Of Shepherd and Sheep

The Fourth Sunday of Easter, April 25, 2021.

Today's annual "Vocation Sunday" Gospel's image of Jesus, the Good Shepherd [John 10:11-18], is a very familiar and popular one – even, it seems, in our modern, urbanized society, in which most of us obviously are not shepherds and mostly know next to nothing about sheep. What we do all know, of course, is that the luckier sheep live to provide us with wool, while the other sheep become lamb chops.

For all its obvious ambiguity, the ruler-as-shepherd image is an ancient one, at least as ancient as Plato. That, I suspect, may be precisely what makes Jesus so special as a shepherd. This shepherd lays down his life for the sheep – a somewhat unexpected reversal of roles, a reversal of roles which brings about a new kind of relationship between the shepherd and his sheep.

In most ancient pagan religious understandings, one of the things that most seemed to distinguish the gods from us was that the gods enjoyed a greatly envied freedom from death - in contrast to our own inescapable human mortality. But, by becoming one of us himself and experiencing our human predicament by his voluntary death, Jesus overcame that separation between God and us, and so reversed not just the traditional job descriptions of shepherd and sheep, but also the pagan idea that human beings exist, like sheep, simply to serve for the satisfaction of the gods.

It even turns out, furthermore, that God actually takes satisfaction precisely in this reversal. This is why the Father loves me, Jesus says, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. So an age-old separation has been overcome, and something new has happened in our world. A brand new connection has been created between God and us by the death and resurrection of the Good Shepherd, who accepted the limits of our mortal life in order to bring us, together with him, to something new beyond those limits.

Now that’s all well and good, but didn’t it happen such a long time ago? And not much really seems to have changed in the world since then, has it? After all, as the 6th-century Saint Anastasius of Antioch famously said, apropos our Easter faith, people still die and bodies still decay in death. And all we have to do is tune in to the news to see how the same sad patterns keep repeating themselves - killings by police, for example, to mention just one obvious example of a long-standing serious American social problem very much in the news right now. 

Easter comes and goes, year-in and year-out, and it all begins to sound routine, doesn’t it? If anything the routine is reinforced in our churches and parishes and parish schools by the predictable repetition of the annual activities and events that routinely recur to punctuate this season. (Of course, now that I am no longer involved in parish life and no longer mark the routine passage of time by the annual recurrence of precisely those predictable activities and events, I miss them all very much!)

In any case, there was certainly nothing routine about Peter’s sermon in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles [Acts 4:8-12], in the aftermath of the first post-Pentecost miracle, an amazing cure which Peter somewhat modestly called a good deed done to a cripple. It all happened, Peter proclaimed, in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, whom God raised from the dead … ‘the stone rejected by the builders, which has become the cornerstone.” There is no salvation through anyone else, nor is there any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved.”

What a claim! The sheer boldness of it – that humanity can be saved and that Jesus Christ is its one and only savior!

Recognizing the boldness of that claim and taking it seriously – making it our own claim – is what Easter time is all about. Admittedly, given the inevitable limits of our attention, it takes considerable effort to keep up that Easter enthusiasm – to keep it from wilting along with the Easter flowers in last week's cold snap!

And so we have to make the effort, a conscious and deliberate effort, to take seriously directions the calendar gives us and so celebrate Easter for seven wonderful weeks, during which we recall the fervor of those first new Christians, who were transformed forever by the presence and power of the Risen Lord, experienced in the here and now in his word and in the Church's sacraments. And we see how eager they were to share that experience with everyone around them – an eagerness we need to learn from, for each of us is also being propelled by the power of the Easter story to trust in its power to transform the world. For, as Peter’s sermon makes clear, the universal power of Jesus’ name is not limited or constrained by any human failure to hear it.

Jesus himself says he has other sheep that do not belong to this fold. These also he must lead, and they will hear his voice. The Savior of the world calls all people to his Father, as he continually transforms the world through the uniquely saving power of his death and resurrection. In Jesus, God can now be found in every aspect of human life, in places and people where one might least expect, in situations which our limited imaginations may even turn into obstacles to God’s presence - itself also a particularly apt lesson for Vocation Sunday.

Our mission, the mission of the Church animated by the power of the Risen Christ, is to go beyond the limits of our imaginations, and become, like the otherwise ordinary people whose story is told in the Acts of the Apostles, effective witnesses to God’s saving power in our desperately needy world.

And all this we have to do together, as the Risen Lord's Church. We can’t be seriously spiritual without being really religious.