The Lord is my Shepherd, Psalm 23 says, but there are human shepherds, too. In the First Reading God thunders against the human shepherds who are failures at shepherding.
Who are these miserable shepherds, these failures, with whom God is so indignant?
Well, you can tell who they are by what God is angry at in them. They are the human beings who have not cared for the sheep, and those sheep are God’s people.
And what did they fail to do when they didn’t care for the sheep? They didn’t help the sheep get nurture; they drove the sheep away. They led the sheep in wrong directions. They scattered the sheep, so that instead of being one flock, the sheep were divided against each other into diverse small groups.
So think about it this way.
Surely no one of us is so benighted as to suppose that God’s thundering against miserable shepherds is meant only for priests who aren’t good enough. That thundering is a warning for each one of us. Every person has many of God’s children in his care. The woman who empties your trash at work, the child in the row behind you who kicks your seat, the annoying non-stop talker at your dinner table, your old and highly inadequate mother, your very imperfect spouse—each of these is one of God’s children, and each of them is in your care—a little or maybe even a lot.
All these are people that we ourselves shepherd—always with our Shepherd, whose grace we need to shepherd well. Let us be careful not to be miserable shepherds for him.
Art by Martin Erspamer, OSB
from Religious Clip Art for the Liturgical Year (A, B, and
C). This art may be reproduced only by parishes who purchase the
collection in book or CD-ROM form. For more information go http://www.ltp.org