Like sheep without a shepherd . . .

Matthew 9:35-38

And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

A. Orendorff

Proclaiming and healing. Healing and proclaiming. Often in ministry, the two are treated separately and relegated to different spheres of the church’s work. In Jesus, they are indivisible. Moreover, both, we are told, flow from the compassionate heart of a Shepherd who saw the “crowds”—that raw, unkempt mob of humanity who would soon cry out, “Crucify, crucify”—as “sheep without a shepherd: harassed and helpless.”

It is much easier to treat people with justice than to treat them with compassion. Justice means you get what you deserve. Justice is easy, clean, manageable and safe. It insulates us from the harrowing possibility that someone might get one over on us, might take advantage of us, might trick us or possibly even hurt us. Yet that’s what it means to shepherd, and that (thank God) is what Jesus not only calls us as his followers to do, but what he himself did on our behalf.

“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:6).