A View from the Pew -- "The Sheep and the Shepherd"
by Dan Smolnik
On September 16, we got to hear and think about some really good news. From Matthew 18 we heard the story of how a shepherd caring for his flock, will not hesitate to leave the other 99 sheep to go retrieve the one that has gone astray. I turned this over many times in my heart, first trying to decide whether I might be counted among the 99, the one, or the shepherd. Next, I got to thinking about that number.
Numbers play several roles in the Bible and some numbers such as 40, get used a lot to illustrate a large among of time (40 days, 40 years) while others get used to stand for really big numbers (seventy times seven). 99, or 100, only shows up a couple times, and both times telling the same story. I realized it wasn’t an accident.
Shepherds in Biblical times handled flocks of hundreds of sheep, sometimes thousands, as they had to not only guard the sheep against things that would eat them (a lot of things), but also had to move them to feeding areas, into and out of night shelter, and to shearing, the market, and to buyers and sellers who used them commonly in a barter economy. The flocks of sheep were regularly in motion.
It would be impossible for a shepherd to keep regular, accurate count of a vast sea of moving sheep, who, not incidentally, tend to stand quite close together, heads down, when grazing. If some wander off, or are taken by predators, the loss might not be noticed until they were unrecoverable.
Instead, wise flock owners put math to work. For every 100 (there’s that number) sheep, they would include one black sheep. Sheep appear in a variety of shades naturally, but only one wool color is recessive – black. That color stands out in a flock . The shepherd could look out, quickly count the number of black sheep in the pasture, and have a sense that, statistically, all the animals were accounted for, or, perhaps, that some might be missing.
An important corollary is also true. Sheep tend to follow each other and prefer groups. If a black sheep is missing, odds are there is more than one sheep unaccounted for. Put another, way, with a ratio of 99 to one, a shepherd missing two black sheep might be thinking about dusting off his resume. When the shepherd goes to find the missing black sheep, he’s probably also going to find several other missing sheep.
The black sheep never knows the importance of his or her presence in the flock. Neither do any of the other sheep. All they know is how important it is to be together.
It turns out we are all the one. We are all the 99. We are all shepherds.
