FOLLOWING THE HERD

Everyone likes to be one with the crowd, or rather, is afraid not to be. The power of popular opinion is far-reaching. Most of us are intimidated by it and easily become slaves to its dictates and demands. Few want the stigma of not being in the herd. There is probably no other place in the gospels, where life and existence is so sharply drawn as in The Narrow Gate and Narrow Path teaching. The idea that most people on earth just exist, rather than live, is the common assumption of the New Testament. It also assumes that this form of existence, which so many share, is nothing other than a common mass movement toward destruction and is rarely stated like it is in Matthew’s gospel. The broad path is a picture of masses of people moving along a great and broad highway, neither knowing where they are going and not particularly caring, but just moving along because everyone else is. It is the endless cycle of working in order to eat, in order to sleep, day after day, year after year and then death.

It is no wonder the scriptures often refer to us as sheep. Those who have sentimental ideas about the attractiveness of sheep are just people who have never been around them. Sheep are unstable, easily frightened, moving in mass without any seeming evidence of individual choice in direction. When frightened, they usually by intuitive reaction, huddle together, cluster and wait. They truly need a Shepherd, as do we because herd thinking too easily influences us.

“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep”. Jesus