All We Like Sheep

Scripture — Isaiah 53:4-6 (NRSV)

Surely he has borne our infirmities
and carried our diseases;

yet we accounted him stricken,
struck down by God, and afflicted.

But he was wounded for our transgressions,
crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
and by his bruises we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have all turned to our own way,

and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Devotion

Believe it or not, though I have written no fewer than 16 devotionals for Life for Leaders that in some way mention sheep (what can I say, sheep come up in the Bible a lot), this is the first time I’ve ever given one this title. (Even though one of those devotions, last fall, was about the very famous piece of music from George Frederick Handel’s Messiah that sets this very text!)

This Old Testament lesson is read on Good Friday because (as I said in my devotion last fall) Christians have traditionally identified this passage as a prophecy of what Christ would do for us. Only three verses long, it is richly descriptive and deeply heartrending. Some years as I contemplate it I am drawn to the description of the Suffering Servant bearing our griefs and carrying our sorrows when we cannot do this ourselves; some years I respond to the shocking and yet comforting line “upon him was the punishment that made us whole.” This year, for whatever reason, I am thinking about sheep.

I’m a city girl; I’ve never kept sheep. (My husband and I did briefly live on a homestead with goats and chickens and a Great Pyrenees and my in-laws, but that’s another story.) I’ve seen them at a distance many times, and I’ve heard many preachers tell me that sheep are stupid and easily led, but I’ve only actually experienced their stupidity once.

On our honeymoon (which my British husband and I spent in Scotland) we stopped by a ruined castle in the Shetland Islands which we wanted to tour. It is quite customary in remoter parts of the British Isles for keys to ruined castles simply to be kept at the closest shop, restaurant, or post office; you go there, ask for the key, tour to your heart’s delight, and then return the key. So my husband—who was, I might add, the only one who could drive the stick-shift rental car—left me in the parked car and went to seek out the guardian of the keys.

Left alone, in a car I could not drive, on a beautiful but desolate hill looking out over the harbor of Scalloway, I looked up and saw a herd of sheep approaching me. And then I saw a herd of sheep surrounding me. There was nothing possibly beneficial to them that they would find in a rental car on the side of the road—in fact, they were endangering themselves as much as they were endangering me—but there they were, head-butting and bleating and bumping into each other and completely preventing me from exiting the car to get help until—hallelujah, a word I do not use lightly on this day of all days—my husband reappeared and dispersed them with a cry, and the key.

The terror and the pain of Good Friday are often beyond our human comprehension. It is easy to mouth the words we know we are supposed to say about Jesus Christ saving us from our sins; it is hard to truly enter into what that meant, and means. Perhaps, when you hear these words today, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way,” you may find it helpful to think of a woman trapped on the side of a Shetland hill surrounded by very stupid sheep, so stupid they did not know that what they were doing was not going to do themselves, or anyone else, one blessed bit of good.

And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: Servant at Work (Isaiah 40ff.).