... when he saw the multitudes he was moved to compassion for them, because they were distressed and scattered like sheep without a shepherd.
Being moved to compassion can sound almost like an act of largesse on the part of a powerful monarch. The Greek of Matthew's Gospel, however, expresses this phrase with an earthy and painful sense of compulsion, a kind of tugging at the guts or churning of the stomach.
Like how I felt the first time I met children and their parents living behind razor-wire at Villawood Detention Centre. Or how I feel listening to the stories of the Stolen Generations or Aboriginal deaths in custody, or read about yet another brutal bombing of the people of Gaza while the powers of the world seem to turn a blind eye.
We often miss the point of the scriptural metaphor of the shepherd and the sheep. It's not so much about power over as it is about suffering with. Shepherds were among the most marginalised members of society at the time of Jesus. Sadly, the centuries have mangled the metaphor.
For too long the charitable model of welfare has been built on the obscene notion that people should actually be treated like sheep who need a strong and wise shepherd to tell them what to do. This model, which moves easily between paternalism and punishment, comfortably accommodates such injustices as controlling the meagre incomes of people on statutory benefits and other forms of disempowerment 'for their own good'.
Oscar Romero (pictured), the late Archbishop of San Salvador, murdered by US-trained paramilitary in 1980, said of the Beatitudes that they turn everything upside down. They provide us with a radical way of unlearning our acceptance of guidance from above and learning with new hearts the promise of liberation from below.
Rather than looking to the skies for a sign, the story of Jesus presents us with a provocative challenge to listen closely to the signs of the times; the still, small sound of humanity in history.
The people Matthew refers to are 'distressed and scattered'. This sense of alienation is central to marginalisation. People feel they are devalued, left on the scrap-heap, and, worst of all, atomised, on their own, left to bear the blame, and therefore the burden, of their own exclusion.
Rather than viewing people experiencing exclusion as sheep in need of a firm hand and voice of command, we are invited to learn