4th Sunday of Easter 2026
Acts 2:14, 36-41; 1 Peter 2:20-25; John 10:1-10
Gervase Phinn, the teacher and school Inspector turned author, tells a cautionary tale about a young teacher arriving in a rural primary school. Anxious to impress with some visual teaching, the young man shows his class picture of a sheep.
“What’s that?” he asks. One lad puts his hand up. “Well” he replies, “It looks a bit like a Herdwick, but the face is the wrong shape”. The moral of that story is “Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs” or, to be more precise, “Don’t talk about things your audience understands better than you”.
I spent eight and a half years in a rural parish, and was careful not to claim any imaginary knowledge about farming. After Mass on my first Easter Sunday in the parish, I discovered that even a lamb may have more wisdom than I do. I was speaking to parishioners outside church when I spotted a lamb which had escaped from a field directly across the road, but was now bleating plaintively as it sought a way back.
Springing into action, a non-farming parishioner and I took our places on either side of the refugee, with a view to closing in and coaxing it back through the gap in the fence. Immediately, it set off at a great rate of knots, sped through my legs, and hurtled along the grass verge before slipping back through a different gap altogether, and trotting back to its mother, looking back at us with a self-satisfied smirk. I cannot assert positively that it winked, but I wouldn’t have been surprised.
My other close encounters with sheep have been on the fells. Both in the Lake District and in Derbyshire, I have accompanied groups of schoolchildren. When the latter have sat down to eat their sandwiches, they have been ambushed by sheep which have clambered over them in an attempt to snatch the aforementioned butties from their hands. You can’t even rely on sheep to be timid.
Jesus, on the other hand, had as much experience of sheep as did His hearers. Although His own trade was carpentry, He would probably have mucked in with the rest of the village when the local farmers needed a hand. His disciples and potential disciples would also have been familiar with talk about sheep and shepherds.
They would have recognised the need, in the countryside of Palestine, for sheep to be protected from both wild animals and rustlers. Seemingly, in that time and place, a shepherd would lie down across the entrance to the sheepfold to form a door, deterring both human and animal predators—or, if not, sacrificing his life in his attempt to save the sheep.
Pope Francis used to stress the need for present day pastors of Christ’s human flock—the Church—to “live with smell of the sheep”. Conversely, it seems from the parable of the shepherd as the door of the sheepfold, that the sheep live with the smell of the shepherd. Whilst the wolf is warned off by the human scent, the sheep, being familiar with it, “go in and out and find pasture”, hopping comfortably in and out over the prone body of the shepherd.
Familiarity between sheep and shepherd is paramount. The sheep recognise the shepherd’s voice: the shepherd knows every sheep by name. What are the implications for us? All of us are sheep of the Lord’s flock: how well do we know the shepherd? Do we recognise Him from time spent in prayer, and therefore do we find Him in the events of our lives? In our prayer, do we leave time and space for Him to speak to us, or is our prayer a monologue, blocking out the voice of the Good Shepherd? In particular, are priests, whom we might designate as deputy shepherds, on close speaking terms with the Good Shepherd, Jesus the Lord?
Speaking of familiarity, in that rural parish which I mentioned, there was a lovely elderly lady who was a powerhouse of prayer. One day, during the Forty Hours devotion, she told me a story.
“Helen and I came into church,” she said, “and Helen stumbled and hit her face on the bench. I said to Jesus ‘You’re naughty. We come to pray, and you let that happen to Helen’”. I half expected her to say “If it happens again, I’ll tell your Mother”.
One last point. It is more difficult now for priests, with larger areas to cover, to know all the sheep by name, but we must be familiar with as many as possible, and always available to all. There is no excuse for lording it over people. That is not the way of the Good Shepherd: it must not be our way either.
