Aileen and I like to watch boring shows right before we turn in for the night. An exciting game or an intense movie might get us too engaged and keep us from being able to fall asleep. But a boring show nicely slows the pace and prepares us to rest.
Lately, we have been watching a show that follows several farming families in Scotland through a year of their lives. It is not exactly riveting stuff, but that’s the point, isn’t it? By the time we get to the end of an episode, we are bored silly and ready to escape to bed.
But recently, one little statement caused me to perk up for a moment. One of the farmers was expressing why, though she loves keeping cattle, she struggles with keeping sheep. This was her reasoning: “Their one goal in life is to find the stupidest, dumbest way to die.”
That’s quite a goal and one that, from my understanding of sheep, is hard to dispute. Though sheep might not actually want to die and certainly don’t make it their aim, they do seem to find creative ways of harming themselves. Millennia of breeding toward the most desirable traits, which are not the traits most associated with survival, has left them more helpless still.
And so sheep are constantly falling in ditches, getting their heads stuck in fences, and flipping onto their backs with no ability to right themselves. They’ll wander from a pasture of lush grass to nibble at weeds along the edge of a busy highway, taking no care to avoid the cars zooming past. Given opportunity, they’ll fall into water and drown or eat so much food they’ll overwhelm their digestive systems and die. They’re endlessly creative in their attempts at self-destruction and nothing short of piteous in their stupidity.
On that note, it has always been interesting to me that one of the Bible’s foremost metaphors for God’s people is sheep. He could have referred to us as lions (strong, fierce), stallions (fast, noble), or eagles (swift, alert). But he went with sheep, and it’s no great compliment. It’s no great compliment, but it is greatly realistic. We, like the creatures we resemble, are bent on self-destruction and endlessly, hopelessly creative at achieving it. We may mock sheep for their dumbness, but we do it while straying from God’s ways, getting mired in sin, and drowning in depravity. We do it while leaving green pastures for dangerous valleys and leaving the safety of the shepherd who pities us, loves us, and has promised to protect us. Unlike sheep, we are moral beings who know the way we should go. But like sheep, we just don’t follow it.
We may mock sheep for their dumbness, but we do it while straying from God’s ways, getting mired in sin, and drowning in depravity.
I have learned from watching far too many of these just-before-bedtime shows that it is the helplessness of sheep that draws out the farmer’s pity for them. Shepherds love their sheep and have a special compassion for them precisely because of their helpless stupidity. They long to keep their sheep alive despite their best attempts at destruction and spend much of their time rescuing their sheep from themselves. And in that way, I do not find it difficult to see why God refers to himself as our shepherd and to us as his sheep, for so often our one goal in life is to find the stupidest, dumbest way to die—to destroy our lives, our souls, our very selves. Yet where we, like sheep, have strayed and he, he like the shepherd, has sought us out and rescued us.
