Jesus Is, We Are To Be, The Good Shepherd - John 10:11-18 (Wednesday Night Reflection)
A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote
pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of the dust cloud toward
him. The driver, a young man in a Broni
suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses, and YSL tie leaned out the window and
asked the shepherd, “If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your
flock, will you give me one?”
The shepherd looks at the man, then looks at
his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers, “Sure.”
The young man parks his car, whips out his
notebook and connects it to a cellphone, then he surfs to a NASA page on the
Internet where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system, scans the area,
and opens up a database and Excel spreadsheets with complex formulas. He sends and email on this Blackberry and,
after a few minutes, receives a response.
Finally, he prints out a 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized
printer, then turns to the shepherd and says, “You have exactly 1,586 sheep.”
“That is correct, take one of the sheep,” says
the shepherd. He watches as the young
man selects one of the animals and bundles it into his car.
Then the shepherd says: “If I can tell you
exactly what your business is, will you give me my sheep back?”
“Okay, why not,” answers the young man.
“Clearly, you are a consultant,” says the
shepherd.
“That’s correct,” says the young man, “but how
did you guess that?”
“No guessing required,” answers the
shepherd. “You turned up here although
nobody called you. You want to get paid
for the answer to a question I already knew, and you don’t know anything about
my business. Now give me back my dog!”
We find ourselves in the midst of a pasture
for the second week in a row as we continue our journey through the “I Am”
statements of Jesus.
We have head Jesus say, “I Am the Bread of
Life,” and it is only through Christ we find that which fills the hunger in our
souls.
We have heard Jesus say, “I Am the Light of
the World,” and know that it is Jesus who brings God’s creative order to the
world, shines light into the darkness of sin and reveals our true intentions,
gives life to those who walk in His light, and gathers folks to Himself.
We have heard Jesus say, “I Am the Gate,” and
understand that it is only through Jesus, not the things of this world, that we
will truly find an eternal and abundant life.
Each week we have also examined, in light of
Jesus’s words, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you…”[i]
and Paul’s words to the church in Corinth, “Now you are the body of Christ and
individually members of it…”[ii]
what these “I Am” statements of Jesus mean for us, the Church, as the Living
Body of Christ in the world. In other
words, as Jesus states what He is in each “I Am” statement, He is revealing what
we are to become.
As I mentioned earlier, with Jesus asserting
His identity as “the Gate,” He let those listening know that it was through
Him, and Him alone, that we pass through to find abundant, eternal life. This week, continuing with the same thinking,
Jesus assures us that we will not have to find “the Gate” on our own, for He is
the Good Shepherd—not only is He the Gate that opens to a fulfilled life, He is
the One who gets us to that life.
We’ve talked about in past weeks how Jesus’
use of the “I Am” statements was controversial due to its connection to the
revelation of God to Moses at the burning bush, and how those Jews hearing
Jesus say, “I Am” would have heard Jesus equating Himself with God. If there was any doubt as to that allusion,
Jesus left no question in their mind when He said, “I am the Good
Shepherd.” With those words, everyone
who heard would have immediately thought of the Words of God spoken through the
prophet Ezekiel: “For thus says the Lord God: I myself will search for my sheep
and will seek them out. As shepherds
seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek
out my sheep. I will rescue them from
all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick
darkness…I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep…says the Lord God.”[iii] By saying, “I Am the Good Shepherd,” Jesus
identifies Himself with God in the Ezekiel passage and claims to be the
fulfillment of this prophecy.
So what is in Jesus’ claim of being the Good
Shepherd?
For something to be called “good” in our
culture is not really that significant.
We live in a culture where “excellence” is what is striven for, so we
might hear “the Good Shepherd” and think of “good” in terms of being “okay” or
“average.” However, the Greek word used
in the Scripture is Kalos which is
better translated as “ideal,” “model,” or “noble.” Jesus is saying I am the Ultimate
Shepherd.
As the Ultimate Shepherd, Jesus sets Himself
up opposite two other groups, the thieves and the hired hands.
The thieves, Jesus declares, don’t come to
care for the sheep, as we read last week, they come to kill and destroy. They don’t use the gate, Jesus says, they
jump the fence to try and steal the sheep, only to take them, not to a pasture
of abundant life, but to death. We’ve
encountered those thieves in our lives, those life-robbing destroyers of men
and women. Some of those thieves promise
abundant life in an attempt to get the sheep to voluntarily go with them. They come in, like someone abducting a child,
offering balloons, candy, or a puppy to lull the sheep into thinking they are
safe, and the next thing the sheep know they are on a trailer heading for
slaughter. Drugs, gambling, and
pornography come in like this, offering a temporary pleasure but likely ends in
physical, financial, or emotional death.
Other thieves come in and are obvious in their attempt to murder the
sheep, often without even taking them out of the pasture—they just drive by and
shoot the sheep where they stand or slip in and poison their food supply. Greed and anxiety top the list of this host
of bandits, robbing the sheep of any sense of peace and security.
In this tonight’s reading, Jesus moves away
from the thieves and bandits, and as the Good Shepherd, contrasts Himself with
the hired hand, someone being paid to watch over the flock. There are many differences between the Good
Shepherd and the hired hand, but there are two in particular that I want to
lift before us this evening. They
revolve around knowing and commitment.
The Good Shepherd knows the sheep and the
hired hand does not. How is that
possible? Wouldn’t the hired hand have
to know that there were sheep in the field and how many sheep that are in the
flock? Wouldn’t the hired hand have to know the difference between a sheep and
the shepherd’s dog? Probably. But knowing that there are sheep and knowing
how many sheep you are looking after, does not mean you know the sheep. We have to remember that in Biblical times,
“knowing” meant a lot more than how we toss the word around. In Biblical times, knowing implied relationship. Remember, all the way back to Genesis when we
read that “Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain…”[iv] While not always used in the sexual context,
to know someone, to really know someone, implies that there is a
relationship. Just as Jesus says, “As
the Father knows me and I know the Father,” there is a deep abiding
relationship. For the hired hand, there
is knowledge of the sheep, and most like how many sheep…but that is as far as
it goes. There is no relationship. The person is being paid to care, you take
away the pay, the hired hand is gone.
The sheep are mere objects, and if he or she does care what happens to
one of the sheep, it is not out of concern for the sheep, but out of concern
for what it might mean for their pay.
The Good Shepherd, on the other hand, knows and loves the sheep. The Shepherd has a relationship with the
sheep, and desires to deepen that relationship.
That is how the Shepherd knows His sheep and how the sheep know the
Shepherd’s voice. Time has been spent
together, a relationship has grown.
With the relationship between the Shepherd and
the sheep, a second difference between the Shepherd and the hired hand rises. For the Shepherd, there is commitment to the
sheep, for the hired hand, there is a very good chance that when push comes to
shove, there is no commitment. Caring
for sheep was a dangerous job.
Considering we have already differentiated between the Shepherd and the
bandit or thief, we know that there were those to contend with. However, there were greater dangers than a
thieves or bandits. We remember that
when young David was convincing Saul that he could go out and fight Goliath, he
spoke of how, as a shepherd boy, he had had to take on both lions and bears.[v] Shepherding was no piece of cake job…it was
dangerous. Have you ever had a job that as
you thought about what it was going to require of you, you either didn’t take
it or walked away from it? Well,
consider you are being paid to help a shepherd watch over some sheep…and you
see a vicious wolf come in and make off with one of the lambs, what are you
going to do? Are you willing to risk your life for someone else’s little lamb?
Most likely not!
The Good Shepherd, on the other hand, has a
relationship with his sheep and is deeply committed to them. He has a vested
interest in the sheep and lives to protect those sheep he knows and cares so
deeply for. The Shepherd, unlike the
hired hand, is willing to lay down his life for the sake of the sheep. He will risk confronting the lion, bear, or
wolf to save a little lamb.
Jesus lives out this promise as the Gospel of
John progresses. The Jewish police force
who helped arrest Jesus in the Garden did not take Jesus’ life from him. Remember Jesus’ words to Peter after Peter
struck the high priest servant’s ear with the sword, “’Put your sword back into
its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup
that the Father has given me?”[vi] When Pilate confronted Jesus saying, “’Do you
not know that I have the power to release you, and the power to crucify you?’
Jesus answered him, ‘You would have no power over me unless it had been given
you from above….”[vii] Jesus goes to the cross voluntarily to offer
up His life as the Good Shepherd, so that we, His sheep, might be rescued from
the greatest enemy any could ever encounter—not the Sanhedrin, not the Roman
Empire, but the enemies of sin and death themselves—Jesus says, “For this
reason the Father loves me, because I lay down might life in order to take it
up again. No one takes it from me, but I
lay it down of my own accord. I have the
power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.”[viii]
Jesus is the Good Shepherd, and we are the
sheep. We are called to follow the Good
Shepherd as sheep who know His voice and are called into relationship with
Him. And though we will never be the
ultimate Shepherd, in following Jesus, we are called to be good shepherds in
His Name. If there is any doubt that we
are to become shepherds, Jesus erases that doubt in his post-resurrection conversation
with Peter:
“When
they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, ‘Simon son of John, do
you love me more than these?” He said to
him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.”
Jesus said to him, ‘Feed my lambs.’
A second time he said to him, ‘Simon, son of John, do you love me?’ He
said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, ‘Tend my sheep.’ He said to him the third time, ‘Simon son of
John, do you love me?’ Peter felt hurt
because he said to him the third time, ‘Do you love me?’ And he said to him, ‘Lord, you know
everything; you know that I love you.’
Jesus said to him, ‘Feed my sheep.
Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your
own belt and to go wherever you wished.
But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else
will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.’ (He said this to indicate the kind of death
by which he would glorify God.) After
this he said to him, ‘Follow me.’”[ix]
What does it mean that we are to follow Jesus
as sheep becoming shepherds…it means we are to continue to heed His voice,
following Him…it means caring for those He entrusts to us…it means that our
commitment to our Jesus is not only about our relationship with Him, but also
about our relationship with our brothers and sisters in the faith…the lambs and
sheep we are called to tend to and feed.
It means that we are deeply connected to one another and we are to know
and be committed to one another…not seeing one another as objects, or folks who
might put some money in the collection plate, but as valued members of the
flock…it means that when we see a need in their lives or the life of the church
we are willing to lay down our lives---maybe that means organ donation, maybe
it means confronting a wolf if someone is in danger of being attacked, maybe it
means running into a burning building if someone is trapped inside, or maybe it
simply means being willing to give of our time if a brother or sister needs
help (even if it means, or maybe especially when it means, that we don’t get to
do something that we had planned or wanted to do). It means putting the care of God’s sheep—one
another, ahead of our own lives—remembering that regardless of our sacrifice,
the Good Shepherd’s was greater, and just as God raised Him up, He promises to
raise us from whatever sacrifice we make in His Name.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit. Amen.
[i] John 20:21
[ii] 1st Corinthians
12:27
[iii] Ezekiel 34:11-12, 15a
[iv] Genesis 4:1
[v] 1st Samuel
17:34-35
[vi] John 18:11
[vii] John 19:11
[viii] John 10:17-18
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