Today is Good Shepherd Sunday. Last week, it was the Road to Emmaus Sunday.
Today, after a brief detour last Sunday in Luke’s Gospel, we’re back to reading John’s Gospel. In fact, in all three years of our lectionary cycle, throughout the seasons of Lent and Easter, almost all the Gospel readings are from John.
I could be wrong, but it seems like those who designed the lectionary felt John had something special to say about Jesus’ death and resurrection. Perhaps they were hoping that, by hearing John’s Gospel, we might experience the Risen Christ in our lives.
That may be why, in all three years, the Fourth Sunday of Easter is Good Shepherd Sunday. In years two and three, we will hear the verses that follow today’s reading, when Jesus keeps talking about the Good Shepherd.
Yet the point of today’s Gospel reading isn’t that Jesus is the Good Shepherd, nor is it that we are the lucky sheep.
Rather, today we are invited to hear and see the Risen Christ in our Eucharistic community – to see God’s new life at work in each other. In this community, we experience and practice God’s love, the self-renewing love that literally flows and breathes into us from Jesus’ death and resurrection.
John’s Gospel tells us that Jesus uses the “Good Shepherd” as a figure of speech, an image field. Jesus uses this figure of speech because he is talking to the Pharisees and Jews.
Our reading today is part of a larger section of John’s Gospel. In chapter 9, Jesus heals the man born blind from birth. We heard this as the Gospel reading for the Fifth Sunday in Lent.
But some Pharisees are upset that Jesus claims that this healing proves that he, Jesus, is from God. John’s first readers would see this point more clearly because the pool where Jesus sent the blind man to wash his eyes was called Siloam, the “sent one.”
In response, Jesus tells the Pharisees that they are blind. They have refused to see that Jesus is the Light of the World. In today’s reading, Jesus goes on to tell the Pharisees that they are the thieves and bandits who try to kill and destroy the sheep.
Here we need to say that the Pharisees and Jews in John’s Gospel are not those devout and respected lay religious people active at the time of Jesus. Jesus and the Pharisees were, in one sense, on the same side. The real enemies in Jesus’ time were the Romans – along with some co-opted religious leaders – who enforced a brutal occupation.
A better way to understand all this is to see that in John – and in Matthew, from which we’ve been reading in Year A – Pharisees and Jews are interchangeable, and they serve as stock characters who represent the central conflict in the drama (almost Greek-like) that John presents.
The purpose of all this is to encourage us to confess that we are the Pharisees and Jews. We are blind from birth, and we hold on to the privilege of our ancestors. We are prisoners of our upbringing, of our past experience, or nostalgia for the days our youth.
Because of our blindness, we have been exiled from the sheepfold. The image from Psalm 23 recalls the great garden – Eden. Adam and Eve were exiled from that garden. The people of Israel were exiled from Egypt and wandered in the wilderness. The Israelites and the Judeans were exiled by the Assyrians and Babylonians. In Jesus’ day and in the days of John’s Gospel, they were exiled in their own country under Roman occupation.
Today, we too are exiled into an era of corruption and war, of cruelty and divisiveness. We live in time of unending uncertainty and ceaseless anxiety.
This passage from chapter 10 is, in a real sense, the gate that opens to the second half of John’s Gospel. As we go out through the gate, following the Good Shepherd, we discover that we are following him to death – his own death and ours. In the verses that following immediately, Jesus tells us that the good shepherd lays down his life – a foreshadowing of the crucifixion.
Then as Jesus leads us further, in chapter 11, we have the foreshadowing – a practice run, if you will – of the resurrection in the raising of Lazarus. Here we have been led into green pastures, back to the garden of Eden.
Later, in chapter 20, we find ourselves with Mary – in another garden – where the Risen Christ calls her – and us – by name. Then, later the same day, Jesus asks Thomas – and us – to put our hands in his wounds. Jesus urges us to keep trusting what the Apostles and those after them tell us about this new life.
All of this is meant to take us out of our minds: we are being moved to hear, see, and touch the Risen Christ.
Right now, our heads are spinning and our hearts are racing. We worry about the future, we re-live past events, and we struggle to respond to the violence and poverty that have been unleashed.
Some of us – all of us? – get up in the morning determined to figure this out, do something to make it all better – or, at least, to not let all this “get to us.”
But today’s Gospel promises us that as we hear Jesus’ voice, as we keep our eyes on focused on each other. And then we realize that, alone, we can never figure all this out. By ourselves, we can never make it better. Left to own devices, what’s going on in the world will get to us.
The good news is that, when Jesus opens the gate and welcomes us into this new community, we are led into green pastures beside the still waters.
In his account in of the feeding of the 5,000, John goes on for 71 verses. Mark takes a mere 14 verses. Only in John’s account do we hear there was lots of grass where the people were fed. That’s the pasture where the Good Shepherd leads us. In this Eucharistic community, there are huge cisterns of the best wine, gushing water, and an endless supply of the Bread of Life.
The gardens that surround our sanctuary here at the corner of Washington and Curtis are green and beautiful. And, inside, this gathering today is lively and joyous. Here we experience the abundant life.
What makes our life together so abundant is not so much amount – we aren’t a large and wealthy gathering – but rather, as the Greek word for abundantly implies, our abundance something that happens over and over, again and again. Week after week, we hear and speak, sing and pray – and again and again, we see God’s love at work among us.
Our first reading from Acts 2 says it best:
Those who had been baptized devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.
Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.
