Luke 15:4 "What man of you, having one hundred sheep, if he loseth one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he findith it?"
One problem with raising sheep is the constant reference and comparison to the "Good Shepherd." We at Shepherd's Field are not the "Good Shepherd", in fact, we are hardly the adequate Shepherd. We find it difficult to actually get up in the morning and feed them so to think of "laying down one's life for a sheep" seems unlikely at least and downright ludicrous at best. And so, we see, this story is so full of holes, I hardly know where to begin....
"A man has one hundred sheep"..... no one has one hundred sheep. Sheep do not come in even numbers, he probably had more like 97 or 103. We don't know how many sheep we have here at the farm. Depending on who you ask, we have between 18 and 22. A conversation at the farm meal usually goes something like this... "Did you count the sheep today?" "Yes, there were 19." "Hmmm, I thought there were supposed to be 20." "No, remember we had to put that one ewe down because her cough bothered Mike." And then someone else volunteers "I counted 21 yesterday." And along about February the ewes begin dropping lambs all over the barn which makes the accounting even more difficult. We have an accurate system for keeping track of the lambs that involves a poster board with all the ewes listed with their numbers and sometimes their given names: Sarah, Edna, Esther, Rachael, Fanny, Horney.... And sometimes with remarks like split ear, crooked horns, good mother, does not play well with other sheep, etc. And on the board we list the lambs with their corresponding numbers and date of birth. And every year we add up the numbers on the board... 28, and then count the lambs leaping around.... 29! I think it would take about 10 sheep to wander off before we would ever notice. And, I certainly don't want to be too critical of the writer of Luke, but if you doth leave the ninety and nine sheep in the wilderness on our farm, when the Good Shepherd returneth with his one lamb after about 20 minutes, the flock would be much easier to count from then on because it would consist of one lamb!
