My sheep
hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and
they will never perish.
Today is
called Good Shepherd Sunday in the life of the church. The readings for the Fourth Sunday of Easter
traditionally focus on the “good shepherd” sayings of Jesus, which of course
come with a side order of Psalm 23 and passages from the New Testament which emphasis
Jesus’ role as saviour and protector of the faithful.
It’s a
pleasing work of the Spirit (I prefer that phrase to the word coincidence) that
this particular Sunday comes just after word that the Roman Catholic Church has
selected a new Pope, Leo XIV, and that this event should come less than a week
after we heard in church, on the Third Sunday of Easter, Jesus tell Peter three
times to feed and look after his sheep.
We are thus
reminded that just as God in Christ protects and cares for the faithful, so God’s
church is called to protect and care for those who have no one else to speak
for them. Good Shepherd Sunday ties
together the sheep and shepherd imagery in scripture to reassure us that God is
not detached but is engaged with us, that God is not absent but is present, invested,
and attentive, deeply invested in our loves, and that God knows us intimately,
understanding our weakness and committed to our welfare. If you watched the crowds in St Peter’s Square
in Rome rejoicing as the new pope was announced and then seen, I think you were
seeing that deep human need to be cared for that is at the heart of faith and indeed
of our human identity.
All of the
ideas that are central to our faith – nourishment, protection, nurturing, companionship
and love– are basic human needs, and if you’ve ever studied Mazlow’s theory of
the hierarchy of human needs, they are fundamental to our wellbeing. Just as sheep need a shepherd to lead them
to pasture, water, and to protect them from predators, so do humans need food,
shelter from the elements, and perhaps even more importantly, others who will help
see to our emotional wellbeing and give us purpose.
We want our
basic needs looked after, but as humans, if we are fortunate, we can find our
greatest satisfaction in caring for others – ailing partners, children and grandchildren,
strangers in distress to who we can be good Samaritans, even and (maybe
especially!) our pets. Collingwood, being a wealthy town, has no
shortage of pet stores where you can buy all manner of high end things for your
pets. As you know, Joy and I have two
little terriers that rule our lives, and we’re fortunate that we can spend an
inordinate amount of money on looking after them. Their current dogfood has the words “Life
Protection Formula” in large letters on the bag. How satisfying for us that we can buy “Life Protection”
to our beloved dogs.
Protection from
harm is way up there in the hierarchy of human needs. We want to protect our pets, our families,
our pets, and we spend a lot of money in search of protection. If you’ve driven by All Saints at night, you’ll
see the new lighting that we’ve installed to make the church safer, and the new
intercom cameras so Nancy can see who wants into the building. But of course, the word “protection”, so beloved
of advertisers, has its limits. Your
insurance policy that should have protected you against disaster has its
loopholes. Your internet antivirus
software may protect you from hackers and identity theft, but who really
knows? And your virtuous lifestyle and
diet may not protect you against cancer.
Protection is an attractive idea, but we all know that life is
inherently risky, and no one gets out of it alive. The last time I checked, the mortality rate
was hovering at 100%.
So who
protects us? If you’re a sheep, your
best source of protection is your shepherd, someone who will provide for those
needs we spoke about – pasture, good water – and who will protect you from predators,
both two legged and four legged. If you’re
a sheep, a shepherd will also protect you from yourself. There’s a saying that the difference between
sheep and goats is that goats only think about escaping, and sheep only think
about ways to put themselves in fatal situations.
Today, on
Good Shepherd Sunday, we are reminded that Jesus can be our our shepherd if we wish to
follow him. We can follow him for many
reasons, to meet our many needs: to be
intimately known and loved in an age where so many feel lonely and anonymous,
to know what the good life looks like because of his teaching, and ultimately,
I think, because Jesus is life. The
ancient church had a phrase it used in worship, “In the midst of death, we are
in life”, and I think the idea there is why Good Shepherd Sunday falls during
the Easter season, as we try to figure out how the resurrection of Jesus
touches our own lives.
To
understand what I mean in saying that we follow Jesus because he is life, let’s
conclude these reflections with a brief look at today’s first reading, from
Acts. The apostle Peter has been summoned
to a town where one of the leading lights of the local church has passed away. Tabitha, or Dorcas to use her Greek name
(both names mean Gazelle) is the sort of faithful woman that any church would
love to have, someone “devoted to good
works and acts of charity”. But she has
died, leaving a huge hole and much grief in the community; the description of
widows holding the cloths that Tabitha made for them is a very real detail that
tugs at our hearts.
I don’t think
there’s a pastor alive who wouldn’t love to be able to do what Peter does, to heal
the sick and bring the dead back to life.
We would certainly be asked to do more hospital visits if that were the
case. But I think we need to resist the
temptation to think of this as a fantastic story. The Book of Acts has its place in scripture
because it describes the impact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, in the way
that a seismograph captures aftershocks following an earthquake, or in the way
that our eye registers the ripples moving out from a stone thrown into a pond.
Peter was in
that room with the disciples when the risen Christ appeared to them and breathed
on them, giving them the Holy Spirit. Acts
makes it plain that Peter is drawing on this power, because he puts the widows
out of the room and prays before he brings Tabitha back from the dead. Likewise, in an episode just before this one,
he tells a sick man to be healed “in the name of Jesus Christ”. Acts thus describes a vital power that flows
out of Jesus in the immediate aftermath of the resurrection that empowers the
apostles and brings enough people to faith to create the church. Indeed, one could fairly say that the biggest
miracle that Acts describes is not healings or resurrections, but the creation
of a church that has survived for all these centuries.
Even in the
first generations of the church, it became evident that believers would die,
either from sickness and age or from persecution. Our second reading from Revelation describes martyrs.
those who “have come out of the great ordeal”, who are now sheltered under the
throne of the Lamb who has himself been slaughtered, so that Jesus, himself crucified,
becomes the most powerful force in the universe, a force of life and love who
is both sacrificed sheep and protecting shepherd. The
message of Revelation is that whatever our fate, our faithful shepherd will
never let go of us, never let us be snatched away, either in this life or the
next.
When a church
is real, and not just a social club or a cultural experience, the living Christ
is at the centre of its life. That
living Christ, the voice of Jesus speaking to us in our scriptures and in our
hearts, calls us into an eternal life that begins now. I think Jesus’ promise of “eternal life so
that we may never perish” is not just the afterlife, but is also experienced in
the present. We find eternal life in
the knowledge that Jesus knows us completely and loves us, but that Jesus also
calls us to see others as he sees us, as individuals worthy of respect and
dignity. Jesus calls us to a life of
service, in which we realize our satisfaction from recognizing that the needs
of others are as great as our own, that we too can be shepherds to those around
us.
I started
this homily with a mention of the new pontiff, Pope Leo, and I’ll finish with another
reference to him. I read yesterday that
the reason Cardinal Prevost chose the name of Leo was in honour of Leo XIII,
who was alive when the industrial revolution of 1800s was impacting the lives
of millions. As the new pope said on
May 10, the church’s social teaching, which comes from the gospel of Jesus, speaks
to “another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial
intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity,
justice, and labour”. That word “defence” is important because it
speaks to the role of the shepherd as a protector, and reminds us that the
church’s role is to speak for and protect those who have no voice.
Good
Shepherd Sunday reminds us that we, as followers of Jesus, can be sheep when we
need to be, but can also be shepherds when we are called to be.