“The Lord is my shepherd.” This is the statement of fact and confidence that opens the most comforting and calmest of the Psalms. It is the signal of God’s constant presence and concern, no matter where we are, whether in green pastures, in the valley of the shadow of death, or at the dining room table. Its message is that God is pervasive in our lives. As another psalm, the 95th says: We are “the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.”
The Twenty-third Psalm is attributed to King David of Israel. We don’t know at what point in his long life he is supposed to have composed it. But, if you read the First and Second Books of Samuel, you realize that David did not remain the handsome and ruddy young man whom the prophet Samuel picked out from among Jesse’s sons as the next king. (1 Samuel 16:12) David’s life thereafter was passionate and violent. He lost the friend of his bosom, Jonathan, the son of the very king, Saul, whom David was replacing. (2 Samuel 1:25-26) He was a renegade and actually a kind of brigand. (1 Samuel 25: the extortion of Nabal) He was also a mercenary. When he was king, he seduced Bathsheba, a married woman, and saw to it that her husband Uriah was killed in battle. (2 Samuel 11-12) His son Absalom rebelled against him, and he was forced to flee Jerusalem. (2 Samuel 15-18) The Bible points out in detail how and how much blood was shed.
Yet, and perhaps we can be shocked, David continued to love God, and God continued to love him. And this is another encouraging feature of the Twenty-third Psalm. It is so interesting that, at some time in his stormy life, David would hark back to his handsome and ruddy years and take comfort from his past life as a shepherd. He could see the peace in leading his father’s flocks. He carried this experience in his heart – and we all do the same thing! And, because David was so good at his art, he could take his life as a shepherd and translate it into God’s unending care for him.
As to the metaphor of the shepherd and the sheep, we should really think about the relationship of humans to animals. As to sheep, not only were they valuable in economic terms as a source of food and of their immensely precious wool. They also have an emotional appeal at least in that they require guardianship and love. At one point, David told King Saul that he killed or drove off lions to protect his flock. (1 Samuel 17:36-36) Of course he might have been boasting, but I don’t doubt that he drove predators off. And the New Testament statements how Jesus seeks out the straying lamb is a metaphor that must have an absolutely accurate origin in real life. (Luke 15:4-7; Matthew 18:12-14)
A shepherd lived with the flock all day and all night. The flock really knew him. When the group traveled, the sheep followed the shepherd. He did not have to drive them, and he could be certain they were behind him. They knew his face.
There are many other fascinating things to say. For example, how the shepherd is the sheep’s doctor and obstetrician. But the point is that the relationship between shepherd and sheep is profound. If you have an animal in your life, you know the incredible strength of the bond. David beautifully takes the reality of this bond between humans and animals and turns it into the bond between The Good Shepherd and us.
We should not forget that the Twenty-third Psalm is more than a metaphor and more than a poem. It is a meditation and a prayer, that is meant to comfort us. And it does comfort us. It is meant to express foundational connection and it does that. Like David, we have problems. We have problems in our personal lives, the problems that come with love. We have problems in the broader world which we recognize because we love. Our world is as uncertain and perilous as the world of ancient Israel was. In his prayer, David is telling us that, amidst problems, amidst enemies, in the valley of the shadow of death, our connection to the shepherd remains unchanged. And that is a good point. Indeed, we need rest and comfort and we want predictability. The Psalm gives us the predictability that comes from faith. The Lord is our shepherd, indeed. As Jesus says in today’s Gospel passage, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me…No one will snatch them out of my hand.” (John 10:27)
It is so wonderful, so entirely lovely, to have a God who loves us. I am not sure that any other religious tradition in the whole world and ever is based on the biblical tradition of a God who loves. The Psalm tells us to have great confidence in God’s grace, not in the world’s perfection – as if! – but in his grace. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton gave a nice definition of grace in his book “The Seven Story Mountain.” He wrote: “What is grace? It is God’s own life, shared by us.” (Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978 at page 169)
This means something very special. We are made to go beyond being the comforted. God is not only deeply loyal to us his flock, but God also shares his life with us. In the Book of Genesis, which is wise and clear-sighted, we read that God actually made us in his own image, And that he put us in charge of his Creation. (Genesis 1:26-30)
If God is so free with his life and his image and his creation, our posture changes dramatically. I would say that the Twenty-third Psalm goes upside-down under our feet. The reason is that, if we share in God’s life, we enter into King David’s metaphor so that we are shepherds too. We are shepherds to each other and we are shepherds to Creation. In other words, we become Good Shepherds too. Maybe, and I am not a theologian, this is one of the big lessons of the Incarnation: that we can actually imitate the Lord. After all, as in last Sunday’s Gospel reading, Jesus said to Peter: “Feed my sheep.” (John 21:15-17)
How do we fulfill the job of being shepherds? We have to take the shepherd’s long, slow, difficult, painful walk of love. Jesus walked this road in his life on earth. And many people followed him and they listened to him. We listen to him today. So, the first stage of the walk is listening. One might say that this is passive. I don’t think so. It means being receptive to Scripture, to good books, to good talks, to good movies, to what we say to each other even in the most trivial conversations. We find the Gospel everywhere, and the trivial is often the arena of the depth of friendship and mutual respect. There is something about this passivity, as it were, that makes things sink in. It is like being picked up and set down at another level.
The next step on the walk is prayer. I am a big enthusiast for prayer. It strengthens faith. Prayer is not something fancy. It is not a big thing. As Father Rocky says, there is no such thing as bad prayer. But prayer keeps our minds and bodies active and attentive to our needs and desires and our aspirations. Since the interaction is with God, prayer has results. In the case of shepherding, it makes us more deeply aware of love and its radical style. For example, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” This is really a prayer about love.
And so, we become attentive to love. We feel a loyalty and love for other people – and for animals and for the beauty of Creation. And we can act in love. I don’t mean we will found nonprofits that will feed the world. I mean that we will become attentive to all our acts and contacts. That we desire every little thing we do to be done lovingly. Making dinner is an act of love. We become aware that hatred can rise up in an interaction with any person, even a person we don’t know like a person highly placed in politics. But Jesus said, “Love your enemies.” Hatred can eat away at the foundation of justice.
Somehow, praying is a way of participating in God’s love. We and God, in prayer, love the people of Gaza and the Sudan; love the people in government offices in Russia; love the kids who get measles; love our wives and husbands and sons and daughters and grandchildren and friends. Prayer is never-ending, never boring. The more we pray, the more people we have to prayer for. I can see why some people keep lists!
I know that the world is a mess. Consider just a part of it: the major wars that are going on. Some readers of Genesis would describe this as The Fall. When I was young, I thought that we could fix it. But I don’t think anymore that we can fix it by ourselves. But we can pray that it be fixed. We are shepherds in this way, too. Our sleepless nights are shared with the shepherd by the camp fire who worries about the predators that we all fear – until, in God’s time, the wolf dwells with our lambs. (Isaiah 11:6)
Prayer is foundational to our lives. This lesson about prayer is really the simple fact of the existence of the Twenty-third Psalm. The Psalm is not just a nice poem or metaphor. It is itself, in the middle of David’s troubled life, a meditation and a prayer. Shepherds love their sheep and they know how bad things can get. So, shepherds like us pray. It is part of being a shepherd. It is the shepherd in King David who said: “The Lord is my shepherd.”
Thank you for listening.
