Remember those air-brushed pictures of Jesus carrying a little lamb onhis shoulders? There was a reason why shepherds carried lambs that way. When a shepherd found a lost sheep his job was not over. Because a lost sheep won’t follow you home like a dog often would. Dogs will run up to you and follow you home. Horses just know. Just free them, and they’ll find their way home. Not sheep. They have to be grabbed, tied up and hauled home. A sheep does not contribute to its rescue. The shepherd has to basically walk it, or carry it all the way home. There’s no cooperative effort here. This metaphor says something about mankind. It would not have been enough for God to send a good teacher to point the way home. Nor would it have been enough for God to send a moral example for us to follow. We are not like dogs or horses. We are sheep. God needed to send a savior to go home FOR us. This points to the doctrine of Original Sin. Modern folks can't stand it. It offends us to think that we are that helpless. And yet modern folks have come to recognize the naivete of thinking the opposite given the historical events in the last 200 years. Blaise Pascal, struggled with this doctrine, and yet at one point in his Pensees he says, “Nothing jolts us more rudely than this doctrine. And yet but for this mystery – the most incomprehensible of all – we remain incomprehensible to ourselves.”