Of Sheep and Shepherd

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

April 21-22, 2018

Acts 4:5-12

1 John 3:16-24

John 10:11-18

Psalm 23

In 1999, fourteen members of my extended family went to the United Kingdom for two weeks to visit further extended family and take the grand tour of southern England.

One of the highlights of the trip was an excursion from London to Bath in a huge motor bus more often used for transporting fans to soccer games around Europe, but this time chartered for our little group.   Part of the trip was along roads that dated to the Roman occupation of Britain, which tend to run along the ridge lines, with picturesque dales dropping off on either side.  In one of those valleys, I spotted an idyllic manor house, sitting beside a stream, with pastures leading up the slope of the hill to our road, separated from the next pasture by a hedge-row leading down to the stream. 

I grabbed my trusty camera and prepared to take the perfect picture of rural England.  But just as I was about to snap the shutter, I noticed a man walking across the pasture into the foreground of the shot. He was a burly brute with a pot belly in a blue undershirt and blue jeans, completely spoiling the ambience of the setting. 

Muttering something unkind under my breath, I waited until the bus passed the hedgerow to the next pasture, and miraculously the shot was even better!  This time, the pasture contained a flock of sheep, being herded by a border collie, with the manor house and stream still in the background.  It proved to be one of my favorite photographs of our trip to England.

Just as I snapped the shutter, I realized who the man was who had spoiled my shot in the previous pasture.  He was the shepherd, of course!  I didn’t recognize him before, because I didn’t know what a shepherd looked like in England in the last days of the Twentieth Century.  But the sheep knew, and the dog knew, and he was driving the flock to the shepherd.

Early in my life I had a rector who every fourth Sunday of Easter would get up in the pulpit and begin his sermon with this introduction, "Baaa."  "Baaa."  That was his way of letting the congregation know that this Sunday is known as "Good Shepherd" Sunday.  The word "good" occurs in the Bible 657 times, and the word shepherd or shepherds occur 106 times.  But they only occur side by side, in the phrase "good shepherd" three times, and then only in this passage of John's Gospel.

For the last several weeks, we have been reading about post-resurrection encounters with Jesus, but today we shift our attention to quite a while before the crucifixion. 

Today's Gospel lesson is set in Jerusalem sometime between the Feast of the Tabernacles and the Feast of the Dedication.  The Feast of the Tabernacles, or Sukkoth, was originally a harvest feast, held in September or October, but later became a remembrance of the Exodus, where Jews were required to spend time in temporary booths, or tabernacles, to remind them of their wandering in the Sinai.

The Feast of the Dedication is the modern celebration of Hanukkah, which is held in December to celebrate the liberation of Jerusalem from the reign of the Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes.  Antiochus had defiled the Jerusalem temple in 167 B.C. by building an altar to his own gods within the temple sanctuary.  Two years later Judas Maccabeus and his brothers threw the Syrians out, regained control of the temple, and rededicated it to the God of Judah.  There was only one jar of sacred oil found undefiled in the temple, enough to fuel the temple’s lamps for only one day; yet miraculously, the oil lasted for eight days, which is why Hanukkah is an eight-day festival.

Jesus had just given sight to a men born blind, and as he walked along the Temple precincts, he sparred with a group of Pharisees who challenged him to tell them who he really was.

In the Middle East, all of a town’s shepherds would keep their flocks in a common fold.  When it came time to go into the field, the shepherd would call out and his sheep would recognize his voice and follow him into the fields. Initially in the tenth chapter of John, Jesus compared himself to the gate of the sheepfold. The gatekeeper would recognize the shepherds and open the gate for them. However, anyone who entered the fold by climbing over the fence was a thief and a robber. The sheep would not recognize their voices, and flee from them.

Having just subtly called the Pharisees thieves and robbers, Jesus changed the metaphor.

“I am the good shepherd.” Jesus said, “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” While a hired hand will run away from danger, the shepherd loved his sheep and would lay down his life to protect them. Those to whom Jesus was talking were not confused by his metaphor.  As we have seen in today’s Psalm, the image of Israel as a flock of sheep was an old one, and the image of the shepherd had been applied to Moses, David, and God. So Jesus was comparing himself to a law giver, a king, end even to the God of Israel!

Jesus continued his answer by telling his critics that they did not believe in him because they did not belong to his sheep.  But who were the sheep Jesus was talking about, if they were not those to whom he was talking, the elders of Israel?  Jesus said his sheep hear his voice.  He knows them, and they follow him, so this clearly applies to his disciples and followers, and by expansion, the children of Judah.

He then said, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.” Jesus clearly meant the Gentiles, and by extension, the church, and you and I.  We are the sheep of the Good Shepherd if we hear his voice, recognize him, and respond to him.

What is the voice of the shepherd saying to us, and are we responding to it? A little bit farther along in John’s gospel, Jesus tells the disciples, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you should love one another. By this everyone will know you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” [1]

The writer of John’s first epistle describes this love in very clear terms. “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” But then the writer asks a question. “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”

So we are called to action by God’s love for us.  We are called to love as God has loved us, but to love whom?  The passage says “a brother,” and it’s pretty clear the writer meant fellow Christians.  But are we to restrict the love of God to Christians? Are we to demand baptismal certificates from those appearing at our Food Pantry, or our TEFAP program?

Pope Francis recently released an apostolic exhortation that put caring for the poor and the refugee on equal footing with opposition to abortion. That’s quite a statement from a Roman Catholic, let alone a pope![2]

“I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold.” Jesus said. John 3:16 starts, “For God so loved the world,” and we, as sheep of the Good Shepherd are to reflect God’s love to all of God’s sheep.

We live in a time when all the safety nets for the poor, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, are under attack by forces of greed and self-absorption. The gates of our country are being closed to refugees fleeing never-ending wars, and those searching for a better way of life. The working poor are kept poor by a minimum wage which hasn’t been raised in nine years, and then it was raised by 70 cents. LGBTQA citizens are facing assaults on hard-won civil liberties. Women’s healthcare is being attacked by old white men. Minorities and the elderly are being deprived of voting rights. Our children and grandchildren are being deprived of breathable air and pure water. The earth, itself, is choking on our excesses. The list of horrible things that are going on in this country goes on and on. And this is being done by people who claim to be Christians!

We, as sheep of the Good Shepherd, are call to stand up and resist. We are called to love all of God’s creation as God has loved us. To fight for the needs of those in need, and to overturn the culture of greed and self that seems to be in control of our nation and world.

There is a song popular in Cursillo and other renewal ministries that repeats the phrase, “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.” Do they know we are Christians? They will, if we share the Good Shepherd’s love with all of his sheep. As today’s epistle says, “And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us.”

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[1] John 13: 34-35.

[2] “Pope Francis Puts Caring for Migrants and Opposing Abortion on Equal Footing,” The New York Times, April 9, 2018.