Good Shepherd Sunday… this is another one of those Sundays both love and hate. One scripture is absolutely beloved by the church and known by heart by many. The other offers an image of Christ that is both comforting and confusing. So, what to preach? How to preach on an image that is so familiar, so beloved? I put it off for a bit.
If you are a person who has spent a lot of time in the church, the shepherd image will be familiar and for some it might carry a bit of baggage. Was Psalm 23 one of the first scriptures you memorized? Can you still recite it today – in any translation version – but likely KJV? Did you spend time in Sunday school colouring flocks of sheep or making sheep out of toothpicks, cotton balls and white glue? Did you spend time in a church space with a painting of Jesus wearing flowing robes with an adorable white lamb perched on his shoulders?
Let’s look at the Good Shepherd passage that we heard from John’s Gospel this morning. It’s a difficult reading for two reasons. On the one hand the metaphor is overfamiliar, it’s beauty buried under so much oversweet piety and Hallmark card sentiment. On the other hand, I’m aware of the fact that I, we, have no real-life idea of what Jesus is actually talking about when he describes himself in terms of shepherds, sheep, bandits and wolves.
Jesus was an effective teacher because he used metaphors and images his audience could easily relate to. When he talked about flocks of sheep, vineyards, mustard seeds and fishing nets, he wasn’t speaking about new and strange things, he was talking about the stuff of ever-day first century ordinary life. Us though? How many of us have ever herded sheep, met a shepherd or wrestled a wolf?
In the process of preparing for today, I came across a story from a minister who talked about visiting her grandparent’s farm in India when she was growing up. She said never once did she see her grandfather drape baby animals over his clean, robed shoulders. Most of the time the animals on his farm stank. And quite often, at the end of the day in their midst, he stank too. We have to wonder how the church has gone from the mud-stained smelly reality of animal husbandry to a sparkly clean Jesus cuddling a lily white lamb.
So we come to this morning’s readings – okay, I come to the readings today – a little tiny bit jaded and quite a bit ignorant – and struggle. I have nothing conclusive or authoritative to say… no new lessons, no applications, no morals. All I have are wonderings – things I wonder about as I try to engage the Good Shepherd metaphor as best I can.
I’m going to borrow from Godly Play for a bit to help us along. Godly Play is a Sunday School curriculum lots of churches use to introduce young children to the Bible. Each time the kids hear a Bible Story, they are invited to wonder about it, to use their imaginations and respond freely to whatever the story evokes. It’s not about finding “right” answers, but about living creatively and faithfully with honest questions.
Here, then, are my wonderings about Jesus, the Good Shepherd
I wonder why Jesus used this metaphor in the time and place he did.
According to John’s Gospel,
Jesus had just healed a blind man on the Sabbath and the religious elite were furious. Moreover, it was the Feast of the Dedication (the holiday we know as Hanukkah, when the Jewish people celebrate the rededication of the Temple after the victory of Judas Maccabeus in the 2nd BCE), and Jesus was walking in the Temple itself – the very place the Jews were venerating as symbolic of their unique relationship with God.
So, why call himself a shepherd in that setting? The image of a shepherd tending his flock would have been deeply ingrained in the religious imaginations of the Israelites. They knew Moses tended his father-in-law’s flock before God commissioned him to lead the Israelites out of slavery., They knew King David tended sheep before ascending to the throne. They knew Yahweh as the ultimate Shepherd over his flock, Israel.
So I wonder if Jesus was saying something provocative rather than self-effacing when he called himself the Good Shepherd. I tend to think “meek and mild” when I imagine Jesus cradling lambs, but why would meek and mild incense his listeners who attempted to arrest him for using this particular metaphor? Was Jesus in face equating himself with God, the Shepherd King?
On the very occasion when the Jews were celebrating the supremacy of the Temple, and its centrality in their faith lives, was Jesus actually suggesting that God’s presence dwells in the wilderness out among the wolves, the thieves, the bandits, and the smelly sheep? In other words, among the outcasts, the irreligious, the ritually unclean, and the politically incorrect? If so, what might this provocative teaching mean for us today? Where is our Temple? Where is our wilderness? Where are the places we assume God will never dwell?
I wonder what it would take to believe these words of Jesus: “I know my own and my own know me.”
Really? Is the life of faith really so straightforward, so certain? I remember times in my life, and maybe you remember too, where it wasn’t so clear, so sure. When we’ve feared that we’re not as faithful as I should be. If Jesus is so certain of our identity, so sure that we are capable of discerning his voice, what keeps us hanging in doubt and fear.
I think of the barriers that lie between Jesus’ assurance and our faith. Barriers of Doctrine? Do we believe all the right things about God? Do we have our creed memorized? Is there some nuance of theology we’re missing? Barriers of guilt. How can we really know forgiveness? There must be a catch somewhere. Barriers of pain. We’ve cried out for our Shepherd’s voice so many times and experienced only silence. Or if Jesus had spoken, have we not recognized it?
If the metaphor isn’t perfect, if it doesn’t cover all circumstances, for all time, if it leaves much to mystery, can we still find the courage to lean into it?
I wonder who the hired hands are?
In the story Jesus tells, the hired hands are pseudo-shepherds who work for personal gain, not patient love. They have no genuine stake in the well-being of the sheep; they run away scared at the first sign of danger. So, we wonder: who pretends to love us for our own gain? Whose voice do we heed to our detriment? What siren song calls to us, making promises that we shouldn’t trust? Money? Success? Beauty? Power? Prestige? Racial, cultural or national identity? These are the biggies, easiest to name… what else? What else beckons?
I wonder what shepherding is really like:
We’ve all heard that sheep are dumb and skittish. We’ve heard they wander, get hurt easily, graze without stopping, and bicker for no reason. We’ve heard how they are stubborn but lost without a leader. So I wonder what Jesus has to put up with, shepherding us.
I wonder why the Church fears this metaphor:
The more I read John 10 and Psalm 23, the scarier they sound. I am astonished at how much I haven’t seen in these passages…the psalmist’s banquet table is surrounded by his enemies. Still waters and green pastures lead to valleys of death.
As the good shepherd, Jesus lives at the edges of polite society, out in the wild, untamed places of the world. His life is perpetually in danger. He faces the mockery of the hirelings, who consider his self-sacrificial vocation absurd. Let’s be clear, Jesus is in it for the long haul with his flock, he not only frolics with lambs but wrestles with wolves. Jesus not only tends the wounds of his beloved rams and ewes with oil, he also buries them when their time comes.
Okay, maybe I don’t wonder why the church has turned this shepherd into a greeting card image. It’s hard to face who Jesus really is. To contemplate what he requires of us. The Epistle of 1 John reminds us that “we know love by this, that he laid down his life for us – and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.”
How will we represent the love of this magnificent shepherd?
How will we spread his goodness in the wildest of wild places?
In the valleys, amongst the wolves, within the flock that tries to offer his ministry in the world? I wonder.
