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Dear Friends in Christ,
This Sunday we hear again Jesus’s words to his disciples: I am the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. The passage gives the day its popular name, Good Shepherd Sunday.
I haven’t known any sheep personally, but I enjoy looking at them from afar. They look great in a landscape. Their wool is useful and warm. And (with apologies to the sheep) they can be quite delicious. We hear in scripture of those who wander off that the shepherd brings back. They are valuable and need guarding, counting, caring.
It’s nice to think of Jesus as a shepherd—caring, in charge, gentle. It’s nice to think of the sheep that hear his voice and follow where he leads. It’s a comforting image—one that populates stained glass, hymns, scripture, and psalmody. In a northern European vein, it reminds me of the sort of picture below from the collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art--or of grade school Christmas pageants with shepherds in bathrobes with siblings dressed in sheep costumes. But for purposes of this moment, let's consider the image of a flock of real live sheep that need a shepherd to protect and guide them.
That image gets a bad rap in our individualistic culture. “I don’t want to be a sheep,” folks may whine. We want to lead, not follow. We are self sufficient, wholly competent, and need nothing. We’re not like those needy sheep! Political scoffers can even refer to the opposite side of the aisle as foolish sheep—“sheeple” even as a sort of slur. Sheep get a bad rap.
But this contemporary anxiety about the sheep metaphor can miss the point of the story. Good shepherd Sunday is not about our role as sheep (though I suspect that most of us in fact DO need someone to protect, to lead, and to guide us, even if we don't want to admit it!). The story isn't about the incompetence of people, the fallenness of the world, or even about the sheep themselves. The story is about the shepherd.
Earlier in the passage from John 10 (the verses we don’t read on Sunday) Jesus first refers to himself as the shepherd; the sheep hear his voice and come out by the gate to follow him. Then as the disciples don’t understand, Jesus changes the metaphor to talk about himself as the gate itself:
‘Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. 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. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. So again Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. 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.’ (John 10:1-4, 7-10)
The sheep in the image below are raised for wool, or for meat, or maybe even both. The sheep in Jesus’s experience would have been used similarly. A sheep coming out of the gate--a sheep walking away--at some point is likely being led to slaughter.
Not so with Jesus. He is the paschal lamb who goes in and comes out by the gate; he is slaughtered, and yet he lives. He is the Good Shepherd who leads his sheep in and out of the gate--not to their eventual slaughter but to everlasting live. He is the sheep, the shepherd, the gate—the way to something completely different that the sheep—and that we—have never known.
Good Shepherd Sunday is about the reality-changing love of God in Christ, the love that makes this shepherd different—the love that makes our lives, our existence, and our eternity different.
This Good Shepherd comes to save. Together let us hear his voice and follow.
Yours faithfully in the name of the Risen Christ,
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