Good morning!
It surely made me smile when I realized I would begin my ministry at St Margaret’s on Good Shepherd’s Sunday…I hope it’s setting us up for a good start and I take this opportunity to tell you how excited I am to be here, with a special thanks for calling me to be your priest and pastor. You probably know that indeed, we call our priests “pastors” or we talk about “pastoral ministry” because of this image of Jesus as the good shepherd: We are invited to model our leadership and service based on his example.
Of course, John probably didn’t have that in mind when he wrote his Gospel. At the time, in Israel, and in the Bible, a “shepherd” was an image people would use to talk about kings. The kings were the “shepherds” of Israel, and it is an expectation in the Bible that the kings would do “what is right in the eyes of the LORD” when they lead the people. Unfortunately, as you probably know, it often just did not happen: the shepherds often turned out to be “not so good” or even “terrible” shepherds and it brought all sort of calamities on the people – You can read about that in the Books of Kings and in the Prophets. One good example of terrible shepherds would be the infamous King Ahab and Queen Jezebel.
But here is the question John asks for us today is: What kind of shepherd is Jesus? We know from many passages in the Gospel that it wasn’t Jesus’s ambition to become a king. When confronted to Pilate, and we read that during Holy week, not that long ago, Jesus insists that “[his] kingdom isn’t from this world”. So Jesus isn’t here to compete with the “shepherds of Israel”, proving himself a good leader as opposed to the bad leaders the people had before him. In John’s, Jesus proves himself to be a good shepherd as opposed to the hired hand. And I think this difference can help us a lot to understand what we talk about when we talk about Jesus as the good shepherd.
The good shepherd is not a hired hand. We know that the hired hand is not here to stay. But more than that, the way the hired hand is described in Jesus’s words, is that the hired hand does the job, yet he will run away when comes danger or adversity. And the hired hand runs away because he does not really care for his sheep. His life is more important to him than his flock. On the other way around, and Jesus repeats that five times, the shepherd is the one who “lays down his life”, the one who gives his life for the sheep.
And before we even enter more deeply in the meaning of this image, I would like to notice with you how beautiful it is that Jesus would say such a thing, that he is the one who does not run away. Think about it: The one who does not run away when there is danger or adversity. To me, when Jesus says that, it really connects to some deep longing we may have within our hearts. How many among us have ever been afraid of just that, that those we love would run away, let us down if something bad was to happen: Will my friends be there for me when I am sick? Will my spouse be there for me if I lose my job? Will my children be there for me when I am old? Or will they all abandon me?
Jesus promises his disciples – and he promises us – that he will always be there for them, and for us. And it is really something we can hear in this Easter season, and we will hear it again and again in the coming weeks: Jesus dies, leaves his disciples, only to be even more present than he used to be. Not just to be among them for a little while on earth, but ultimately to be with them spiritually and take them with him to the Father.
Sadly, often, it is something that may take a life time to realize – that Jesus is the faithful companion always present, because we don’t really understand what the shepherding is about. We think that if God does not answer our prayers the way we want to, God has forgotten about us, and we are so focused on our frustrated desires or even our very legitimate suffering, that we fail to see the companionship and the many ways Jesus makes himself present to us, to comfort us and support us, but also to lead us into spiritual maturity and into a bigger life. I have a friend who said she realized that when she lost her job. She said at the beginning all she could see and think about was that God needed to provide her a new job. But little by little, she opened her eyes on the love and care she was surrounded with by her friends and neighbors and how it made all the difference in this difficult time that turned out to be much longer than what they had all expected. Her prayer was answered in a very different way than what she had expected, but she said that it was much more precious to have received so much love along the way.
Jesus talks to us the language of the heart when he says he would never leave us, and he invites us to have a conversation, a real companionship, he invites us to experience his presence day by day. And so, back to our first question, Jesus does not describe himself as the “good shepherd” versus the “bad shepherds”, Jesus is not just “not an unfair ruler”. Jesus describes himself as the “good shepherd” versus the “hired hand”: Jesus is the one who cares, as opposed to all those who do not care.
Jesus cares. He says he cares about his sheep right there and about all the other sheep, and he cares so much that their lives are more important to him than his own. Do we really believe this? That Jesus does not have “more important things to do” (as I hear so often) than caring for us, that Jesus cares for every one of us, and he cares for those we care for, and he also cares for those we don’t care about?
And so maybe that’s what we need to hear today. If Jesus is the shepherd in the sense that Jesus cares, what does it mean for us? According to the passage of the first Letter of John we have just heard, if we’d really believed that, first it would change the way we pray (and we have just talked about that) we would pray with boldness and truth, knowing that in our relationship with him we would receive what we ask for, and it would also change the way we behave: We would love in truth and action, says John in his Letter, which means: we would care.
There is a quotation by Mandy Hale I really love. She says: “To make a difference in someone’s life you don’t have to be brilliant, rich, beautiful or perfect. You just have to care.” And it’s so true, isn’t it? So much of our time is spent trying to be brilliant, rich, beautiful or perfect hoping to “make a difference” when the only difference we can make is by caring, wherever we are and whatever we do. Students want to have a teacher who cares. Patients want to have a doctor who care. Citizens want to have a President who care. We don’t necessarily expect them to have a Nobel or a Phd. We just want them to care! Even when we call the help desk, we hope that the technician will care! It’s the same with parenting. Parents who make a difference for their children aren’t the parents who are perfect. Parents who make a difference are the ones who care. There are so many people in the world who don’t care, what if we were the ones who make a difference, not necessarily by doing something extraordinary, or even by being extraordinarily “good people” as opposed to those who are “bad people”, but what if we’d make a difference by being those who care in the name of the Good Shepherd?
Maybe you have read Bishop Curry’s last book “Love is the way”. One of the things he says which I think is very important is that in the end, in his ministry of shepherding, as a priest, bishop and now Presiding Bishop, he understood that all he had to do what to do his job! And he says it is true for all of us. He says: “None of us can know where our witness to love might lead – what light we might bring to the world. Our job is to do our job, and to let God do God’s job.” Do your job – not as the hired hand, who sees only his own profit. Do your job as the shepherd who cares deeply. Amen.