SHEEP, BUT NO SHEPHERD

 

SHEEP, BUT NO SHEPHERD

On 5 August 1962, Nelson Mandela was arrested on a bend of the Durban/Pietermaritzberg road near Howick in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. He was held in prison for 27 years. The actual spot of his arrest is now a national monument and an imaginative interpretative centre has been constructed there, tracing the story of his life and his ‘Long Road to Freedom’ which was synonymous with that of South Africa itself. A highly original sculpture has been erected next the road consisting of fifty iron poles, each designed so that together they portray Mandela’s head. But you have to view them directly in front so as to see his face. Moving one side or the other distorts the image. 

I was part of a group last week that visited the centre and several things struck me. Perhaps most of all was the description of his first years on Robben Island in the 1960s. The texts on view highlighted the loneliness of those years. They were the first in what was a life sentence. Cape Town can be cold and the food was spare. He and his companions had to work in a stone quarry. They were cut off from the world. He had to struggle not only with the physical conditions but the awful psychological trauma of emptiness. How did he get to this point? Was it all worthwhile? Would he just be forgotten by the world and die and be buried on the island.

These reflections led me to marvel at the cost of leadership. Mandela and his companions supported one another at a time when one might think it was all hopeless and their cause was crushed. There must have been low moments when only a rock-like belief in the justice of their goal kept them from despair. What is deeply impressive is their faithfulness to something they knew was not just their own but was shared by the whole nation. But it was in the distance.

I find such ‘facts on the ground’, such political realities, indicative of something underlying them mirrored in the scriptures. Jesus, echoing Ezekiel, found the people ‘lost, like sheep without a shepherd’. They needed a leader; someone who could put their desires into words, someone who was prepared to suffer so that their hopes would be realised. We know good leaders and not so good ones. And we know the difference. A good leader is someone who has a vision and is prepared to suffer – for 27 years if need be – so that that vision blossoms.

21 July 2024         Sunday 16B          Jer 23:1-6    Eph 2;13-18      Mk 6:30-34