In our First Reading today we heard Jeremiah use the image of “a trusting lamb led to slaughter.” For the people of the Old Testament that simile would have been more vivid because they were more of an agrarian people and the Industrial Revolution hadn’t hit yet. They could readily picture the scene, and would have seen it many times. The average person in our society is more remote from farm-type images.
Small-time, family farms have become a thing of the past. Agri-business is the way most of our crops are grown. When the average young person thinks of milk, they think of jugs in the dairy section of the local grocery store. They don’t make the connection with a cow. They’ve never had the fun of milking a cow by hand and, seeing a cat nearby, squirting at it, and watching the cat rise up on its hind legs to reach the stream of milk with its head and gleefully drinking it with a very rapid movement of its tongue!
The process of slaughtering an animal is foreign to most of us. We see it already packaged in the meat section. Our Abbot recently made a visit to one of our daughter-houses over in Nigeria. To celebrate the occasion, they butchered two big bulls. For Fr. John, that was quite the show, and he is able to give a very humorous rendition of it. But for most of the monks there at that abbey in Nigeria, slaughtering an animal to eat is something they grew up with – the average person in Nigeria is closer to the land than us here in the States.
When Jesus preached, he used many images from nature – many of his parables speak of farming and animals and things of the land. His audience would have been more rural than us. He was taking something from their everyday life and teaching a spiritual lesson with it. His parables are still marvelous learning devices for us, centuries later, and they will continue to be for centuries to come. I’m just saying that now that many of us are a step removed from that bucolic life they took for granted, it helps make biblical images even more meaningful when they’re fleshed out a bit.
When I was in the sixth grade I got into the sheep business. I bought three pregnant ewes, and before long had a herd of about 25. It actually turned out to be a fairly good business venture, and helped put me through college. Some income was from the wool, but most of it came from butchering the lambs when they got to a certain weight and selling them to people who lived in the area. I had grown up killing animals to eat, and it was just an accepted fact of life. I took pride in doing a real careful job and making them look really good when I took them to the meat locker.
One time a mother died soon after giving birth. I fed her baby on a bottle, and it was actually quite fun. I would go out to the barn three times a day, at first, with a warm bottle and call out, “Here, Leppy.” Leppy is what an orphaned lamb is called. I guess I wasn’t feeling very original when I named it. Leppy would come running over and drink her bottle with the greatest gusto! She would get down on her front knees and give the initial three little butts with her head like they always do with their mother to get her to let her milk down. She saw me as her mother, and whenever I went out to the corral she would follow me around like a little puppy dog. The three bottles a day eventually became two a day, and then one. Even after I weaned her, she would follow me around with the utmost affection and devotion.
But then the day came to butcher her. If ever there was “a trusting lamb led to slaughter,” it was this one. I couldn’t keep her as a ewe because she wasn’t of good enough stock, and it would have meant changing my ram to avoid inbreeding, and I had a really good one at the time. So I just had to disconnect myself from my feelings and distract myself from what was really taking place. I walked out to the corral and Leppy came running over to the gate. I opened it and she followed me over to the place where I had a pulley overhead and would string them up and skin them and gut them. I laid her down on her side and stretched her head back to make her juggler vein fully exposed. All the while her soft brown eyes were pinned to my eyes, and they spoke nothing but trust. I could not look into those eyes. Like Abraham, I grasped the knife firmly and tried to get it over with as quickly as possible. With two quick motions I cut her neck wide open and wrenched her head to break her neck. I wanted my little Leppy to feel the least amount of pain as possible. The jerks of the body gradually subsided, and the process went on as usual.
Now, years later, as I’ve gone back to that scene, I’ve wondered if that mentality that I developed back then has made me less faithful in my relationships with others. Do I have a utilitarian view of other people? Do I have a tendency to see them in the light of how they can be useful to me – and when they are no longer useful, I dump them and move on to someone else who is? Am I treating the trust of other people with reverence? I think these are questions all of us can be asking ourselves. How faithful are we in our relationships?
Betrayal can be such a painful thing. You can hear the anguish in Jeremiah’s voice as he laments: “Yet I, like a trusting lamb led to the slaughter, had not realized they were hatching plots against me.” These were members of his own village, that he expected loyalty from. And I absolutely LOVE his statement a couple lines later: “Lord, let me witness the vengeance you take on them, for to you I have entrusted my cause!” I have used that line myself, with much energy!
I sometimes wonder if our society might be prone to utilitarian relationships. “Individualism” is something that we have been accused of. If you were to ask someone of biblical times who he was, he would have responded with something like, “I am Jacob, the son of Jonah, of the tribe of Asher.” His identity came from his clan and family. If you were to ask someone the same question today, you would hear something like, “Hi, I’m Bill. I’m a lawyer.” It’s as if we create our own identities, and it’s not in relation to a group.
We are also a very mobile society. Job opportunities very often move us to other states. Living around extended family and the kids we grew up with is becoming increasingly rare. This can contribute to more superficial relationships. If we get too close to people it will just hurt that much more the next time we move away. Being true to our friends and loyal in our relationships is a very good virtue to cultivate.
When one of my older brothers was in the Boy Scouts, there was another kid who wanted so badly to be part of the group, and was partly retarded. Every time the instructor would ask him one of the quiz questions, he would answer: “Be true to your friends.” No matter what the question was, the response was always the same: “Be true to your friends.” This poor kid was only operating with about half a brain, but, God bless him, he had one of the important lessons of life down.
