Jesus the Good Shepherd
Sermon preached at All Hallows by Annie Heppenstall on 29 April 2007
Fourth Sunday of Easter
Readings:
Ezekiel 34:1—12
John 10:22—30
It’s Good Shepherd Sunday today.
RE lessons
Recently I found myself having to do an impromptu RE lesson on Psalm 23 with a class of eight-year-olds: what was the poet trying to say about God, by describing him as a shepherd? We got words about kindness, caring, looking after, protecting, showing the way, kindness to animals, sheepdogs, that kind of thing, and they drew nice pictures of grassy fields with streams and fluffy lambs, with crook-wielding white-robed people with beards. In a sense, that’s it, what the children say holds good, out of the mouths of babes etc, and all we need to know is the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. But when Jesus and the Gospel writers talk about the Good Shepherd, it’s not just any old shepherd. As with many key words in the Gospels, they are referring to specific passages in the Old Testament, especially the psalms and the prophets, and in this case most directly, Ezekiel. It’s Ezekiel, with a bit of Isaiah, who shores up Jesus’s spin on the Good Shepherd. Because by claiming to be the good shepherd, Jesus was not just saying he was a kind leader, nor even simply that he was going to seek out the marginalised Hebrew people of his day, the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Those things might be true, but there is more.
OT shepherds
So. Old Testament shepherds. The leaders were often referred to as shepherds. God also was described as the shepherd of the people, most famously in Psalm 23. By the time of Ezekiel, around the fall of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the shepherd-leaders are doing a pretty poor job, and had been for centuries, so God sends his prophet to tell them so. Let’s hear Ezekiel again, and think context, which is timeless: a superpower ready to annexe a small neighbouring nation with unstable internal politics and corruption. But God doesn’t step in to help the little country’s leaders, he criticises them for letting down the people they are responsible for. Even in dire straits, they should be accountable to and regarding the welfare of the people; now, they will have to face the consequences.
You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them.
And later … Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, but must you tread down with your feet the rest of the pasture? When you drink of clear water, must you foul the rest with your feet? And must my sheep eat what you have trodden with your feet and drink what you have fouled with your feet? … you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide …
Sheep and Goats
When we hear in Matthew 25 of the Son of Man sitting in judgement over the nations, separating the sheep and the goats, it is Ezekiel 34:17 the writer is referring to. It is a judgement between the fat, bully sheep and the lean, weak sheep. The Son of Man here is the great shepherd, the good shepherd, looking out for abuse of power. It’s a Magnificat act — the Magnificat, the song Mary sings when she is pregnant with Jesus — the moment when the mighty will be brought low and the lowly raised up. Justice will prevail. The political powers that exploit and oppress must have the tables turned on them; the leaders and the powerful of this world will have to stand before the Son of Man, and be accountable. God’s Will will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. The consequences of that accountability are reflected in Luke’s beatitudes, which have the power to make some of us feel so uncomfortable:
Luke 6:24—26
But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.
Woe to you who are full now,
for you will be hungry.
Woe to you who are laughing now,
for you will mourn and weep.
Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.
We look to the future, hoping for the Kingdom, but we must also look to the present, because with each act of justice and peace God’s Kingdom is breaking through.
God’s Kingdom
So, the Good Shepherd is a weighty, perhaps an uncomfortable, metaphor for the establishing of justice and the establishing of God’s will. It tells us that God’s Kingdom is not just a heavenly state of bliss, this is not a religion about opiates for the masses — yes, you are oppressed and suffering now, but you will be recompensed in heaven — it’s about looking for justice all the way along the line. It’s about how to go about leadership now, it’s about attitudes to wealth and power now, on earth. And it is a subversive concept because God is not on the side of the kings unless they obey him. God is on the side of the weak and the oppressed.
Oneness with God
What God says in Ezekiel, in answer to these failed leaders, is, ‘I myself will be the good shepherd.’ But then some verses later, and this is significant, God says, ‘I will send a son of David to be the good shepherd.’ There is an intimate identity between God and the servant he will send, because they both do the same job. They both have the same objective. They are of one mind, and that is how Jesus comes to say he and the Father are one, at the end of today’s Gospel reading. His deeds, or as John says his signs, indicate that he is the Messiah, the chosen one. He is the Shepherd, because he does the things the Shepherd is to do, therefore he is one with God, and is God: John 10:37—38 ‘If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, so that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.’
Messianic works
So these works that the Shepherd is to do: what are they? Divine acts: to seek the lost, to bring back the strayed, to bind up the injured, strengthen the weak … the opposite of what the failed shepherds do. We hear these qualities elsewhere too on Jesus’s lips: take Luke 4, when Jesus reads from the book of Isaiah: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.’ Healing, liberation, justice, peace. The Gospels tell us repeatedly that this is what Jesus does. He is the Good Shepherd because of the care he takes of the sheep, the rag-taggle crowd that never make it to the front of the queue. He is the Good Shepherd sent by God, he is one with God.
Universalism
Now that all makes the Good Shepherd a big concept. But there is more, because Jesus goes beyond Ezekiel. To Ezekiel, God’s flock is just Israel. We are used to hearing in the other three Gospels about the lost sheep of the house of Israel. There is a feeling that, early on, Jesus also saw his ministry as being only or primarily for the Jewish people who had gone adrift. There is a shift in Matthew, Mark and Luke, where Jesus gradually comes round to extending his ministry to non-Jews. But in John’s Gospel we are not presented with a development in Jesus’s character, we are faced with the timeless truth of Jesus’s divine—human identity, and he does not get persuaded to change his mind or mission by anyone. In John’s Gospel, Jesus is not limited by anything or anyone, but knows and reveals the mind of God, from beginning to end.
In John 10:16 Jesus says he has other sheep that do not belong to this fold, and they too need to be brought in. That is, non-Jewish followers. This sounds like a new departure, that makes Christianity unique, maybe an influence from Paul’s mission to the Gentiles. But again, the idea is not new, it’s not a Christian invention to accommodate the growing demand for baptism, God’s care over all people, not just one particular ethnic group, comes from Judaism and lies in the last section of Isaiah.
Isaiah 56:3—8
Do not let the foreigner joined to the Lord say,
‘The Lord will surely separate me from his people’;
…
for my house shall be called a house of prayer
for all peoples.
Thus says the Lord God,
who gathers the outcasts of Israel,
I will gather others to them
besides those already gathered.
The pastoral care, the welcome God gives, is extended to all peoples. I don’t think that means everyone has to be converted to Christianity, I think it is an extension of the attributes of the Good Shepherd: where you see acts of mercy, acts of healing, acts of restoration and concern for the weakest in society, there you see God. There is a Christian flock and there are other flocks, but they are recognised as belonging to the Good Shepherd because they hear his voice, and his voice says do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God; and to the weak his voice says ‘come to me and be loved’. That is the call that unites, that is what allows sheep of many flocks to come together and share a pasture land peacefully, that is the meeting point.
Importance of OT
I am trying to show how much more we can get out of the gospel message by letting it open windows for us into the Old Testament and Apocrypha. The New Testament does not silence the Old; it does not mean the Old is no longer relevant. I have talked about two dimensions to the Good Shepherd that we only get if we look at the prophets: justice, and God’s care of all peoples. There is more, we could go deeper given time, but it is enough I think to accept that by doing what Paul says, and trying to take on the mind of Christ, we have to think about the prophets. It’s not that Jesus has a tick-list of things that need fulfilling: I’ve done the donkey ride, I’ve done the cleansing of the temple, I’ve done the healing … what next? No. Jesus knows the mind of God. He discerns the true voice of God running through the scriptures that he loves, and he lives out his interpretation.
This is big stuff, about world politics and global interfaith dialogue. But it does not mean that we lose the personal. Our God is bigger that we can ever know, but it is still also true that God notices the one who strays from a flock of a hundred, and goes to search. Every single one counts. Not a sparrow falls from the sky without God knowing.
Personal relevance
So what does all this mean for us personally? The first thing is about leadership. It’s easy to create a them-and-us scenario, where the bad leaders are them, and the indignant righteous are us. Sometimes we really are at the receiving end of things we don’t like, and often we see terrible injustices that we know are wrong, and that seem very hard to change. But any free citizen in this land also has some power. The majority of us have a voice, we have choices, we have the right to vote, we have consumer-power, we have massive impact on the environment. We have access to a huge abundance of resources, and we have opportunities to develop our lives in many directions. The easy part is pointing the finger at world and local leaders, the harder part is looking at our own part.
Take those muddied rivers of Ezekiel: When you drink of clear water, must you foul the rest with your feet? And must my sheep eat what you have trodden with your feet and drink what you have fouled with your feet? … you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide…
I think of waste dumped in the sea, pesticides from farming, seeping into the rivers. I think of people in other places, drinking water polluted by companies maybe I am giving money to, by buying their products. I think of rivers running dry, land turning to desert because the rivers are drying up, I think of the rainforests being felled, … the climate changing, and what it means: you don’t need to be a prophet to predict that people are going to die of thirst — already they are dying of thirst — that there are going to be wars over water rights and access to arable land … And must my sheep eat what you have trodden with your feet and drink what you have fouled with your feet?
Again, I see the sheep struggling at the food-trough, and I know there is enough for them all, if all take equally. This world, they say, could feed everyone, if everyone moderated their eating in the right way.
You eat the fat … you clothe yourselves with the wool … you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them.
I play my part in the pollution, the exploitation of people and the land, the waste of water, and suddenly I am not so confident about my righteousness, my safety when it comes to the sheep and the goats. I might say I like God’s principles of healing, justice and peace, but is that what I really live?
Those words in Matthew, where he is talking about God’s chosen one dividing the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25:31—33, 41—45) — Matthew wants us to think of Ezekiel’s sheep: he wants us to look at our own lives and see how it relates to us, on the small scale of our lives:
… ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’
The Good Shepherd reminds me of the call Jesus begins his ministry with, the same call as John the Baptist: ‘Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.’ It is a call to acknowledge our part in the messiness and the violence, and change not just once but over and over again.
Seeking the lost
But, and this is a big but, Jesus is the Good Shepherd who comes to look for the lost, not just the ones lost in fear, lost in bewilderment, lost in confusion and anger, lost in their own smallness and insignificance, but also to the ones who are lost in their small-minded selfishness, their luxury, their comfort, their materialism and consumerism, and in their complacency. We are complex characters. We — I — can be lost in so many ways. And the Good Shepherd comes looking for us. God is a God who seeks us out tirelessly, who wants relationship with us. So what is our response? ‘Go away, I don’t believe in you’? ‘ Leave me alone’? ‘ Wait, I haven’t finished exploring yet’? ‘No thanks I’ll find my own way’? ‘ I am not worthy, I’ll stay where I am’? or ‘Thank you, please take me home’? I have heard myself saying all of those things. But there is not a once-only opportunity. The Good Shepherd waits. Remember 2 Peter 3:9 — The Lord is not slow about his promise as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish but all to come to repentance.
The call to discipleship
Well, Jesus says his own sheep know his voice when he calls. What is it we should be listening out for? I can single out three things, I think.
- There is a call to do divine acts, to work for justice, healing and peace, and this includes siding with the weak sheep, the little ones, to make way for them at the feeding trough so they can get their health and their strength back. They are God’s little ones.
- There is a call to look at those who wield power, and to be the voice of prophecy alive today, that speaks against injustice and oppression. But there is also a call to look at our own power and how we use it, to repent of our failings and to change for the better.
- And there is a call to recognise our own need for, our hunger for, the Messiah—Shepherd, our hunger for God, who comes to look for us when we are lost, because we are lost, and brings and will bring us back into love.
There seems so much to keep in mind, yet everything is summed up. I think, by one simpler call of Jesus the Good Shepherd, one with God, Messiah, servant Son of God, and that call is as potent and urgent as it was to his disciples in the first century:
‘Follow me.’
Copyright © 2007 Annie Heppenstall
This page was last updated on Sunday, 6 May 2007
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