I continue to fail my flock. And we justify this by taking these words literally, but then refuse to apply them to Jesus. We refuse to blame Jesus for the poor education of his students.
I too often hear these words with judgment and cruel irony rather than the generous evocative love of Jesus. That he had sympathy for people in their lostness and fed them in his exhausted state. Even this becomes the standard for me.
But Jesus acted so generously because they seemed so lost and he felt bad for them.
These sheep aren’t lost, but they believe they are.
It is really a cruel, self-imposed prison. To feel lost when surrounded by others. Unled when the leader stands before you. Unprepared when your teacher has been teaching you forever.
Jesus’s sympathy is so striking because the problem isn’t Jesus. And it isn’t about the effectiveness of local leadership in the midst of crises. He has sympathy because they seem lost in spite of all that is actually around them. He is generous when their view of the world is broken and jaded.
The central conflict in the story isn’t that the people lack leadership. The leader is standing in front of them. It is that the people struggle to see what true leadership has to do with them.