Sermons
13th April 2008 - Easter 4
The iconography of Jesus the Good Shepherd leading his flock towards eternal safety is enduringly and understandably popular. There may be difficulties in regarding ourselves as dumb beasts whose main concern is eating grass, but the imagery around this theme in the bible is sufficiently coloured and nuanced to remain attractive, particularly in the way it describes the characteristics of the shepherd himself. The good shepherd knows and cares for his sheep individually, he has names for them and calls out to them, he protects them from danger and makes sure that they are fed. He walks ahead of them to show them the way to good pastures, and he will search without tiring for any who become lost on the way. But what if you don’t feel called or cared for, what if you seem to remain lost and the good shepherd seems to have forgotten about you, what if you are not being fed or protected from safety? For most people - and most Christians - life will sometimes feel like this either from time to time, or perhaps even most of the time. So what is that good shepherd upto when we can’t discern his presence at all?
Well, first it might be good to look a bit more carefully at that Biblical colour and nuance to the idea of good shepherding. In many places in the Old Testament the shepherd and the sheep is the standard analogy for the people and their leaders, and in various places this becomes directly related to the idea that God leads his people. So when leaders of the people are acting according to God’s will they are good shepherds as with David and with Moses. But when David turns out to have a decidedly bad shepherd side as well, when he arranges for Uriah to meet his unfortunate death, then he is exposed by the prophet Nathan as a bad leader of the people, a bad shepherd. And the word leader is important here. In the middle-east through the Biblical period the practice was to lead the sheep, not to drive them from behind as is more common in our own day (mainly now by quad bike – the image of Jesus worrying his flock by zooming around behind them on a quad bike is much less amenable to positive interpretation). So the shepherd leads, as Moses led the people through the desert. The Good Shepherds of the people of Israel are always ahead, always going forward. And in Jesus’ day sheep were kept mainly for their wool not for their meat. The shepherd would actually know the different sheep and may well have had names for them. And of course, he would provide for their safety and he would make sure they were fed.
If we use this analogy then to think about our lives as followers of Jesus we should be able to discern his voice calling to us individually, we should feel that we are fed by him, and we should feel protected from danger by him. But what if we feel none of those?
Perhaps here the anaology with the brute beasts does actually work. Because no matter how hard we think about it, or how hard we try to fathom the mystery of the idea that God in Jesus shows us that he loves us individually, we always live within our fallen nature we cries out doubt and fear even when we have give ourselves to Jesus, as the evangelicals say,. Becoming a Christian does not solve all your problems overnight or leave you feeling assured of your eternal safety. What becoming a Christian really involves is allowing yourself to begin to trust something quite incredible. It means beginning - and always only beginning - to trust that the voice of Jesus can be heard in your life, that you can be fed by word and sacrament, and that you can have a sense of ultimate safety. But in this life, all these tentative steps of trust, of faith, can only be taken with trepidation and with a constant backward glance. The glance that says: ‘what sort of safety do you call this? What sort of feeding is this? What sort of calling is this?’.
Christian life is not about security in this life, it is about opening up your mind to the possibility that God is leading and you are following, and on occasion you will have to be like that dumb beast and simply follow the leader. Becoming a Christian is not so much like taking out insurance, it is much more like putting all your money (and your house) on the 40-1 horse in the National.
So why take the risk? Because, what is offered is life itself, abundant life, eternal life. Jesus says that those who believe in him have already passed from death to life. Through trusting in his voice, through trusting in his word and sacraments, through trusting that ultimately we are destined for safety with God, through all this tentative trust we can pass through the gate of death and experience eternal life itself. Jesus says he is the gate, all who enter through him will be saved and will come in and go out through him. And we don’t have to wait until our bodies die for this experience. In hearing the voice of Jesus guiding us, in partaking of his sacraments we experience that eternal life here and now, we are given a foretaste, a sequence of glimpses into the eternal. And the sort of life on offer is radically different from the fallen life that we experience normally. Our normal lives are shot through with commonplace sin, uncontrollable desires, and the lethargy and accidie that are ever in danger of dragging us away from the vision of life in all its fullness, life in abundance. So when we feel that the good shepherd has deserted us we need to recall that we imagine that desertion only because of the way we are constituted as fallen but capable of redemption. We need to remember that becoming a Christian is about playing the long game, the very long game, and we need to calm our fears, and allow enough quiet in our hearts and minds to hear again the voice of the good shepherd going ahead of us, calling us by name, leading us to the good pasture. And we need to remember that if the grass looks greener away from the route the shepherd is taking, he isn’t going to force us or drag us in the right direction, but he will come looking for us in love, calling us back, showing us the ways that lead to life.
And one of the reasons you might like to consider trusting this shepherd, one reason why this shepherd has the loving authority to call you is that he lays down his own life for the sheep. Unlike the thief or hireling who only sees the sheep as potential profit or exploitation and flees at the first sign of danger. This shepherd is ready to yield up his life for the sheep. The thief or hireling would gladly take the life of the sheep, the good shepherd gives his own life for the sheep and in laying down his life, in his apparent passivity, he is most active, for through his sacrifice he offers life eternal, life in abundance.
The iconography of Jesus as the Good Shepherd leading his flock towards eternal safety is enduringly and understandably popular. Here we are shown not only who Jesus is, but who we are, not only who we are to follow, but how we are to follow. Here we are shown life itself, the life that Jesus came to bring us, life in all its abundance.