This week on Things Unseen, we're talking about the Church. And yesterday I mentioned

the composer Muzarsky's composition, Pictures at an Exhibition, and suggested that this

may be a good metaphor for reading the New Testament and looking one by one at some of

the pictures it gives us of the Church. To help us understand what it means to belong

to a specifically Christian community. And we saw yesterday that the Church is the

body of Christ. The New Testament also tells us that the Church is the flock of God.

And let's have very much loved picture, isn't it? And I suspect it has a stronger emotional

pool on us than body. Perhaps that's more true of people who live in rural areas, like

much of my home country of Scotland, where you drive through the fields you see, filled

with sheep. And it's amazing to me to see how much time they spend eating. That's a very

interesting thing when we think about the metaphor of a flock for the Church. Or maybe we

love the picture of the Church as a flock, because we're familiar with some of the great

passages in the Scriptures. We perhaps love to sing the hundredth Psalm, all people that

in earth do well, sing to the Lord with cheerful voice. We are his flock, he doth us feed,

and for his sheep he doth us take. Or perhaps most of all the Lord's my shepherd, I'll

not want. Or maybe the 77th Psalm, written by the melancholic ASAF, whose strengthens his

soul in God with the wonderful words that reassure him that the God of Israel's past will

be the God of Israel's present, and the God of his present. You led your people like

a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron. The thought obviously is this, if God can lead

the giant flock of the Exodus people, and take them right through the desert and provide

for them, then he can surely do the same for us and for me as an individual. So this picture

of the Church as a flock comes straight out of the Old Testament, but even more significantly

...