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GOD OUR SHEPHERD
The twenty-third Psalm seems to break in two at the end of the fourth verse. The first four verses clearly reflect a pastoral scene; the fifth appears to carry us off, without warning, to very different associations. This, however, is only in appearance. The last two verses are as pastoral as the first four. If these show us the shepherd with his sheep upon the pasture, those follow him, shepherd still, to where in his tent he dispenses the desert's hospitality to some poor fugitive from blood. The Psalm is thus a unity, even of metaphor. We shall see afterwards that it is also a spiritual unity; but at present let us summon up the landscape on which both of these features--the shepherd on his pasture and the shepherd in his tent--lie side by side, equal sacraments of the grace and shelter of our God.
On such a wilderness, it is evident that the person and character of the shepherd must mean a great deal more to the sheep than they can possibly mean in this country. With us, sheep left to themselves may be seen any day--in a field or on a hill-side with a far-travelling fence to keep them from straying. But I do not remember ever to have seen in the East a flock of sheep without a shepherd.
On such a landscape as I have described he is obviously indispensable. When you meet him there, 'alone of all his reasoning kind,' armed, weather-beaten, and looking out with eyes of care upon his scattered flock, their sole provision and defence, your heart leaps up to ask: Is there in all the world so dear a sacrament of life and peace as he?
There is, and very near himself. As prominent a feature in the wilderness as the shepherd is the shepherd's tent. To Western eyes a cluster of desert homes looks ugly enough--brown and black lumps, often cast down anyhow, with a few loutish men lolling on the trampled sand in front of the low doorways, that a man has to stoop uncomfortably to enter. But conceive coming to these a man who is fugitive--fugitive across such a wilderness. Conceive a man fleeing for his life as Sisera fled when he sought the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite. To him that space of trampled sand, with the ragged black mouths above it, mean not only food and rest, but dear life itself. There, by the golden law of the desert's hospitality, he knows that he may eat in peace, that though his enemies come up to the very door, and his table be spread as it were in their presence, he need not flinch nor stint his heart of her security.
Every one feels that the Psalm was written by a shepherd, and the first thing that is obvious is that he has made his God after his own image.
There are many in our day who sneer at that kind of theology--pretty, indeed, as the pearl or the tear, but like tear or pearl a natural and partly a morbid deposit--a mere human process which, according to them, pretty well explains all religion; the result of man's instinct to see himself reflected on the cloud that bounds his view; man's honest but deluded effort to put himself in charge of the best part of himself, filling the throne of an imaginary heaven with an impossible exaggeration of his own virtues.
Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift, That I doubt His own love can compete with it? ... Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man; And dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who yet alone can? Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to enrich, To fill up his life, starve my own out, I would--knowing which I know that my service is perfect. Oh, speak through me now! Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst thou--so wilt thou!
Do not say that this talk of surrender to God is unreal to you. Happiness, contentment, the health and growth of the soul, depend, as men have proved over and over again, upon some simple issue, some single turning of the soul. Lives are changed by a moment's listening to conscience, by a single and quiet inclination of the mind. We must submit ourselves to God. We must bring our wills under His. Here and now we can do this by resolution and effort, in the strength of His Spirit, which is nearer us than we know. The thing is no mystery, and not at all vague. The mistake people make about it is to seek for it in some artificial and conventional form. We have it travestied to-day under many forms--under the form of throwing open the heart to excitement in an atmosphere removed from real life as far as possible: under the form of assent to a dogma: under the form of adherence to a church.
But do you summon up the most real things in your life--the duty that is a disgust: the sacrifice for others from which you shrink. Summon up your besetting sin--the temptation which, for all your present peace, you know will be upon you before twenty-four hours are past. Summon up these grim realities of your life,--and in face of them give yourself to God's will, put your weakness into the keeping of His grace. He is as real as they are, and the act of will by which you give yourself to Him and His Service will be as true and as solid an experience as the many acts of will by which you have so often yielded to them.
Otherwise this beautiful name, this name Shepherd, must remain to you the emptiest of metaphors: this Psalm only a fair song instead of the indestructible experience which both Name and Psalm become to him who gives himself to God.
Men and women, who in this Christian land have grown up with this Psalm in your hearts, in all the great crises of life that are ahead shall this Psalm revisit us. In perplexity and doubt, in temptation and sorrow, and in death, like our mother's face shall this Psalm she put upon our lips come back to us. Woe to us then, if we have done nothing to help us to believe it! As when one lies sick in a foreign land, and music that is dear comes down the street and swells by him, and lifts his thoughts a little from himself, but passes over and melts into the distance, and he lies colder and more forsaken than before--so shall it be with us and this Psalm.
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