I am the Good Shepherd,
and I know mine and mine know me.
I came across a fellow named Shane the other day and suggested he was born in the early 1950’s. Why? Because that classic western film named Shane (the name of the lead actor Alan Ladd) came out then and often you can date a whole generation of Americans by a name popular at the time of their birth. Anyway the film Shane was about the conflict between sodbusters (i.e. farmers) and cowboys (herdsmen). For quite a while it was the herdsmen who felt they owned the Great Plains where they grazed their cattle and goats and even sheep – “out where the buffalo roam”. But then came the Homestead Act of 1862 by which government land was opened up to farm families for cultivation. The film is set in that tense environment – because the herdsmen didn’t like the idea of the open prairie being dug up and parceled out and fenced in. You can understand why. The film comes to a climax when the gunfighter (Jack Palance) for the herdsmen, is confronted by the retired gunfighter visiting with the farmers (Ladd) and the issue is resolved with the farmers staying and the cattlemen dead!
But isn’t this the earliest issue dealt with in the Bible? What was Abel? A shepherd, meandering over the open land to pasture his sheep. And what was Cain? A farmer who didn’t like Abel’s sheep trampling on his seeded fields. So here the farmer (Cain) kills the shepherd (Abel) and claims the land for farming. Of course, this meant fences, boundaries, property rights, bureaucracies – and the location of market venues (farmers’ markets) which became towns. In other words agriculture (Cain) launched us into an urban way of life: Cain founded a city versus home on the range. And once we had cities we had technology (all who forge instruments of bronze and iron) and culture (all who play the lyre and the reed pipe). It’s all right there in Genesis chapter 4. Of course you can learn about this economic rivalry at some college level course but Genesis makes it so succinct.
Actually all the prominent early characters of the Hebrew Bible were shepherds or herdsmen: Abraham, Jacob, the sons of Jacob – living on the margin of the citified world of their pagan neighbors. David was a shepherd. But by 1000 BC the Cain influence led to Israel’s becoming citified, living within fences, walls, under bureaucracies within a top to bottom monarchy – including taxes, the military draft, capital versus labor, things that still have us today nostalgically singing lyrics like: I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences /?And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses /?And I can’t look at hovels and I can’t stand fences /? Don’t fence me in.
In the light of the Hebrew Bible’s seeming preference for the pastoral life of its earliest characters, for a life of ruminating from pasture to pasture (or from parable to parable) in wide open, scenic places where one can breathe and admire the sunrise and sunset – it seems so wise of Jesus to present himself as our Shepherd, calling us out to pasture while other authorities would rather confine us (or corral us) within some ideology or academic jabberwocky that leads us nowhere.
Of course we have to ask ourselves if we as a Church have slipped into the ways of Cain and old Israel. Have we too sacrificed our pastoral destiny for an urban one with its walls, fences, bureaucracies, top-down ways of leadership as opposed to that of a Good Shepherd who would guide us toward a life style that amounts to a paradox of freedom and cohesion, of individuality yet togetherness? The best way to avoid following Cain is to listen closely to the nuances; the cadences of him who walks ahead . . . and the sheep follow him, because they recognize his voice.