Acts 4:7-12; 1 John 3:1-2; John 10:11-18; Psalm 118
April 25, 2021
Larry Campbell
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing to you, our Shepherd, our Rock, and our Redeemer.
The gospel reading for today is a well-known passage. It’s full of “metaphor”. I love metaphor.
A Metaphor is a word-picture, often found in literature, that describes a person, place or thing, by referring to … anything; a sound, a memory, a feeling – that helps us understand, just a little better, something about the object of the metaphor.
Here’s an example... “the mind is an ocean”. The statement is using a picture of the vastness of the ocean, to give a particular understanding of the mind. Here’s a few others…
“the mind is a computer”;
“the mind is a labyrinth”;
“the mind is a battlefield”;
“the mind is a filing cabinet”;
Each of these metaphors tells us something different about the mind…except maybe the computer and the filing cabinet – it kind of depends what the writer is trying to convey, but even those two metaphors can conjure up pictures each of which that show us something quite different about the mind.
Jesus used metaphors all the time to describe something about himself and what he was all about. In our reading today, he used the image of a Shepherd. Jesus said that some shepherds would run away whenever there was any danger. And believe me, back then there was always danger. We’ve heard the stories of king David; about when he was a shepherd boy. There was an instance when his flock of sheep was attacked by a lion and David fought it and killed it. And once a bear came and snatched one of the sheep and carried it away. David chased the bear down and rescued the sheep right out of the bear’s mouth. There’s no way a hired hand would put life and limb on the line just to save the boss’s sheep. It would be better to lose a day’s wage, or even lose the job, than to lose one’s life for something as insignificant as a sheep. But the sheep aren’t insignificant to the one to whom the sheep belong.
Anyway, I love metaphor.
I love liturgy as well; we read a group of passages from the bible that are also being read at the same time by Christians from Bolivia to Athens, from Vilnius to New York, from Dartmouth to Iqaluit. But I think we can miss something when we read these passages broken up as they are for our weekly readings.
For instance, to whom is Jesus speaking here when he’s talking about the Good Shepherd. I have often pictured him talking with his disciples in a quiet place, similar to what we saw a couple weeks ago when we read about the last supper.
That’s not the case here. The reading today is from John chapter 10. But if we go back to John chapter 8, we read that Jesus confronted some Pharisees at the temple. He made a comment about how Abraham rejoiced when he saw him. Someone in the crowd responded, “You’re not even 50 years old, and you say you’ve seen Abraham?”
Then John had Jesus make this profound and confusing statement...
“Before Abraham was, I AM”.
Remember, God said the same phrase to Moses when Moses was afraid the people of Israel would not see him as a leader. God said, “I AM WHO I AM. Tell the Israelites, “I AM has sent me to you.” Well, the people that Jesus was talking to, flew into a fit that was close to becoming a mob riot. They actually picked up stones to hurl at Jesus, to put him to death for blasphemy. But somehow, Jesus slipped away.
On his way, he came upon a man born blind (we read this in chapter 9). Jesus said,
“We must do the work of the One who sent me as long as it is day; night is coming when no one can work. But while I am in the world, I AM the light of the world.”
Then, we read, Jesus healed the blind beggar.
It was the Sabbath. The pharisees already decreed that if anyone said that Jesus is the Christ, they would be thrown out of the synagogue, excommunicated. In their minds, (“The mind is a dark and devious place”) ...to them Jesus was a trouble maker, and anyone who could do this sorcery must be from the devil. When the he-was-once-blind man was asked who it was that healed him, the man said, “I don’t know. All I know is, I was blind, now I see. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing...”
And he was promptly tossed out of the synagogue, presumably for lecturing the leaders.
Jesus heard about this, went in search of the no-longer-blind man and found him. They had a conversation and the looking-for-a-new-church man proclaimed that he believed in Jesus.
“Believe”. What does it even mean? In the original language, the word for “believe” suggests that the one who is doing the act of ‘believing’ does so because he was persuaded to believe...for the once-I-was-blind-but-now-I-can-see man, you can imagine that this grace would be amazing enough for him to say “Whoever you are, I believe in you.”
Jesus said, “I have come into the world so that those who do not see, may see, and those who do see, may become blind.” There were some Pharisees there who had followed Jesus. I'm guessing they were probably pretty intent on exacting some sort of penalty for all the things he was saying. They kind of smirked and said, “Surely, you’re not suggesting that we are blind too!” And Jesus said, “If you were blind, you would have an excuse for how badly you’ve missed the mark here. But since you say, “We’re not blind”, there is no excuse; you have totally missed the mark.
Jesus was making a very definite point to the Pharisees when he began to talk about being the Good Shepherd.
When I was in eastern Europe, I stayed with a young family. The man worked downtown but like everyone else, he had a cow. Every morning on his way to catch the commuter train to the office, he would walk his cow down to the local community field. When he was done work, he would come home by train, stop by the community field, get his cow, and bring her home to the little stable out behind the house. This is the kind of arrangement Jesus was thinking of when he spoke about the sheepfold.
He said, “Anyone who enters the sheepfold any other way than through the gate is a thief and a robber. The one who enters through the gate is the shepherd. The doorkeeper opens the door and the shepherd enters, calls out his sheep and they come to him, because they know him...they know his voice.
This metaphor seems pretty clear to us, I’m sure, but the Pharisees claimed they didn’t get it. So Jesus said,
“OK. Listen. I AM the door of the sheepfold. Those who came before me were thieves and robbers, and the sheep don’t recognize their voices. The thief only comes into the sheepfold to steal and kill and destroy...I come so that these sheep may have a life that has more joy than they can handle...”
or as the Apostle Paul, and some of our liturgy, puts it, “more than we could ask or imagine.”
Then Jesus said,
“I AM the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand will run away as soon as he sees the wolf prowling around. He doesn’t really care about the sheep. But I AM the Good Shepherd, I know my own, and my own know me. I lay down my life for the sheep. They know that. And they feel safe.”
So, what do we have here…? Three metaphors that Jesus used to give us a glimpse about who he is…
Jesus said, “I AM the Light of the World”; and then he turned around and gave sight to the it’s-the-first-time-I’ve-seen-anything man.
Jesus said, “I AM the Door”; as he pointed out to the Pharisees that he was the way that the sheep move out to green pastures, and home to safety.
Jesus said, “I AM the Good Shepherd”; He was saying, “I am the one who will die for you. The hired hand will not feed you what you need and keep you safe.” I think in this last parable, Jesus was implying that the Pharisees were the thieves that “steal, kill and destroy”. They will abuse their religious power, making life for their people full of judgment, not full of joy.
So the question for me is;
Is Jesus’ light shining in my life? Has my blindness been wiped away by Jesus, the Light, the One through whom God has defeated death, darkness and fear?
Is Jesus the Door for me? Do I experience peace because it’s through Jesus that I am fed and sheltered and have my being?
Is Jesus the Good Shepherd to me? The One who said he would die to keep me safe?
Have I seen enough to say, “Who are you, that I might believe? I have been persuaded by the beauty in your creation, and your love for the world. I entrust my soul to you, O, Light of the world, O, Door to my home, O, my Good, Good Shepherd.