Fourth Sunday of Easter: April 21, 2024
Good Shepherd
The Rev. Nat Johnson
Acts 4:5-12
1 John 3:16-24
John 10:11-18
Psalm 23
Every year on this fourth Sunday of Easter, we hear about the Good Shepherd from a portion of the tenth chapter of John’s Gospel. Each year, the readings are full of images of sheep and shepherds, of pastures and still waters. Most of us probably have probably have little to no firsthand experience of tending sheep or the life of a shepherd. For those of us who’ve grew up hearing about Jesus, the Good Shepherd, it’s possible, maybe even probable, that the images we hold about shepherds and sheep are overly sentimental.
To further complicate the relationship between the text and our imaginations, we hear portions of this story year after year in Easter – after Jesus has already laid down his life for his friends and taken it back up again. We hear this story, year after year, in the context of victory. But the disciples hear it long before they accompany Jesus to Jerusalem, when they are still on the way, journeying toward the cross in the shadows of Jesus’ unbelievable predictions that he must suffer and die.
What’s more, the designers of our lectionary cycle distance Jesus’ declaration of being the Good Shepherd from the narrative context of John’s story. Chapter 10 of his gospel is not a stand-alone literary unit, but a descriptive discourse meant to unpack the “sign” Jesus performed and the controversy it sparked in the previous chapter. While Jesus and his disciples were walking, they came upon a man born blind, which prompted a question about the reason for the man’s blindness. Jesus upends their theological assumption that sin had anything to do with it, explaining that instead of an occasion for judgment, the man’s condition would be an occasion for the revelation of God’s glory. With spit and dirt, Jesus created mud, spreading it on the man’s eyes and then instructed him to go wash in the pool of Siloam.
Jesus’ healing of the man confounded the community, leaving him unrecognizable to some and a source confusion for others. Jesus particularly offended the pious sensibilities of the religious authorities, who called both the man healed and his parents to give testimony in response to their questions. After multiple rounds of questioning, the man lost his patience and chastised the religious leaders and calling out their unwillingness to accept the testimony of evidence before them. Unable to accept the testimony of the man who had been blind, they throw him out of the community. Jesus, and by extension, the one who Jesus healed, were threats to the sense of religious certainty the leaders both claimed and promised through their teaching. Those who should have been able to were unable to recognize the work of God right in front of them. In contrast, the man at the center of the controversy was given the capacity to not only see, but to recognize Jesus as the Son of Man.
The religious leaders took offense to this and so Jesus gives them two figures of speech to try to help them understand. First, that he is the gate through whom the sheep enter the pen and to whom the sheep belong. When Jesus says that he is the gate, he is not suggesting that he bars access to the fold – he does not keep some sheep out and let some in. He is the gate in the sense that through him, the doors to deep and abiding relationship with the God who creates, redeems, and sustains are thrown open. The shepherd of the sheep call them by name; they recognize his voice because they know him. There are other voices – voices that belong to the thieves, bandits, and strangers. Those voices belong to the ones who are intent on killing, stealing, and destroying – they bring words of division, operate within ideologies of scarcity, make false promises of protection. But the sheep do not recognize their voices because they do not know to whom they belong.
The second image Jesus offers is that of Shepherd – that he is the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep, in contrast to the hired hands who aren’t invested in the safety and wellbeing of the sheep. The sheep sense this; they don’t recognize the voice of the hireling because they don’t know him. The mutual recognition between the Good Shepherd and the Sheep is born out of relationship. The sheep trust the Shepherd because they both know him and are known by him. The Shepherd calls each of us by name and all we must do to answer is follow.
And in order to follow, we must learn how to recognize the voice of the Shepherd, to distinguish it from all of the other voices that belong to the ones intent on killing, stealing, and destroying. Through dedicating ourselves to the teachings of the apostles, to prayer, to fellowship with one another, and to the breaking of bread, we attune our ears to the tone and tenor of Jesus’ voice. We begin to see that what separates his voice from all others is what Presiding Bishop Michael Curry calls a “rubric of love.” Jesus’ words to us, his guidance and his commands will always lead us to deeper experiences of love.
Jesus is the Shepherd who cares for us, who guides and leads us, who opens the way for fellowship with God. He is the Shepherd who knows each one of us by name. There is something beautiful about this image – an intimacy about God’s knowledge of me in all of my particularities. Jesus knows each of us not just as one specimen of the human race, but as our individual selves, as the strange bundle of peculiarities that make me, me, and you, you.
It is this Jesus, who knows and loves me and you, that opens a path to a kind of life that actually delivers on its promise. It is life abundant! Full of beauty and wonder and awe. There is no end to the abundance that Jesus offers us, there is only more! Jesus is calling you to this life of abundance.
Do you recognize his voice in your life? Do you hear him calling you by name, telling you that he loves you? No matter where you are in your life, no matter your physical or mental state, no matter your skepticism or flat out exhaustion – Jesus is meeting you where you are at and he calls out to you. He invites you to know him as he knows you, to love him as he loves you. He desires to lead you into green pastures and beside still waters. Will you answer him today? Will you follow him into the depths of abundant life?
My prayer for each of us this morning, dear People of St Peter’s, is that we might not only hear the voice of the Good Shepherd who calls us by name, but that we would recognize in that voice the One who offers himself fully to us, who beckons us to know as we are known, and who desires nothing less than for us to receive the love that he offers us.