Sunday, 4/21/13
In the Gospel Jesus
said he knows his sheep, and they follow him. In Our Lord’s time every family had a
few sheep, so the relationship between sheep and their shepherds was a familiar
matter for Jesus to use for giving examples about healthy religious life. With
us. however, keeping sheep isn’t that common, it might even be against the law.
So let me recreate what I take to have been the sheep keeping business back
then.
For their wool and
their meat, every family kept up to a dozen sheep, and they were usually
entrusted to a boy in the family who grew up with the family’s little flock.
Every day the little shepherd, with no schools back then, took his (or her)
sheep off to the hills to fatten up on grass.
For safe keeping at
night, each little flock was brought to a common enclosure called a sheepfold.
It would be a stonewall enclosure with briars along its rim, and with just one
gate.
A cute thing came in
the morning when the shepherds would come individually to call their sheep to
wake and follow them. I say it was
cute, because surprisingly, with a dozen or more little flocks sleeping in the
sheepfold, when a shepherd made the sound familiar to his sheep, and only to his
sheep; they would hop up and follow him, leaving the other little flocks
sleeping.
Monsignor Logan in
our diocese kept sheep in Ireland where he moved them by flipping a switch
behind them, urging them on. He hadn’t believed the Gospel stories about the
sheep meekly following their shepherd’s voice. But, on going to the Holy Land
he checked on it, and found it to be true. The sheep followed their shepherd’
voice, and no other.
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