A small speckled creature in The Sheep Detectives shows up early and stays with you longer than the murder mystery does. The film calls him the Winter Lamb. He was born outside the cozy season of spring when most sheep are born, and for that small offense of timing, he is roundly shunned.
The other sheep keep their distance. He is too small, too speckled, too off-schedule. He has done nothing wrong. Like all of us, he was simply born when he was born.
George Hardy, the shepherd played by Hugh Jackman, with the kind of tenderness that ruins you a little, picks the lamb up. Feeds him. Nurtures him.
George treats the Winter Lamb the way he treats every other sheep in his care. The film makes that small decision matter. It is the moral spine of an otherwise whimsical mystery about a flock of British sheep voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Patrick Stewart and Bryan Cranston.
Kyle Balda directs with patience. Craig Mazin’s script is more clever than it needs to be. But the heart of the film is one lamb who arrived at the wrong time, and one shepherd who knew that arrival time is no reason to be left in the cold.
My daughters noted what multiple reviewers have said: George should have turned the rest of the flock into lamb chops for the way they treated the winter lamb.
The Brutality of Nature
I went home and looked up whether real sheep actually shun winter lambs.
The answer is more complicated than the movie’s social parable. It’s also more brutal. It turns out, it is possible for a ewe to become pregnant out of season, and the resulting births are more likely to end in rejection of the lamb. When a ewe has triplets, the smallest or last-born is most commonly rejected. A lamb that cannot keep pace with its mother as she sticks with the rest of the flock will be left behind to die. A newborn lamb can die within hours from hypothermia, hypoglycemia, or dehydration.
The shunning in the film is more gentle. The actual shunning in real pastures is final.
The Kindnes of a Shepherd
So when the scriptures speak of the lost sheep, and the good shepherd, and the one who goes looking, it is not speaking in metaphor about a sentimental possibility. It is speaking about the real death of real lambs in the real world. The good shepherd interrupts an ecology that already has a death wish for the wrong-time, wrong-size, wrong-smelling lamb.
This is what the Apostle Paul understood, and what got him into so much trouble with the people who had assumed they were the right kind of sheep.
Paul wrote to new churches scattered across the Mediterranean, full of Gentiles. They were winter lambs. They had arrived in the household of God off-schedule, without the right paperwork, eating the wrong food, raised in the wrong religion.
The existing flock had a clear sense of what was required of these latecomers: Circumcision. Dietary laws. The full conversion process. They didn’t want new birth for people who didn’t show up here from the old birth.
Paul refused. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus,” he wrote to the Galatians.
To the Ephesians, he was more pointed. “For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” The wall came down. The off-schedule arrivals were not lesser members. They were full siblings.
Romans 15:7 puts it plainly. “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.”
All are Born at the Right Time
This is not a theology of niceness. It is a claim about who counts as the people of God. The flock you were sure of has always been larger than you thought. The wall you were defending was the dividing wall of hostility. Christ tore it down.
There has always been a kind of Christian who wants to build the wall. There was one in Galatia, telling new believers they were not quite right until they modified, adjusted, contorted. There was one at the Jerusalem Council, dragging the meeting toward a smaller table.
There has been one at every revival, every Pentecost, every awakening, holding a clipboard and a list of acceptable arrival times. They are still in our churches. They tell immigrants and women and the poor and anyone who is Other that they will be welcome once they meet a few preconditions.
The Winter Lamb in The Sheep Detectives sees things the rest of the flock misses. The marginalized always do. The film knows this. Paul knew it before the film knew it.
Pick up the lamb. Cross the season. Tear down the wall. Welcome one another, as Christ has welcomed you.
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CEO of Sean Palmer Coaching, Homiletician in Residence at Bammel Church in Houston, and co-host of the “Sacred Frames” movie podcast.