Pentecost 3A: The Sheep Are Not the Problem

Rev’d Deb Bird

In recent years, much good work has been done to challenge victim-blaming around sexual violence. For too long, victim-survivors were plagued with questions like: What were you wearing? Why were you there? Why didn’t you leave? Why didn’t you report it sooner? Such questions implied that the burden belonged to the victim: that they should have anticipated violence, managed another person’s behaviour, and carried responsibility for someone else’s misuse of power.

Thankfully, trauma-informed advocacy has helped us ask better questions: What happened to you? Who used power wrongly? Who failed to protect you? What systems made it harder for you to be heard? Those questions do not solve everything, but they have rightly shifted us from blame toward protection, from shame toward repair, and toward an understanding that the problem was never the victim. The problem was societal failure to address the conditions that made such harm prevalent in the first place.

Similar assumptions were at work in the first century. If your life had gone badly, you might be told you had deserved it. If you were sick, poor, disabled, widowed, unclean, or desperate, perhaps God was displeased with you. Meanwhile, those who benefited from the hierarchy of men over women, rich over poor, empire over occupied people could make their privilege look like divine order.

But it does not take many encounters with real people in real lives to recognise when a worldview only benefits some, and in others, diminishes human dignity. The author of Matthew tells us that as Jesus moves through “all the cities and villages” he sees crowds who are “harassed and helpless.”

If we were encountering people living in a class based society under foreign occupation today I imagine we might have to use more trauma-informed language: we might describe them as dislocated, carrying grief in their bodies, blamed for circumstances they did not create, and trying to survive without enough resources, care, or hope of justice.

Jesus offers a diagnosis: they are like sheep without a shepherd. Someone should have been watching, guiding, feeding, protecting them. Someone should have made sure the weak were not trampled, the wounded not abandoned, and the lost not left to become the prey of oppressive social systems and empires.

In other words, the problem is not the sheep. The sheep are not lazy or morally inferior. When Jesus looks at the crowd, he does not ask, What is wrong with these people? He asks, Who has left them like this? And what must be done for this situation to be transformed?

Long before Jesus, Israel’s prophets had been asking those same questions. Prophets such as Ezekiel and Jeremiah challenged kings, priests, judges, landowners, and public authorities who had failed in their duty of care. In the biblical imagination, duty of care is not merely governance language; it is covenantal faithfulness, because a person’s love of God is measured by the safety, dignity, and nurturing of the neighbour placed within their care.

What happens then when profit matters more than people? Productivity more than safety? Reputation more than truth? Policy popularity more than human dignity? Again and again, human bodies pay the price.

Leaders fail when they do not strengthen the weak, heal the sick, bind up the injured, bring back the strays, or seek the lost - the sheep are scattered and become prey. When Jesus sees that the people around him are in this state, he recognises that failed shepherding has left them exposed to poverty, manipulation, and corruption.

We can see something similar in today’s cost-of-living and housing crisis. There are plenty of careful, hardworking people who are only one rent rise, one illness, one job loss, or one unexpected bill away from disaster. Not because they are lazy sheep, but are the result of years of unregulated and compounded pressures: insecure work and the rise of gig economy, rising rents, too little social and affordable housing, housing treated an investment vehicle rather than a human need, and the long tail of inflation in the wake of COVID. Again, human bodies pay the price.

And yes, good people step into the gaps. Micah Projects and homeless services, parish food pantries, neighbourhood centres, and quiet acts of generosity keep many people going. This is holy work, but charity alone is no substitute for good shepherding. Hunger relief is absolutely necessary, but it is not food security. Emergency accommodation is vital, but it is not a home. Temporary relief from fuel prices is very good, but it is not a society ordered so families can live with stability, dignity, and hope.

We all know poor leadership protects its privilege. Good leadership listens, acts fairly, and shares power. But Christlike leadership goes further. It moves intentionally into places where people have been abandoned: to restore what has been broken, renew what has been depleted, and defend the integrity of life from housing to migration, from aged care to disability, from climate integrity to war, and the public language we use in public.

When Jesus sends the twelve, he gives them authority not to offer charity, but to mend and transform. The socially excluded leper is healed so they can belong to the community again. The demonised person is freed from torment so they can have meaningful relationships. The sick person is restored so they can regain strength, dignity, and support their household. Jesus sends the twelve to make damaged places habitable again.

Throughout history the church has been at its most faithful in the gaps between propaganda and the suffering it hides. At our best, Christians have stepped into those gaps in places needing hospitals, schools, refuges, orphanages, hospices, advocacy movements, and communities of care - because the healing ministry of Jesus has always pressed beyond compassionate feelings into embodied repair.

We still participate in that reparative witness: in prison chaplaincy and hospital visiting, aged care and disability advocacy, communities that welcome refugees, shelter the vulnerable, and insist forgotten people are not disposable.

We see it among us in prophets like Aunty Jean, whose lifelong Aboriginal Christian witness has held together a faithful love for the church, even as she had difficult stories for this church to hear. Her work reminds us that Christian reconciliation is not a soft word for avoiding pain, but a necessary refusal to leave a gap between truth and the life-restoring Gospel Jesus preached.

The point of the prophetic tradition is not to make heroes. It is to train us ordinary people like us to see the person rather than the problem, to treat the wound beneath the behaviour we do not understand, and hear the whole story rather than the stereotype. It is to ask questions that inform - and help us to transform - rather than interrogate.

The sheep have never been the problem. The scandal is not that the wounded need our care; the scandal is that so many shepherds have learned to view their wounds as inevitable.

So let us ask the Lord of the harvest to send out more labourers. God knows this world needs them. But we must not be surprised when the labourers God sends are us.