Sheep, wandering and following.

A Sermon for the Second Sunday after Easter

May 4, 2025 at Holy Communion

1 Peter 2:19–25, John 10:11–16

“You were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls” (1 Peter 2:25). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.

Are sheep wanderers or followers? It’s no secret that the Bible loves sheep metaphors, but it’s less common to notice that the Bible presents sheep in two apparently opposite ways.

On the one hand, sheep are the typical example of waywardness. We have Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep which stupidly leaves the flock so that the shepherd has to go find it. “All we like sheep have gone astray”—a line from the Prophet Isaiah which is quoted into today’s Epistle—finds its way into kitchen radios around the world when Handel’s Messiah is played every Christmas. It makes its way into our Book of Common Prayer, too. You may remember praying in confession, “Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.”

Because we associate sheep with waywardness, we miss that many of the Bible’s sheep metaphors emphasize that sheep are followers, including today’s Gospel. Jesus explains us that “the sheep hear the shepherd’s voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out … and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice,” (John 10:3–4), but that “a stranger they will not follow, … for they do not know the voice of strangers” (v 5). His point is that his own people know his voice and follow him. Other counterfeit shepherds might come and try to lead the sheep—for their own advantage—but there will be a double proof that they are not genuine. The first proof is these false shepherds will abandon the sheep when trouble comes (v 12–13), and the second proof is that sheep will not follow them, because the sheep know the voice of their true shepherd (v 5, 14, 16).

But these two metaphors—comparing the people of God to wandering sheep on one hand and to docile sheep on the other—are not in fact contrary to one another. They fit together in this way: sheep lack the capacity to direct themselves. They do not know the way home, so they have to be shown. If a headstrong sheep decides to go its own way, it will get lost, because sheep are not navigators. They were made to follow a herd, not to blaze a trail. So sheep naturally attach themselves to a flock. They go where the others go, and trust the familiar voice of the shepherd to lead the whole pack of them.

Human beings are like sheep because we also lack the capacity to direct ourselves. If the sheep metaphor that dominates in our imagination is the metaphor of the wayward sheep, the reason may be that we are like headstrong sheep: we are convinced that we can find our own way when, in fact, we cannot.

Human beings, by nature, are dependent. Most basically, we cannot live without being sustained by the world outside of and around us. So, in one of the earliest writings about government, the philosopher Aristotle argued that human being are naturally social. We are not sufficient as individuals to provide ourselves with the goods of life, so we gather in families and towns. A community can be self-sufficient, but no individual can be self-sufficient. So we divide labour, we trade and share, and we choose how to organize our common life. This is the basis for politics. So he argues that existing somewhere in the relationship between government and citizens is essential to what it means to be human. In short: we are made to be led. We are not sufficient to lead ourselves. As the church fathers would later delight in calling us—we are ”rational sheep”.

Although the sheep metaphor dominates our Gospel reading, it makes an appearance only at the end of our Epistle. Most of the Epistle is devoted to recapping themes we’ve heard several times throughout Holy Week and Easter: that Christ suffered giving us an example of patience (1 Peter 2:21), that he did not respond to sin with sin or violence with violence (v 22–23), and that he bore our sins on the cross, so that we can be healed (v 24). And that’s where the sheep metaphor comes in: “you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls” (v 25).

St Peter is extending the Easter argument, adding something new. When Christ comes into the world to die for us—to “lay down his life for the sheep” as Jesus says in our Gospel (John 10:15)—he becomes the shepherd again to sheep who have lost their way. We had been under the care of hirelings who abandoned us to be devoured by the world, the flesh, and the devil, but now Christ comes to be a responsible shepherd and put himself between us and those wolves.

An early Christian writer called Irenaeus would make this one of his favourite themes. He called it “recapitulation,” or, more literally, “re-heading.” Jesus, coming into the world, puts us under the leadership of a new head who makes up for all the failures of our previous representatives. The paradigmatic example is Adam. The whole human race used to be represented by Adam, whose disobedience set the pattern for all future waywardness, leading to death. But now Jesus, out of obedience to the Father, embraces Adam’s whole life and death, and assumes his role as representative of the human race, so that he can lead human beings into life. Jesus dies to become the head, leader, and shepherd of a humanity which had wandered far when it tried to lead itself.

The first thing we can do with this teaching is simply to celebrate it as good news. We have a shepherd who can be trusted, a shepherd who puts himself between the wolves and our souls. Guilt can’t touch us, nor shame, nor ignorance. We trust the shepherd to keep us safe until it’s time for him to lead us home.

But for a second point of application, and one which we can take into our closets and use to examine ourselves, I turn to Saint Paul. In Romans 6 (v 16), he asks us, “Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?” His argument is simple: when you give yourself over into another person’s power, you have to face the consequences of what obeying that person means. Why? Because we are like sheep, not sufficient to lead ourselves. We will, inevitably, be formed by the leadership of those we give ourselves to.

We attach ourselves to people, ideas, cultural forces and spiritual practices, all in the hope of finding some direction. The point of application is this: recognizing that you are just a sheep, present yourself with simplicity of heart to follow the Master. Stop trusting the other voices. They don’t speak to your soul; you don’t know their voice. The voice of Christ speaks in the heart with clarity and directness to those who, shutting out the noise, still themselves enough to hear and follow it.