donkeys and shepherds

SERMON PREACHED at St BARNABAS’, WARRINGTON

FOURTH SUNDAY IN EASTER (25^th April) 2021

 

 Readings

Acts 4:5-12

Psalm 23

1 John 3:116-24 

John 10:11-18

<<< “Henderson at Gallipoli, leading a soldier on a donkey,” from the J.G. Jackson Collection, Hocken library, University of Otago, Dunedin (Accession Number AG-577). Provided by Nigel Robson. - No known copyright restrictionsAWMM

You probably know the story, though it’s probably better known in Auatralia than here. John Simpson Kirkpatrick was a First World War Stretcher bearer, who was killed in action on 19 May 1915. He was one of many medical operatives and countless soldiers who died in that brutal war that was supposed to end all wars. It didn’t of course.

The story goes that on the morning of April 26^th, along with his fellows, Jack Simpson (which he became) and others from his Australian Medical Corps contingent were carrying casualties back from the beachhead to the shore, carrying the injured over his shoulder. As he was doing so he spotted a stray donkey. Having grown up handling donkeys in the northeast of England he realised how it could serve to rescue the wounded. He enticed it to join him, and used it to transport the wounded to comparative safety. Over the next 24 days he is believed to have rescued more than 300 men. Then he was killed by machine gun fire.

The story of Simpson and his donkey became entwined with that of Dick Henderson, also a stretcher bearer, also a Gallipoli donkey handler.  A famous water-colour ostensibly of Simpson but actually of Henderson, was painted by Horace Moore-Jones, probably in Dunedin. Moore-Jones didn’t realize that Henderson, not Simpson, was the man in the photograph that was the basis for his painting. That painting is now generally renamed “A Man and His Donkey.” The best-known reproduction of it hangs in the National Gallery of Australia, while a sculpture of Henderson and his donkey stands outside the National War Memorial in Wellington. 

The story is even more complex: Moore-Jones, himself a survivor of World War One injuries, was eventually honoured having died in an act of peacetime heroism, rescuing women from a burning hotel in Hamilton. Henderson too emulated Simpson’s heroism, continuing the donkey-assisted rescue work for some six weeks after Simpson was killed. Later, after serving in France and receiving the Military Medal for conspicuous bravery, Henderson was gassed at Passchendaele in 1917. He was repatriated, but never recovered his health, eventually dying in Auckland in 1958. However after years of silence he did eventually set the record straight about the figure in Moore-Jones’ painting. 

Have you come to the wrong place? Were we not here to break open words about a Jesus-saying, the fourth of seven (that perfect number) of Jesus sayings in the Fourth Gospel? 

Well yes, but Simpson, Moore-Jones and Henderson may have much to teach us. For while we may not know, or be able to unravel the stories of these three figures of the twentieth century, the overall story is well-known. On this day, ANZAC Day, many may remember, amongst other acts of war-time sacrifice, the stories surrounding Simpson and his donkey – perhaps there are still children whose parents read for them the Glyn Harper children’s book The Donkey Man.

Maybe it’s just me but correlation between ANZAC legends and the Jesus legends don’t always leap to the forefront of my mind. But … but …

For the Shepherd saying of Jesus, and the many other shepherd stories that surround him, are amongst the most well-known of his legends, if I may put it that way. Metaphors around shepherding and sheep appear often amongst Jesus sayings, more than 30 times in the gospels, nearly twenty in John’s version alone. Jesus the Shepherd – and still later the Lamb, appear frequently in the stained-glass windows of our churches. Yet almost always not only is the shepherd a very European shepherd, the sheep are almost always very meek and muddly sheep – Southdown or Romney at best. 

What if these images are the wrong shepherd and the wrong sheep? Or for that matter, what can these images convey amongst, for example, Australian Indigenous for whom shepherd and sheep alike are ridiculously alien concepts? And in any case haven’t our European scenes alienated us from the hard realities of the Sheep and Shepherd around the Jesus story? Are not shepherds in New Zealand, Merino country excepted, as likely to lead sheep to a double-decker truck and slaughter as to safety? Haven’t we become as muddled as Simpson and his donkey in popular telling?

How do we connect to the tough imagery of a Middle Eastern Shepherd and his sheep – the one, you remember, who will ho seeking the 100^th sheep, the lost sheep, at great risk to his own life? Perhaps not entirely in the way of hymn-writers of earlier centuries did! For there be dragons – or at least wolves, or wild dogs, out there where the 100^th sheep may have strayed, out there where Jesus leads us.

You may have seen the other day the story of Mayur Shelke, who leaped into the path of an on-coming train to save a child who had fallen on the tracks. The child’s mother was blind and could not see her child, though no doubt she could hear the approaching train. Rescuer and child survived, escaping with about a second to spare. But the story does not end there: now Mr Shelke, who received an award of 50,000 rupees, has given have the award money to the child’s mother, so the child and its siblings can receive a better education. He has also asked that any further rewards be given to help India’s desperate fight against Coronavirus.[1]

I am the Good Shepherd, says Jesus. I am the good stretcher-bearer, says Jesus. I am the hotel-fire rescuer, says Jesus. I am the good pointsman who rescues the child from a train, says Jesus. The shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, for the soldiers, for the small Indian son of a blind mother.

We become how we live. Somewhere in the formation of a Simpson, a Henderson, a Moore-Jones, a Mayur Shelke, are the seeds of goodness that turn in an instant, or for a season, to heroism. Jesus is not only talking of dramatic heroism, though of that too. He is speaking of a life lived for others. He is speaking clearly (and in contradiction to our Acts passage, a contradiction we must live with) of lives so saturated in compassion and justice that these strengths break out in a moment or a lifetime of being lived for others.

I can’t speak for you, but I know only too clearly that mine is not that life, yet I hope and I pray that as the journey continues the self-centredness at the core of my being can become the other-centredness, the Christlike compassion that touches the lives, enlivens however briefly, the lives that cross my path. Our task – it is worth recalling as we hurtle towards Pentecost – is so to open ourselves to the Spirit of the Risen Christ that we too can find the Shepherd qualities in us and live for others.

 

The Lord be with you.

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[1] https://www.indiatoday.in/india/video/man-who-saved-a-child-from-speeding-train-donates-half-of-his-prize-money-for-his-education-1794384-2021-04-23. Accessed Saturday, 24^th April 2021.