Sheep are popularly imagined to be dumb creatures, easily led, easily picked off one by one by predators because (it is wrongly thought) they scatter in all directions at any alarm. The image isn’t helped by Monty Python skits like this: (You will carry on reading after the clip, won’t you?) Of course, this picture of a solitary, scattered, sheep is what Christians fasten on to. Like today’s Psalm 23, The Lord is *my* Shepherd. Or Luke 17, we cast ourselves as the lone lost sheep, sought out at great cost by the Great Shepherd. And yes, praise God, it has been a most wonderfully comforting picture, held in front of countless believers as they navigate their own Valley of the Shadow of Death. We have a unique, personal relationship with the Shepherd. If we consider at all that sheep are in a communal flock, the Shepherd cares for the whole fold, it is only in the context of all going astray. But it turns out that sheep aren’t that stupid after all. It’s not only “'Arold, that m
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