‘All we like sheep, have gone astray’ – so runs one of the many great choruses in Handel’s Messiah, the words drawn from the book of Isaiah (53:6), which continues: ‘each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all’. It’s a favourite metaphor of Scripture, used also of course by Jesus, who called himself the Good Shepherd. Anyone who has watched a herd of sheep will know how true it is that where one ventures, others tend to unquestioningly follow, as observed in the following illustrated prayer from my book The Little Book of Lent Prayers. The relevance of that analogy to Lent hardly needs spelling out.
Guide me, Lord,
for time after time I go astray,
unthinkingly following the crowd.
Help me to copy, not the sheep
but the shepherd.
Amen.