Good Shepherd Sunday: The Resurrected Christ — Our Good Shepherd
The Rev. Canon Tuck Bartholomew, the Canon for Church Planting in the Diocese of the Mid-Atlantic (our Diocese), visited this week and gave a wonderful sermon. Unfortunately, the audio recording did not work this week, so instead of an audio recording, we have a manuscript of the sermon below.
The Resurrected Christ — Our Good Shepherd
The Reverend Canon Tuck Bartholomew
John 10:1-10
Delivered 4/21/24
Introduction
This is the 4th Sunday of Easter where we celebrate 50 days of feasting as we learn to practice resurrection. This can be difficult in a world like ours in which suffering and injustice still feels far more normal than new creation.
Up to now we have mostly been in gospel stories of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances. These are stories of comfort, of assurance, of restoration (as with Peter), and they offer us a way to similarly enter into the joy of Jesus’ Resurrection amidst our own fears, anxieties, doubts, and struggles.
For the early church, these experiences anchored the imagination of their faith and practice not in optimistic thinking, but in the experience of Jesus back alive, bodily raised to life. Jesus wasn’t a ghost or a mere spiritual reflection on the life of someone they loved who has now passed.
Jesus is the Good Shepherd
And we notice that Jesus keeps talking about his wounds which remained discernibly present even after his body is transformed and changed in the resurrection (somehow he goes through doors and such). There is continuity in the story of Jesus’ life as one who suffered, or as today’s reading said, who lays down his life for the sheep, but who also took it back up in resurrection. It is by his wounds, his suffering and death, that we are healed. We find room for our wounds in his. I have been listening over and over to one of the songs from the Porter’s Gate collection, Sanctuary - Christ is lower still, and this one line in particular, “In his wounds I find room for all of mine; when from grace I fell, Christ was lower still.”
Today, Good Shepherd Sunday, in John 10, Jesus had described himself to the disciples as The Good Shepherd and describes them as his sheep. It is an image that shows up richly in the Hebrew Scriptures, Psalm 23 most obviously, and Ezekiel 34, when God promised to shepherd his scattered sheep.
It's important to revisit this earlier description of Jesus as The Good Shepherd because even though Jesus is raised in a glorified body, he remains the Good Shepherd. N.T. Wright suggests we expand our notion of the word “good” beyond a strict moral focus of good vs. bad, to something like “beauty”, the beautiful shepherd. It is the resurrected Jesus that seeks his flock, scattered by discouragement, fear, doubt, sadness, and confusion. And, he still shepherds us similarly.
How Jesus Shepherds
Notice three obvious aspects of Jesus’ teaching: Self-giving love, Relationship, and other sheep.
Self-Giving Love
First, self-giving love. Jesus lays down his life for the sheep which this text says twice. At the time, Jesus understood everything about his life as just this type of loving care, and he knows that the suffering and death of his passion are on the horizon.
The point for us to linger on his self-giving love. This is the nature of his care for the sheep: self-giving love; for the disciples, His care for us. Jesus, as a shepherd, leverages all of his power through love for the well-being of his sheep.
Jesus stays with and near us in our most vulnerable moments of life. He contrasts his care with that of the hired hand. Jesus will not abandon when danger looms; he lays down his life.
The Orthodox priest and theologian Fr. John Behr says that “Self-giving love is God’s design for humanity. And in Jesus, God in person, in flesh, expresses the deepest truth of what it means to be human. When he loves like this, to the end of his own life, he reveals God and he reveals what it means for us to be most human.”
I appreciate Leslie Newbigin’s illustration of what happens when we are in a conversation with someone about a third person that is NOT presently in the room. We share our views and thoughts, knowledge of facts and detail, but if that person were to come into the room the conversation completely changes from talk about facts to encounter with the person who now speaks for themselves. And that is what happens in the incarnation: Jesus is in the room.
He is showing us what God is like and what those created in his likeness are similarly meant to be like.
It’s not surprising that in the earliest iconography of the church Jesus as the good shepherd features prominently. Jesus gently carries the lost sheep across his back safely home. Whatever you imagine to be true about Jesus, imagine this.
The resurrected Jesus is the good Shepherd and self-giving love is the way he shepherds.
Relationship
But second - Jesus speaks of deep and real intimate connection between the shepherd and the sheep. Verse 4 says, “… I know my sheep and my sheep know me.”
The invitation for us is to realize that God desires relationship with us.
So think with me about the post-resurrection encounters with Jesus through this lens of the Good Shepherd. In each case Jesus meets these persons in the depth of their vulnerability and in ways unique to their stories.
Thomas, the twin, perhaps noted because twins know a great deal about mistaken identity, or maybe simply Thomas’s story shows up because of the sorrow and frustration he felt by now being included when Jesus first appeared. He named his doubt and named what he wanted; and Jesus — with grace and generosity — shows up and says “touch my wounds and believe.”
Or think of the disciples traveling home toward Emmaus — distraught, confused, discouraged — and Jesus gently enters the conversation, listens to their hearts and their stories, and begins to unravel the teaching of scripture, warming their hearts, and breaking bread with them.
Or, I love John’s telling of Mary in the garden after the empty tomb is discovered. She is there weeping — you can imagine the distraught nature of her tears — “they have taken my Lord’s body and we don’t know where they have put it.” Her life, so carefully rewoven together by Jesus’ earlier care, now fragile, and so here; the tender voice of Jesus the gardener calls her name, “Mary…”
Grace and forgiveness, the love Jesus has is not abstract, but particular to our lives; to our real-life stories. He knows us and we know him. This invites us into profoundly intimate relationship. We ask for this each week in the Eucharistic prayer: “that he may dwell in us and we in him.”
A.J. Sherrill, in his little book, Quiet, opens with a starting claim that “…Every moment of every day the most significant reality in the entire universe is the radical availability of God’s presence…” What would it mean for us to act on the truth of God’s availability to us?
Jesus sees and knows, and is radically present to his sheep. He has an intimate, vulnerable knowledge of us as persons.
Other Sheep
Self-giving love, intimate presence and care, and one final thing we need to see is that Jesus has other sheep. Verse 16 says, “I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.”
The flock is larger than his first followers imagined. They would have naturally thought of scattered Israel, or perhaps their own small band of disciples; but the flock is larger; larger even than the slow fermenting growth of the early church; greater than all that claim the name of Jesus in our day; and Jesus seeks them.
And I think this last reference of Jesus reminded the disciples that He was always seeking those that did not yet belong; and so, the church is not a community turned in on itself — its own needs and interests — we too must be mindful of the other sheep Jesus is seeking. So weekly we take the blessing of our life with God into everyday life where we too seek the other sheep.
Conclusion
As we close, let’s circle back to Psalm 23. It is a psalm often associated with suffering and often read in the midst of suffering because of the powerful metaphor of shepherding. But it is a psalm to be practiced in life, now, in whatever circumstances we find ourselves in — not just moments of suffering and death.
The famous ending, “I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever and ever,” while comforting as we suffer and death looms, might also speak of the psalmist’s intention to live by faith; returning again and again and again to the house of the Lord for as long as he lives. This is how I will practice my life with the Good Shepherd, as one who listens to this voice, gathering with those that gather over and over again, ordering my life to the Good Shepherd.
Our reading this morning from 1st John opens with the profound declaration of our intimate life with God as children, and by the end of our reading we are thinking deeply about sin. “Those who belong to God do not sin,” we are told. John doesn’t mean that we live perfectly without sin, but that we return again and again in steady acts of repentance and faith as we follow the Good shepherd.
May God give us grace to so follow our Good Shepherd. Amen.