SERMON V. CHRIST’S SHEEP

Mark vi. 34.  And Jesus, when he came out, saw much people, and was moved with compassion toward them, because they were as sheep not having a shepherd:  and he began to teach them many things.

This is a text full of comfort, if we will but remember one thing:  that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; and, therefore, what he did when he was upon earth, he is doing now, and will do till the end of the world.  If we will believe this, and look at our Lord’s doings upon earth as patterns and specimens, as it were, of his eternal life and character, then every verse in the gospels will teach us something, and be precious to us.

The people came to hear Jesus in a desert place; a wild forest country, among the hills on the east side of the Lake of Gennesaret.  ’And Jesus, when he came out, saw much people, and was moved with compassion toward them, because they were as sheep having no shepherd:  and he taught them many things.’

And, what kind of people were these, who so moved our Lord’s pity?  The text tells us, that they were like sheep.  Now, in what way were they like sheep?

A sheep is simple, and harmless, and tractable, and so, I suppose, were these people.  They may not have been very clever and shrewd; not good scholars.  No doubt they were a poor, wild, ignorant, set of people; but they were tractable; they were willing to come and learn; they felt their own ignorance, and wanted to be taught.  They were not proud and self-sufficient, not fierce or bloodthirsty.  The text does not say that they were like wild beasts having no keeper:  but like sheep having no shepherd.  And therefore Christ pitied them, because they were teachable, willing to be taught, and worth teaching; and yet had no one to teach them.

The Scribes and Pharisees, it seems, taught them nothing.  They may have taught the people in Jerusalem, and in the great towns, something:  but they seem, from all the gospels, to have cared little or nothing for the poor folk out in the wild mountain country.  They liked to live in pride and comfort in the towns, with their comfortable congregations round them, admiring them; but they had no fancy to go out into the deserts, to seek and to save those who were lost.  They were bad shepherds, greedy shepherds, who were glad enough to shear God’s flock, and keep the wool themselves:  but they did not care to feed the flock of God.  It was too much trouble; and they could get no honour and no money by it.  And most likely they did not understand these poor people; could not speak, hardly understand, their country language; for these Galileans spoke a rough dialect, different from that of the upper classes.

So the Scribes and Pharisees looked down on them as a bad, wild, low set of people, with whom nothing could be done; and said, ’This people who knoweth not the law, is accursed.’