By Malcolm Muggeridge
‘Feed My Sheep’ An advantage of being, as I am, only a belated reader of the New Testament, is that one often finds a freshness of enchantment in sentences and phrases which, I imagine, come to seem commonplace to more erudite and systematic readers.
This is what happened with the three words, ‘Feed my sheep’. I found myself saying them over and over with a sense of great joyfulness, as though they were the key to some special revelation. One of those crystallizations of meaning which mystics and poets fashion for us.
They occur, of course, in a rather curious thrice-repeated exchange between Peter and the risen Christ, in which, having asked Peter three times if he loved him, and being assured each time that he did, Jesus added, first, ‘Feed my lambs,’ and then, the other two times, ‘Feed my sheep.’ It irresistibly recalls that three-fold denial of his Master of which poor Peter has been guilty shortly before – something I can never recall without an agonizing pang at having likewise offended, not just once on a dramatic occasion, but again and again.
A shepherd and his flock provided Jesus with one of his favourite images. Even today in the Holy Land one can easily see why. The shepherd tending his sheep, finding them shade and water, seeing that none stray too far away, picking up in his arms one who may be lame or too small to keep up with the others, is still a familiar sight. It perfectly demonstrates in simply earthly terms Jesus’ purpose in coming among us; he was the Good Shepherd, and so he has been known through the centuries. I find it rather sad to reflect that this imagery is soon to become obsolete and incomprehensible in our technological world, if it hasn’t become so already.
One can scarcely look for the Good Shepherd in factory farms, where animals are accorded just enough statutory room to stand up in; where they never see the light of the sun, or the green of the grass, or the blue of the sky. Still less in the manufacture of our food requirements from petroleum products and other such unappetizing substances. Who, I wonder, will be able to detect the image of a Saviour in the man with the hormone- injector, whose ministrations are liable to transform our domestic animals into weird, unseemly, top-heavy creatures, mercifully hidden from view?
Surely, the first necessity we are under is to respect life; every aspect of it. Not just those of our fellow men who are dear and familiar to us, our families and friends. Nor even just our fellow humans who share the same essential experience of living. All and every manifestation of life; the croak of a frog, the contour of a hill, even the very particles of desert dust and the obscure flowering of hidden verges. All that lives and is on our small earth and in the illimitable universe.
So ‘Feed my sheep’ applies to the whole flock, black, white and piebald. There are no exceptions. If we fail in according this respect to life as such, if in our insensate greed we wreck and impoverish and poison our human habitation, then we may be sure that in the long run we shall wreck and impoverish and poison ourselves.
We live in a society which can produce in more or less unlimited quantities everything, and more than everything, we can possibly want to feed and clothe and divert ourselves. From turbines to potato crisps, from giant airliners to birth pills – everything. The problem with us is not food supplies, but appetite. How to induce us to eat when we’re not hungry, to discard what is not worn out, to indulge every whim and fancy that vanity and the senses can be lured into entertaining. So appeals to cupidity, appeals to sensuality, appeals to morbidity, all on behalf of the great Moloch – Consumption.
The same message spelt out in neon lights, printed in words, embellished in colour, yelled in discotheques, whispered by crooners, related to the built-in urges of our way of life -money, sex and violence. An enormous flourishing industry, designed to ensure that greed never flags, sensuality never abates; that our heart’s desire is caught for ever in traps that are fastened to the earth and baited with flesh. Then the other side of the picture.
Calcutta in the early morning; the streets strewn with the sleeping destitute and homeless, the garbage piled high and a few early risers poking about in it for something edible. A macabre fantasy, a tiny corner of a vast and mounting tragedy involving the greater part of the human race…
— from Time and Eternity
