Nehemiah 9:6-15
Acts 6:1-9; 7:2a,51-60
John 10:1-10
Psalm 23
The Good Shepherd is one of the most beloved Christian images. Some of the earliest Christian art we possess depicts Jesus as a shepherd with a lamb on his shoulders. It is one of the most beloved Jewish images, too. God is often portrayed in the Old Testament as the shepherd of Israel: for example, when God says through the prophet Ezekiel, "I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out." When God says in the same passage that "I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down," we hear an echo of the words of the beloved Psalm 23, which we pray today: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures . . . ."
The prophet Isaiah also speaks of God the Good Shepherd: "He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep." These are the words set to music in Handel's Messiah, and they have inspired many a stained-glass window (for a local example, visit the Church of the Good Samaritan in Sauk Centre). During the season of Advent we often pray Psalm 80, which begins: "Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who lead Joseph like a flock! . . . Stir up your might, and come to save us!"
So it would not have sounded strange to Jesus' Jewish friends to hear "I am the Good Shepherd." It might have been shocking at first to hear it from the lips of a mortal human being-but when they encountered the Risen Jesus, their hearts told them that it was true: this Jesus, whom they had known and who was still the same Jesus, even though raised in glory, could speak to them with the voice of God and say: "I am the Good Shepherd."
It is not so easy for us modern people, though, to accept the idea of God, or Jesus, as shepherd-if that means that we are the sheep. Who wants to be a sheep? (raise your hands!) Sheep are not terribly bright animals; if you don't personally know any sheep, a movie like "Babe" gives a pretty clear picture of their nature. There was actually a shepherd, with a big cloak and a crook and a flock of sheep, who was part of the scenery in the German town I lived in during the 1980s. Every once in a while, when I was riding the bus home, we would have to stop for five minutes or so while the shepherd led his sheep across the busy street, going from one pasture to another within the city limits. It was certainly picturesque, but I never wanted to get off the bus and join them.
Sheep have to be taken care of; they have to be led; if they fasten on the wrong leader, they can run right off a cliff without looking back. Who wants to be like that?
The last thing we modern people want is to be thought stupid or gullible, to be led around by someone else and told what to do, even if it's "for our own good." We value our freedom, our autonomy, above everything else. That's probably the worst thing about being in the hospital: having to do everything on somebody else's schedule, follow orders, do what's "good for us" whether we feel like it or not. We certainly would be insulted if anybody out-and-out called us "sheep." And yet we get sorta warm and fuzzy at that image of the Good Shepherd. One part of us wants to be free; another part wants to be protected and held and kept safe.
I want to tell you, though, that the claim Jesus makes in this gospel passage is even stronger than that of being our warm and loving protector. What he claims is that he OWNS US. Check it out: "I know my own, and my own know me . . . I lay down my life for the sheep." Jesus says that he has freely laid down his life in order to lay claim to "his own." He has claimed us as his own by giving himself; and from that point on we are irrevocably his. The priest signs us with the cross in baptism and says: "You are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ's own forever." We can belong to no one but the one who has paid the price for us-or at any rate, we cannot legitimately belong to anyone or anything else.
This sounds even worse than being sheep; the gospel's claim, and the church's claim, is that we are owned by Jesus Christ! That really rubs against the independent, individualist grain of twenty-first century westerners. But think about it for a while: which of us is entirely free, not owned by someone or something? Remember what Jesus says elsewhere in the gospel: "no one can serve two masters." He doesn't say that any of us can be without a master, only that we cannot serve two. The implication is that we will serve one, and the only question is: which one?
The struggle for mastery is going on all around us, and within us. Not so long ago a huge cable company (Time-Warner) tried to assert mastery over a broadcast network (ABC-Disney) by refusing to carry its signal unless it paid them more money. Millions of people were affected-and who knows what the long-term effects might be? Why, people might even turn off the TV and start reading books!
In our own families, children assert their independence of their parents, too often, by enslaving themselves to other masters: drugs or alcohol, for example. Maybe some of us have done that, or had that happen in our families. Employers manipulate their employees, taking away bits and pieces of their control over their working hours, narrowing the range of their financial choices-by threatening to take away their jobs altogether and transfer them overseas, to countries where people, even little children, are as truly slaves as any people have ever been in the history of the world. Those are some of the forms that mastery takes in our world, the world in which we place so much value on freedom. It turns out that "freedom" is mostly a little leeway to choose which master we will serve.
So here is a task for us, as people living in the world beyond Easter: let us use this Easter season as a time to take stock of our lives, and to admit to ourselves who our ruler and guide, our master, really is: the Good Shepherd, or the hired hand-or someone or something still worse? We are moving through the Easter time, toward the feast of Pentecost when we celebrate God's gift to us of the Holy Spirit. Will we accept that gift? It is a serious decision, because to accept the Holy Spirit is to bind ourselves irrevocably-no turning back-to the one master who has laid down his life to claim us.