Acts ; Psalm 23; 1 John ; John Good Shepherd Sunday. It is always the Fourth Sunday of Easter, and each

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1 Page 1 of 5 Acts ; Psalm 23; 1 John ; John Good Shepherd Sunday. It is always the Fourth Sunday of Easter, and each year of the lectionary cycle we get a reading from the Tenth Chapter of John s Gospel. Each of the three readings is familiar, which makes preaching a challenge. Many a church window portrays Jesus with a lamb slung across his shoulders. We tend to romanticize the image as we conveniently ignore the portion of the story in which Jesus declares that the good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. We also forget that the life of a shepherd was no walk in the park. It was lonely, dangerous, undesirable work. Shepherds were dirty and smelly since they spend virtually all their time in the company of sheep rather than the rich and famous. For Jesus to say, therefore, that I am the good shepherd would offend the religious establishment. As one commentator notes, the claim had an edge to it. 1 An equivalent claim in our day might be if Jesus said, I am the good undocumented worker. The other thing we do besides romanticizing the story of the good shepherd is that we engage in contrasts. We hear the word good and we immediately think of the opposite, bad. However, the Greek word, kalos, that is translated as good is more accurately translated as model.

2 Page 2 of 5 Jesus is the model good shepherd described in Jewish scripture. A model shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. A model shepherd knows his sheep and they know him. 2 Jesus contrasts himself as the good shepherd with the hired hand who runs away because he does not care for the sheep. And the sheep know the difference between the good shepherd and the hired hand. Who is Jesus talking about, we might ask. To answer that question it is helpful to look at the backstory to this morning s reading. If we go backward in John s Gospel to Chapter 8 we find out that Jesus s audience includes the scribes and Pharisees and his disciples, including Judas. Jesus enters the temple and begins to teach. The scribes and Pharisees bring a woman forward and in front of the whole gathered crowd they accuse her of adultery. The law of Moses, they tell Jesus, requires that the woman be stoned. What does he say? This, of course, is an attempt at trapping Jesus into saying something with which they can charge him. Jesus does not immediately respond and so the scribes and Pharisees press him for an answer. Finally, Jesus responds. Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her. Everyone except Jesus and the woman leave the temple. No one has condemned, her asks. No, sir, she replies. Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.

3 Page 3 of 5 Jesus has another confrontation with the temple establishment and in the course of the back-and-forth he declares, You know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me you would know my Father also. By the end of Chapter Eight Jesus is beating a swift retreat from the temple so as not to be stoned to death himself. The main event in Chapter Nine is Jesus healing of the man blind from birth. Jesus healed the man on the Sabbath, which sent the Pharisees into a fit of apoplexy. The Pharisees cross-examine the blind man s parents. They also cross-examine the blind man not once, but twice. They decide that Jesus is a sinner for having healed the man on the Sabbath. And the once-blind man has not given them the answers they want so they throw him out the temple. At the end of Chapter Nine Jesus notes that the Pharisees unbelief renders them blind even though they can see. Theirs is the sin of spiritual blindness. You see, the Pharisee s, the religious establishment, had come to believe they were the shepherds rather than the sheep. In reality they were nothing more than hired hands. When they looked at people they saw only an adulterer, only a man who must be a sinner or he would not be blind either that or his parents sin caused their son s blindness. The religious establishment did not really know the people to whom they purported to minister and they did not know their God either.

4 Page 4 of 5 The God they did not really know was not a God of who s in and who s out. The God they did not know saw the adulterous woman and the blind man as sheep for which he would lay down his life. The good shepherd Jesus knew his sheep the adulterous woman and the man blind from birth and they knew him. The lesson for us is to realize that we are all sheep and Jesus is our shepherd. He laid down his life for us. He knows us by name. Even when we err and stray from his ways like lost sheep our Lord, the Good Shepherd finds us and returns us to his fold. Jesus tells us that he has other sheep that do not belong to his fold. He must bring them also, and they like we will listen to his voice. Maybe we know some of those people. Perhaps they are children or grandchildren who we wish attended church but do not. Perhaps they are friends who no longer identify as Christian. Perhaps they are people who have been so battered by life that they feel unworthy of God s love. Whatever the case, it makes us anxious. We want people in the pews again. But we need not worry. We may not know what God has in store for those who are not in the fold. But we know our Good Shepherd; he knows us, and he calls us by name. Let us therefore trust that the Good Shepherd extends his love and mercy to all people no matter where they are in life. For surely goodness and mercy shall follow all of us all the days of our lives and we all of the Good Shepherd s sheep will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.

5 Page 5 of 5 1 David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, Editors. Feasting on the Word Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B, Volume 2 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), p Ibid. p Trinity Episcopal Church Bay City, MI Sunday, April 26, 2015 Easter 4B