The Duality of Lamb

understanding Psalm 23 by tending sheep

This article is part of the Claritas spring 2023 issue, Love. Read the full print release here.

By: Raena Prude

I. The Lord is My Shepherd 

A blood-soaked lamb drops out of its mother, onto the floor’s bedding. A labmate, Mia, picks him up to weigh and clean him. Then, suddenly, the mother flips out: she begins screaming, swinging her head, and running around in a manic frenzy, looking for her lamb. In a futile attempt to calm her, we hold up the lamb so she can see him and use him as bait—for lack of a better word—to draw her into a separate pen, where she can nurse and learn to bond with her offspring. Slowly, with lamb in hand, Mia retreats into an empty sty. But this proves unsuccessful; the ewe refuses to give the lamb more than a passing glance. We then have to chase her, until one of the TAs is able to wrangle her and force her into the pen. She remains irate for 10 minutes, before finally noticing the lamb sitting at her feet.

We were in the midst of our so-called “lambing” shift for a sheep rearing class, during which we monitored pregnant ewes and the development of newborn lambs. We had arrived at 11:00 pm, and just an hour later, my lab group and I were exhausted and desperately wanting to go home. None of us felt particularly loving or shepherdly that night. 

This unnecessary battle made us tired and upset. None of us could wrap our heads around how a sheep could be so dense, so stubborn. Perhaps if the sheep trusted us and recognized that we were caring for her son, we wouldn’t have had this mess. Her lamb wouldn’t have been so stressed out from the chaos, and we could’ve gone home.

But there was work to be done—and we had been delegated this small portion of creation to care for and maintain. God made us so that we “may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all creatures that move along the ground”.  [1] 

Just as the Lord is my shepherd, I am His subsidiary shepherd, responsible for tending some small parcel of His creation. 

II. I Shall Not Want

Through this class, I began to understand this universal calling: to steward God’s creation. Okay, that’s wonderful. But what happens when God’s creation doesn’t want to be stewarded? What do we do when sheep panic, bleat, and rebel? Moreover, why do sheep panic, bleat, and rebel?

Why, when you rescue a sheep who got his head stuck in a fence while reaching for food, will he immediately get it stuck again in the exact same position? And why do all sheep do this?

In short, it’s because they feel little connection with us, their shepherds. They fail to realize that we can empathize with them. They act according to their will because they do not trust the will of their shepherd. Sheep act as though the relationship is parasocial—as though we are pure persona, incapable of interest, emotion, and love.

But they’re wrong, aren’t they? We can relate to them, and we do empathize with them. We too, as a consequence of our faithlessness, suffer from the need to be in control of our own lives. And yet we can relate to their grievances, for we too can often feel alienated from our Shepherd.

Just like our sheep, we also get our heads “stuck in the fence” trying to achieve what God has specifically kept us from. Often, we try to reach through doors God has closed for us: doors to relationships, careers, internships, or ungodly desires. We reach for sins and temptations that God has explicitly, Biblically, told us to stay away from. And when we get ourselves entangled in our sin, God rescues us. Just for us to immediately fall back into it. 

In short, we do this because we often lack our own faith in God, and feel little connection to Him. We can easily forget that God can relate to and empathize with us. It’s almost as if our relationship with God, just like sheep’s relationships with us, in our eyes, is parasocial. God is unattainable and separate from us, and doesn’t care to know us on a personal level, but we know He is divine. Unlike us, God is a pure persona. But He is not uninterested in us, and He loves us.

And we are wrong. Jesus, while being pure, could relate to us and proved it to us when He was Man. He faced temptation in the wilderness. He also felt brief agony and separation from God, as He prayed in the garden for His cup (command to be crucified) to be removed from Him, and cried out, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” [2]. The pain we sometimes feel that we believe God couldn’t possibly understand or care about, has been felt by Him. As C.S. Lewis puts it, “The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.” 

This is the reason why the Bible compares us to sheep so often, consider the infamous “The Lord is my Shepherd” psalm [2]. It’s to illustrate this point. And as Jesus is both Shepherd and Lamb, so are we both shepherd and sheep.

And Jesus, having understood us, is the perfect Shepherd. As we guide our sheep, He guides us. And just as disobedient sheep want what they want, and must be guided away from being led astray by them, we want what we want and require this same type of guidance. But if our sheep trust us, they’ll understand we can give them what they need so they won’t feel the need to chase their wants. The same applies to us.

All we like sheep have gone astray; We have turned, every one, to his own way — Isaiah 53:6

III. Green Pastures, Still Waters

Sheep typically don’t know what’s best for themselves. They were among the first animals to be domesticated, and are now almost wholly dependent on human care. As humans, we know what’s best for them, and we steward them. As people, we don’t know what’s best for ourselves. We were made in the image of God, to be His children. We were not designed to be apart from Him, and are wholly dependent on His care. Consequently, God knows what’s best for us, and thus, He stewards us.

But, like sheep, we don’t like to be stewarded. Sometimes we’re too busy screaming, swinging our head around, and running in a manic frenzy to stop and see that God does care about us. We may be literally chased down by wisdom and pay no heed to it. 

When we have to wrangle a sheep so she’ll calm down and notice her child, or yank on a lamb’s head to get out of a fence, we don’t enjoy it at all. We know it’s making the sheep uncomfortable, and ultimately it’s not what we want to do. But it becomes inevitable after they’ve gotten themselves into a precarious situation.

The mother ewe had just given birth. Her panic and frantic running could put a strain on her body, especially as she hadn’t even finished all the stages of birth. Because we had to chase her with her lamb, her freezing cold newborn lamb was stressed. Had  she trusted us, everything would be fine, but instead everyone was at risk and she and her lamb faced harm –and this required us to hold her down and wrangle her into her pen. We love our sheep and we don’t want to see them hurt. 

But being wrangled or twisted and pulled can be painful and uncomfortable. And for a sheep that has no idea of the danger that it’s being protected from, perhaps it thinks we don’t love it.  But we do. 

Likewise, Sometimes God has to wrangle us to make us lie down in the green pastures He illustrates for us in Psalms 32. Sometimes we face discipline, we don’t get what we want, we receive consequences for the sins we’ve chased. And it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by this pain and forget that God loves us. That the pain we feel is the result of our screaming, our running around, our reaching for our temptations. But it’s God freeing us from the fence, holding us down so we can finally get wisdom. Because He doesn’t want us to be lost to our temptation, our sin. He loves us. 

IV. Paths of Righteousness

The LORD God then took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it. — Genesis 2:15

My heart beat when I first saw the mother ewe break out into her frantic run. And the fact that we had to use force to stop her was heartbreaking. I don’t want to see her, any of them, hurt.

This provided me, not even a full glimpse, a taste, of what God may feel when I disobey. Fatigued, frustrated, and pained. I loved my sheep with every fiber of my being. I would think of them all the time, I loved to see them happy, I would cut time out of my day just to spend time with them. If this is a fraction of the love God feels for me… what am I doing?

The disappointment I felt every time a sheep disobeyed is a shadow of the disappointment God feels when we disobey. And the joy I feel when the sheep obey is merely a flicker of the joy God feels when I obey Him. And how incredible  is that? 

God puts us in these situations of stewardship to illustrate this for us, so we can understand Him, and understand how He–as once being a Sheep too–understands us.  This is an ultimate form of love. 

This article appeared in Claritas’ spring 2023 Love Issue

Sources

[1] Genesis 1:26

[2] Psalms 23

[3] Matthew 27:46