Pioneers and Settlers

Long before the chosen people settled as farmers, they had wandered from place-to-place living in tents and leading their animals from one pastureland to another. At the time of Christ, the shepherd was still an important worker, but he was not looked on with great confidence. The old rivalry between the nomads roaming with their flocks and the settled tillers of the soil was still alive. Shepherds were regarded as an unhappy mixture of gypsy and roaming thief, not least because their flocks sometimes ate their way through private property! Because of the roving nature of their job, they could not honor the demands of the ceremonial law and so were regarded as religious outcasts; and because they were seen as untrustworthy, they were disqualified from appearing as legal witnesses.

The popular, romantic image of the shepherd that many of us have is a world away from the reality. It does not include living on the fringes of civilization, the harshness and danger of the wilds, the smell of the unwashed, the large loneliness, and the sheer difference of a life which communed more with sheep than with people. The shepherd had a place in the folklore of the Israelite people, but he had no place of importance in their society at the time of Jesus. Shepherds, donkey-drivers, and peddlers were all at the bottom of the social scale.

So, when Jesus speaks of himself as the shepherd, he is clearly allying himself with the vagabonds of society. Elsewhere he says: ‘’Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head’’ (Matthew 8:20). He is the wandering prophet who has been rejected by his own settlement in Nazareth. He keeps moving, always having another address in mind, and he shakes a lot of dust from his feet. He never lingers on even when the people’s hospitality is generous. He will not be tied down - except when he is taken to Calvary. He is a pioneer rather than a settler. 

As the shepherd he is always going ahead of his flock seeking out new pastures. He takes on the risks and dangers of the calling, knowing that there will be a few wolves on the uplands with marvelous woolen outfits and make-up to outsmart anyone but a shepherd with an acute sense of smell - especially for the phony. The authority figure, all of whom are settlers, regard him with undisguised hatred. They will eventually ensure, just as at the beginning, that he is taken into the killing fields and murdered. They will tie him down at last. But he does not settle into death, and the tomb is a temporary stop. Clearly, you cannot keep a pioneer down! 

When you think about yourself, do you see yourself as a pioneer or a settler? Is the Church made up of both kinds of people? Like St Paul, who was a tentmaker and who was good at moving on, as we hear in today’s first reading, do we need more pioneers in the Church? Every community needs both kinds: people who call the community away from stagnation, and people who build up the community. Every person here has a vocation to do one or the other. Let us pray for each other’s vocation.