As we gather to read the word this morning, there is o­ne thing that is inescapable ? it is all about sheep. Sheep and shepherds everywhere.
Whether it is the lamb that was slain in the reading from revelation, or the sheep of his flock in the psalm or that the Lord is my shepherd, or that Jesus wanted people to belong to his sheep ? there is no avoiding them. There are sheep running about in almost all of our readings this morning, and in some of the things that we are singing.

That is what we get on this Sunday ? halfway through the Easter season, the Lectionary compilers give us, every year, lots of sheep. So much so that some people are starting to call this Shepherd Sunday or Sheep Sunday.

Sometimes it seems as though the whole of the bible is full of them. It tells us quite a lot about what life was like and how important sheep were. It was the shepherds on the hills of Bethlehem who were the first to visit Jesus as a child in the manger and it was as the lamb of God that he died. Between the two, Jesus himself often seemed to relate his own mission to this agricultural life which was so common in his days.

We begin though with one of the Easter stories which we have read today which doesn?t seem to have a sheep in it, but a moment?s reflection will enable us to see why we are reading it today.

This morning, we read the story of Tabitha in Acts. She was devoted to good works. She made things for the widows. She looked after them in a culture where no-one would care for them once they had lost their man. When these women had no-one else, Tabitha was the one who was devoted to helping them. Then she died and there was no-one.

Well, I have a theory about Tabitha. You see, in a way, Tabitha was like a shepherd to these women. Looking after them and caring for them. The raising of Tabitha is the story of the raising of a shepherd who was herself restored to her flock. And if I think carefully, I can think of women that I know who act in the same gentle shepherding way.

This image of sheep and shepherd is incredibly powerful. It seems to affect many of us emotionally. When we think of God caring for us in this way ? protecting, feeding, nourishing, healing, seeking us our. There is something about that vision of God which most people find comforting. It is the kind of God that we want to know.

It is worth pausing for a moment though to reflect that Jesus was probably not talking religion as he walked in the Temple, but politics. He was there on the Feast of Dedication ? what would be called Hannukah today. Then it was a relatively new festival, celebrating the restoration of the Temple less than 200 years before by a dedicated band of loyalists. It was they who rescued the Jewish nation of the time from false shepherds. When the angry young men come up to Jesus outside the temple and ask him if he is the Messiah, they do so with some urgency. They don?t want talk of sheep. They are looking for talk of war. They don?t want to know about shepherding. They want things in Jerusalem put right, and put right by force. They want a new Messiah to set free the very Temple in whose shadow they walk.

They don?t want an agricultural labourer ? they want a fighter. A leader. A revolutionary.

And they say to him ? are you the one?

And he talks of sheep.

He will have nothing of the war that they want him to fight. They come to him with the politics of war. His business is in caring for his sheep. Tending his flock. Feeding the lambs. That?s what his politics were, after all.

The idea of the Jesus as a Good Shepherd is one that seems still to have some currency outside the church. It is an image which the church has preached through the centuries and one which I think that still tugs at the heart strings.

I may have told you before of a time when I remember meeting an actual shepherd. I had gone to the first seminar of a course in the University of Edinburgh. And everyone who was there was training to be a minister or priest of some sort. And we were asked to introduce ourselves. And someone had been in the police and someone else had been a civil servant. And so we went round the table until we came to a woman who said ?Well, I was a shepherd.? And there was a moments silence around the table as though she had said something incredibly significant. And then someone said ?How lovely? and she said ?Well, it was a tough life?.

I wonder what kind of shepherd Jesus really intended us to think of him as. Was he someone lovely to be depicted in stained glass with a lamb about his shoulders or was he someone who would have said, ?well, it was a tough life?.

It was a tough life too and a tough death. For Christ was the good shepherd who loved his sheep to death. Even death on a cross and became, not shepherd but the Lamb himself. The lamb that was slain. Sharing the fate of his own flock.

It is that image, of the lamb that was slain which is so powerfully depicted in the book of revelation which we read from.
The lamb that was slain who was surrounded by creatures singing ?Blessing and Glory and Wisdom and Thanksgiving and Honour and Power be to our God for ever and ever Amen.

It is a part of the divine counter-culture ? God?s own way of looking at things. The slain lamb becomes the shepherd of Israel ?(or is it the other way round, we are never quite sure). Nothing in God?s world is quite as it seems to be.

Jesus is the shepherd who knew what it was to be a lamb which was killed. Tough life, a tough death.

In fact – tough love.

Amen

Today, we celebrate a Feast Day. Today we remember one of the younger followers of the Lord. One of the witnesses of the first days of the church. Someone who himself wrote down stories and sayings and passed them on to us so that we could find faith in the risen Lord.

Today is St Mark?s Day ? the day we remember in particular, with affection and in celebration, the writer of the third gospel, whose own words were the words that I have just been reading to you.

Mark?s Gospel is now almost universally agreed to be the first of the Gospel?s to have been written down. On this, his Feast Day, it is perhaps worth thinking for a minute or two about the process of writing a gospel. What is it? What was it? Was Mark inventing a new genre or writing something that would be immediately understood at the time.

I was struck this week by someone writing on the BBC Religion and Ethics website about seeing Jesus through Jewish Eyes. It is worth listening to (and looking up too)?

I could see, even at 17, what Matthew was doing. He was proving that all the prophecies relating to the Messiah were manifest in Jesus. Virgin birth? Tick. White donkey? Tick. Hanged on a tree? Tick. But I’d never been taught as a Jew to pay much attention to these details of messianic credential. How will we know the Messiah? Easy. The world will be at peace. Cross.
I could see Luke floundering in Jewish preoccupations he couldn’t fathom. What were they all squabbling about? But with Mark and John, I felt more home.

The world Mark describes sounds not dissimilar from the world I know from the Talmud and the Midrash, those compendia of rabbinic debate, quoting about 1000 rabbis, spanning nearly a 1000 years.

I recognised the pleasure in argument and verbal honing, the clever use of proof-texts, the camaraderie and generosity underlying disagreements, as the rabbis call them, for the sake of Heaven. I couldn’t detect anything much Jesus says in the Gospel of Mark which couldn?t also be found in the mouth of some rabbi – I want to say, some other Rabbi – in these great treasure stores of the Jewish relationship with revelation.

Rather interesting, I think. (I?ll post a link on my blog for anyone who is interested in this to follow up).

Mark is writing then as a Jewish believer. A young believer too, according to the gospels themselves. Someone whose whole family seem to have got mixed up in this Jesus business, both before and after the resurrection.

When Mark writes to us, he writes in poor Greek. His text is stuttering and jagged. His storytelling is urgent and his language rather common. This is the language of the street (or perhaps more accurately that of the fishing-boat) not the kind of language that people use in synagogue or temple. Awkward Greek. Strange turns of phrase. Muddles participles. Yet urgent ? telling the tales with no additions, little comment, telling the story just like it is.

There is a tradition, worth recounting here that Mark was the one who brought Peter?s experiences to the world. Strange, isn?t it that Peter, who was to build the church left us no gospel. Paul had his letters in which he tells of his encounters with the Risen Lord, but Peter leaves us nothing quite like that. The theory is, that Mark was Peter?s amanuensis ? the one that Peter told his story to. The one, in short, who took down dictation.

If so, what we are hearing is not just the words of Mark, but the rushed recollections of Peter, who had seen it all for himself.

Mark was one of the first to spread the gospel abroad from Jerusalem. He ended up in Egypt ? Alexandria to be precise and was martyred for his faith on Easter Day, in the year AD 68.

He is the Patron Saint of Egypt and I remember well being there on his Feast day a couple of years ago. Indeed, I visited the place where some of his relics now lie in Cairo. And there everyday there are people who pray. People who keep vigil. People for whom Mark is very present and who still teaches them to walk gently with God.

I have been there. I have seen this. I am a witness to this.

I had to make a witness statement before a lawyer this week, in connection with the Park of Keir Inquiry which is coming up. I don?t know whether you have ever had to give evidence or appear as a witness. It is harder than you think. To present in a clear way the evidence that you need to get over is not as simple as it sounds ? I found myself working quite hard to present my evidence in 2000 words.

Mark?s gospel is a witness statement ? either his own or filled in with Peter?s memories too, – a witness statement about the one whom we remember at this time of year as the risen one. The one who came and changed everyone he met and changed everything about the world by his life and death and resurrection.

During this Eastertide, we salute Mark and Peter and the other apostles. They were there. They saw these things. They were witnesses.

So then, we now give thanks for St Mark and for his gospel and for all that is teaches us about the risen Lord.

Alleluia.