IV Easter – May 15, 2011 – Year A (RCL)
What’s all this fuss about shepherds?
We only talk about them in church, anyway, and then it’s pretty much once a year—right?
Is the Twenty-Third Psalm one of our favorite psalms (assuming it is) because it’s encouraging and describes the ideal human condition, or is it one of our favorite psalms because someone taught it to us as a child and it’s familiar?
I can remember seeing the picture of two sheep dogs guarding the sheep in a Bible story book when I was very young and wondering where the third one was.
(You know: “Shirley, Goodness, and Mercy will follow me all the days of my life….”)
In today’s Gospel lesson Jesus refers to himself as a gate—the gate of the sheepfold—but not before he kind of complicates things by referring to himself in the way one would speak of a shepherd.
“…anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit,” Jesus says. “The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice.”
“I am the gate,” Jesus then goes on to say. “Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
“I am the gate,” Jesus proclaims, but by the time we reach the end of this Gospel lesson—most likely a collection of some sayings of Jesus that have been grouped together because of their common theme—we realize that half the time he’s been talking about himself as the shepherd and half the time as the gate.
So what does Jesus want his audience—Jesus is standing in the court of the Temple, where he has just healed a blind man on the Sabbath—what does he want this large audience of critics, as well as followers, to see?
What does Jesus want you and me to see?
The short passage that we read from the Acts of the Apostles may provide us with a clue.
It describes the social structure, if you will, of the early Church, where “[all] who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.”
This description suggests that at least Jesus’ disciples, who became the apostles entrusted with the task of organizing the early Church—at least the disciples eventually understood what Jesus was driving at when he devoted so much of his teaching to images of shepherds and sheep—not that images of shepherds and sheep were all that original with Jesus, of course.
Somehow the disciples got the picture; somehow the disciples came to understand that for the Church to survive and to grow its members needed to follow Jesus’ example and learn to shepherd each other the way he had shepherded them.
They got the picture—just not right away.
As the writer of the Gospel according to John explains it, “Jesus used this figure of speech with them”—the image of the shepherd whose sheep know him by his voice—“but [the people] did not understand what he was saying to them. So again Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep.’”
Jesus simply took a different tack.
It’s as if he were trying to remind his listeners of something they already knew: “You are God’s people; you are the sheep of God’s pasture. Think of me as the gate of God’s sheepfold or think of me as a shepherd—whichever one works for you, whichever one helps you to understand how much God loves you and wants the best for you.”
In the very next verse the writer of John’s Gospel would have Jesus say: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”
New Testament theologian Raymond Brown has suggested that the first part of that verse might well be translated: “I am the model shepherd.”—in the sense of “I am everything you could possibly want in a shepherd.”
But Jesus has still more to say on the subject.
“All who came before me,” says Jesus, “are thieves and bandits.”
Jesus could be pretty hard on the religious leaders of his day—the chief priests, the scribes, and the Pharisees; eventually he angered some of them enough that they conspired with the Roman authorities to put him to death.
“But,” says Jesus, “the sheep did not listen to them.”
When Jesus refers to the sheep who did not listen to the thieves and bandits, he is, of course, talking about his followers, that sturdy band of disciples and hangers-on, whose numbers waxed and waned, as Jesus revealed more and more to them of himself and of the Kingdom of God which was growing in their very midst.
But the Gospel according to John is a document that comes to us from the period after Jesus’ resurrection so that the “sheep” that Jesus is talking about include the beginnings of the Church, as well—the followers of the followers of Jesus, so to speak—faithful, courageous people, many of whom found themselves face to face (at least until Christians were allowed to practice their religion openly without persecution) with the very “thieves and bandits” that Jesus had denounced, the very “thieves and bandits”—jealous religious leaders and fearful politicians—that had conspired to put Jesus to death.
“The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”
In the early Church following Jesus meant taking the example of “the good shepherd”, “the model shepherd”, to heart, and, if you were at all serious about it, it could quickly lead to a martyr’s death.
Yet why else would Jesus have offered the example of “the model shepherd” had he not wanted his example to be followed?
Offhand, I can name only one person who owns and tends sheep in this neck of the woods—one shepherd in our local community; there may well be others, but there’s only one I can name, and he has always struck me as a person who has the safety and well-being of his sheep at heart, and if I were the owner of some sheep I certainly wouldn’t hesitate to entrust them to his care.
Most all of us know someone like that—a friend, a teacher, a coach—someone we know that we could count on in a crisis, someone to whose care we wouldn’t hesitate to entrust those who are nearest and dearest to us.
Needless to say, good shepherding doesn’t necessarily lead to martyrdom, at least not in our present circumstances; in fact, in the majority of cases—with the exception of a Martin Luther King, Jr. or a Gandhi—it doesn’t.
But all good shepherding does inevitably lead to some sort of self-sacrifice on the part of the shepherd; one way or another, we end up putting ourselves on the line for someone else, someone we may not even know.
“The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”
And, to one degree or another, we who have been called to follow Jesus end up laying down our lives for each other, too.
In a very real sense this vision of good shepherding, the vision of Godly shepherding Jesus offers us, is as old as creation, maybe even older.
And not only does the vision of Godly shepherding extend to all humankind; it encompasses all of creation.
From the very beginning, as Jewish friends who know their Hebrew can tell us, human beings were meant to “shepherd” the earth—human beings were meant to be stewards of God’s creation.
“Be fruitful and multiply, …fill the earth and take charge of it,” is perhaps the wording that best captures the spirit of the injunction given in the Book of Genesis to the creatures made in the image and likeness of God.
“…fill the earth and take charge of it.”
How easily a call to exercise benevolent dominion can give way to the urge to practice irresponsible domination!
How easily the sacred privilege of exploring everything we have been entrusted with can be mistaken for a license to exploit everything we have been entrusted with, where the goal is no longer the benefit of all but the profit of a few!
It happens every day.
But Jesus’ vision of Godly shepherding prevails; God never withdraws the invitation to us to be stewards of all creation.
Whether we’re good stewards or bad stewards is finally up to us.
What a sobering thought to realize that the same marvelous store of intelligence that God freely bestows on human beings can be used to blow up a school or to discover the cure for some deadly disease!
The sky’s the limit!
But how reassuring to know that with Jesus’ model of the Godly shepherd as our guide, our stewardship of each other and of all creation will finally become as all-embracing and as generous as the all-embracing love of God, the God who gives us life that we might have it more abundantly.
Wonder of wonders!
That means that ready or not, slowly but surely, you and I are being transformed from grateful sheep into grateful shepherds.
Ready or not…
Thanks be to God!
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