The Good Shepherd

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan Church on the 4th Sunday of Easter, 26th April 2026.

Christ the Good Shepherd, attributed to Josep Vergara

‘The sheep follow (the shepherd) because they know his voice’.

So says Jesus, in today’s reading from St John’s Gospel (John 10:1-10). These words always used to puzzle me. It just didn’t chime with my own experience.

I remember helping to move my Grandfather’s sheep as a child. Those sheep certainly didn’t recognise anyone’s voice, let alone mine aged 12! You couldn’t lead them. In fact it was the divil’s own job to stop them charging off the wrong way. We stood in gaps, we waved our hands and we hunted them as best we could to their new field of fresh grass - but they just wouldn’t follow! Surely, I thought, shepherds in Jesus’s time must have had a very different relationship with their sheep to us.

But then some years ago a farmer explained it to me. He was amused by my difficulty moving sheep. ‘I never have any difficulty getting sheep to follow me’, he said. ‘I just carry a bag of sheep nuts with me, and they come running.’ There’s more than one way to move sheep - the sheep follow the shepherd who shows them the way to food!

‘The Lord is my shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing’.

So begins the 23^rd Psalm we read earlier. We all love it, don’t we? It is such a favourite because it is so filled with comforting images of God caring for us and keeping us safe.

This metaphor of the shepherd runs right through Hebrew scripture. That’s hardly surprising because the Israelites were a pastoral people.

God is often likened to a shepherd, as in Psalm 23, or as Isaiah writes (Isaiah 40:11): “(The Lord God) will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.”

But Ezekiel 34:2 applies the metaphor to the leaders of Israel, in a great indictment for their bad leadership and corruption: “Ah you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep?” The same indictment might be made of some of the great and powerful in the world today. I do not need to name them, do I?

Jesus chooses to use this metaphor of the shepherd in today’s reading (John 10:1-10).

It is the first part of a longer parable about his relationship with his disciples. In the very next verse, which the lectionary keeps for another day, Jesus continues “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”

The image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd is both familiar and lovely. We have all seen pictures of him as the strong, self-reliant, country man keeping his little flock safe from harm, carrying the lost sheep back to the flock on his shoulders.

In the rugged Judean countryside sheep had to be kept in a sheepfold at night, to prevent them straying into the crops, and to protect them from wild animals and rustlers. In the two halves of the passage we have just heard, Jesus is probably talking about two different kinds of sheepfolds.

The first kind is a large communal fold near a village, surrounded by fences with a gate. The village would employ a gatekeeper to protect the sheep in the communal fold. In the morning the gatekeeper would open the gate to the shepherd who would call his own flock out. The other flocks wouldn’t recognise his call and would stay behind until their own shepherd came.

The second kind of sheepfold would be up in the hills, far from the village, and much smaller. It would be used in summer when a single shepherd would stay out with the sheep for days or weeks on end. To protect the flock at night, the shepherd would lead them into a small enclosure, perhaps just a dry-stone wall he had built. Instead of a gate, he would lie down to sleep in the entrance, where any movement in or out would wake him up. I’ve found similar structures up in the Burren hills. When Jesus said “I am the gate”, everyone would understand what he meant.

In this passage I think Jesus is deliberately doing two things:

Firstly, he is promising his disciples – sheep who recognise his voice - that he will care for them. He will keep them safe and feed them. “Whoever enters by me will be saved”, he says.  They “will come in and go out and find pasture”. It is also his promise to us, today.

But secondly, Jesus is implicitly accusing the leaders of his own day for being bad shepherds, just as Ezekiel had done centuries before. “All who came before me are thieves and bandits;” he says, “but the sheep did not listen to them”. The thieves and bandits are surely those who mislead and oppress the people, whether in the time of Jesus or in our own day. As his disciples we must not listen to them, but rather we must listen to the gentle, loving voice of Jesus, our Good Shepherd, who leads us to green pastures beside still waters.

Jesus will always be our Good Shepherd.

We should hold on to that comforting, familiar image, and listen to his words. After all he has told us “Remember, I am with you always.”

But Jesus has handed on his shepherd’s mantle to others too, starting with the apostles. John (21:15-17) tells us that Jesus said to Peter “Feed my lambs … tend my sheep … feed my sheep”. Bishops from that day to this have inherited a shepherd’s mantle, as Bishop Michael has.

We give thanks for Bishop Michael’s wise and loving Christian leadership which it is his job as a bishop to give us. We give thanks too for the shepherding of our Rector Keith. They both need our prayers as they lead us to face many challenges. The thieves and bandits have not gone away, you know!

But shepherding is not just a job for those who are ordained. Jesus has commissioned every one of us - disciples who follow him - to continue his mission. We are all called to be shepherds in our different ways. Let us be attentive to the Holy Spirit prompting us to tend to the needs of our families, our friends, and the communities of which we are part.

So I finish in prayer with the Collect of the Word appointed for today:

God of all power,
you called from death our Lord Jesus,
the great shepherd of the sheep;
send us as shepherds to rescue the lost,

to heal the injured,

and to feed one another with understanding;

through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord,

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever. Amen

 

Living in Community

Reflection at Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 14th April 2026

St Barnabas

‘Everything (the first Christian congregation in Jerusalem) owned was held in common’, we are told.

Does this mean that Christians today should practice some kind of primitive communism? I think not, because most Christians have never done so.

The first Christians in Jerusalem decided among themselves to live as a religious community, surrounding the apostles, and sharing all personal possessions. Their community must have been much like the monasteries that grew up in Ireland in the early days of the Irish church. Or much like the monasteries that developed in the high Middle Ages, following a ‘rule of life’ bound by vows of poverty, obedience and stability. Some few Christians today still decide to live together, sharing everything in community. While we may admire their lives of prayer and service, we are not all called to it.

In today’s reading (Acts 4:32-37), we heard the first mention of a Levite, Joseph, nicknamed Barnabas.

‘He sold a field that belonged to him, then brought the money, and laid it at the apostles’ feet’, we are told.

Later, the Christian community in Jerusalem sends Barnabas to oversee the growing church in Antioch. He seeks out St Paul to help him. After a year, the church in Antioch sends them back to Jerusalem with money for the relief of the poor Christians in Judea. Barnabas then travels with Paul on his first missionary journey. Together they visit the Jerusalem community again for discussions with the Christian community there, which we know as the Council of Jerusalem. The question they seek to answer is whether Gentiles who do not follow Jewish practices, such as circumcision, can be included in the church. The Council confirmed that Gentiles need not follow the Jewish law to be included, authorised Barnabas and Paul to continue their mission to Gentiles, and asked them to maintain contact with the Community at Jerusalem.

What a life Barnabas had, and how much we owe him! We celebrate him as a saint and example, a true hero of our faith! Sent out by the Community in Jerusalem, with Paul he founded churches across the Eastern Roman Empire. At first these were probably what we would call ‘house churches’, meeting to worship in each other’s homes, without holding possessions in common. They kept in touch with each other, and with the community in Jerusalem by exchanging letters in the hands of messengers.

We who are members of the Community of Brendan the Navigator are part of a dispersed religious community.

We are rooted in the Church of Ireland but with an ecumenical outlook. We welcome as members any who are interested in walking with us.

We do not ask members to live together or hold their personal possessions in common, but we do expect them to follow a simple rule of life: to be regular in prayer and contemplation, to support Community events, and to commit to a personal spiritual practice, which members must work out and apply for themselves.

Through the Community, we experience fellowship on our Christian life’s journey. We come together and walk together in the spirit of pilgrimage, sharing our personal faith and experience with others, and bringing back the gifts of faith we receive from them to our home places.

On Saturday this week the Community of Brendan will hold a 16km pilgrimage walk between the Cathedral of the Assumption in Carlow and St Lazerian’s Cathedral, Old Leighlin. I plan to attend a shortened walk of about 6km – my old legs would not carry me any further. I would be glad to give a lift to anyone who would like to join me.

 

We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses

Reflection at Compline in Killodiernan Church on the Wednesday in Holy Week, 1st April 2026

‘We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.’

So says the anonymous author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, in the reading (Hebrews 12:1-3). But who are these witnesses?

For the author of Hebrews, it was all the Hebrew patriarchs and prophets who held to their faith in Yahweh, the God of Israel, as the one true God. He gives a long list of them in the previous chapter. As Christians, we still hold them in honour today as our ancestors in faith.

But to them we add all the named Christian apostles, saints, and martyrs. They are examples to us of people who held firm in their faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and his teaching, despite every discouragement. They are heroes of our faith.

But our cloud of witnesses is even bigger than that. It includes all those Christians whose names we have never heard of, but who died in the faith of Christ. 

And it also includes all those, living or dead, who have formed our own faith. We remember them with gratitude for their examples – may their names be a blessing to us!

How wonderful it is to be surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses!

We are not alone on our personal journeys of faith. Others have gone before us. Let us take inspiration from them. As Hebrews urges us, let us ‘lay aside every weight’ that holds us back. Let us lay aside ‘the sin that clings so closely’ to us. And ‘Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us’, the race to the kingdom of God, our promised land.

And in this Holy Week, let us focus our minds on Jesus, ‘the pioneer and perfecter of our faith’.

He endured the pain of the cross, and the mocking of hostile crowds, ‘so that (we) may not grow weary or lose heart’, as the author of Hebrews puts it.

It is Jesus who has inspired the cloud of witnesses who in turn inspire us. Jesus showed them, as he shows us, the way to defeat evil, the Way of the cross. He also promises us forgiveness when we fall out of the race, as we surely shall sometimes. Though we fall all too often, when we seek God’s forgiveness, Jesus gives us the strength to pick ourselves up, and continue the race. With his help we will win the ultimate prize, we will abide with our triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit in his eternal kingdom.