List of Sermons for the Current Liturgical Year |  Archived Sermons | Front Page

The Fourth Sunday of Easter

"We Are His People, and the Sheep"

The Rev. Dr. Richard W. Pfaff

We are taught in school not to mix metaphors. “Once you open a can of worms, they always come home to roost,” is one celebrated example, or “grabbing the bull by the horns and running with it;” or “the tornado of the ABC sale hit nothing but net.” The teacher’s red pen itches (I don’t think that’s a mixed metaphor), and anyone who hopes to write or speak carefully tries to avoid the insidious trap of mixing two images in a single comparison.

Switching images without warning provides almost as great a difficulty, and this may explain why pondering today’s Gospel reading [John 10:1-10] may induce confusion. The first half hinges on the tricky metaphor of Jesus as the gatekeeper of a sheep-fold. When his hearers complain that they can’t understand that metaphor, Jesus “explains” it to them by switching metaphors and comparing himself now not to the gatekeeper but to the sheepfold’s gateway or door itself. And in the verse just after our reading ends, he uses a third metaphor, one so familiar that it echoes in the collect for today: “I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” – hence, this Fourth Sunday of Easter is sometines called Good Shepherd Sunday. Three ways of saying what Jesus is like: the keeper of the gate into the sheepfold, the gate through which alone safe passage for the sheep is guaranteed, the shepherd who keeps the sheep safe. The one constant is the sheep; maybe thinking about them will help to clarify.

I was taken to a major league baseball game in Milwaukee a couple of weeks ago, the last game of the exhibition season. The cold wind and snow in the parking lots didn’t matter because the stadium has a closed roof, and there were about 25,000 people present. We were sitting fairly high up, so I had a good view of the crowd, particularly during its periodic and ineffectual attempts to perform what I think is called “the wave.” (I tried to rise and throw my arms up at the right time, but was no more in sync than the majority of my neighbors; the fans were obviously rusty). As I mused on the thousands and thousands of heads, mostly in baseball caps of one sort or another, it suddenly struck me that they were very good specimens of sheep: the sheep presupposed in the reading you just heard and spoken of explicitly by Jesus a bit further in John’s gospel as those sheep – of more than one flock – for whom the Good Shepherd lays down his life.

On the whole we are, it seems to me, comfortable with being sheep. We don’t perhaps go quite as far as the saccharin children’s song of long ago that began “I am Jesus’ little lamb,/ Ever glad at heart I am;” but we can sing, with Anglican gusto, “we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture,” and continue to feel quite good about ourselves.

This is, I suggest, because we don’t realize how sheeplike we are – in, that is, the negative connotations that sheep inevitably carry along with their woolly coats. These connotations, of docility and a certain dingy herdishness, don’t cast sheep in a very favorable light. As sheep, or the next thing to them, we watch the evening news and submit ourselves to commercial after commercial from, in particular, pharmaceutical companies that insult our intelligence almost as blatantly as the tobacco companies did forty years ago. As sheep, or the next thing to them, we listen admiringly to political candidates making promises that can’t possibly be carried out in anything like the time-frames proposed. As sheep, or the next thing to them, we are convinced to support development projects whose apparent aim is to cover the largest possible part of the earth’s surface with concrete, so that parking lots will be ample enough to accommodate ourselves as manic shoppers. In short, if an extended comparison between sheep and us doesn’t seem very flattering to us, perhaps it’s not much of a compliment to the sheep either.

Indeed, it’s enough to make us wish that Jesus had chosen another figure of speech than that of shepherd and sheep. Preachers can go on and on about the basically rural society in which Jesus lived and the close understanding that many in that time would have possessed of the relationship between the shepherd and the flock. But there’s no reason to think that sheep in Jesus’ day had fundamentally different characteristics from today’s sheep, whether in flocks and herds or in cars, offices, classrooms – and even pews.

On the other hand: there’s no reason to think that Jesus employed his metaphors lightly. He must have known what sheep were like and nonetheless chosen consciously and deliberately the metaphor that casts us as the sheep. This means, at the most basic level, that we’re bound to take our being classed among Jesus’ sheep with utmost seriousness. If as metaphorical sheep we’re inevitably going to engage in a certain amount of sheep-like silliness, we are equally, as sheep, bound, in the words of today’s Gospel, “to follow him, for they know his voice.” We don’t, of course, follow his voice all the time; none of us does, “all we like sheep have gone astray.” Yet each of us is, by God’s grace, a saved sheep, even the one sheep who wandered away while the ninety-nine remained in place, and is ultimately found. And following Jesus is what we are saved to do.

We have, then, a challenge – or, I rather think, two challenges. The first challenge is to acknowledge all the negative aspects of our sheep-likeness. When we assent unthinkingly to the latest double-speak, when we follow persuasive pseudo-charismatic leaders (think of the miserable people, especially the women, in the compound in west Texas), when we decide that cutting moral corners is acceptable because “everyone does it”: at all these points, and many others, we compare with real sheep unfavorably. This facing up to our often mindless sheep-likeness is done most readily by repentance: “we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.”

Having sought and obtained forgiveness, we face as the second challenge the exact opposite: to glory in what we’ve just found regrettable; for that same sheep-likeness puts us into a relationship with the Lord marked by notes of trust, dependence, and devotion. Such notes are entirely different from those of a grudging acceptance of authority or a willful lack of self-discipline.

Trust is a one-word encapsulation of Jesus’ statement that “the sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.” Leads them sometimes through those dark and frightening places well termed the valley of the shadow of death. But, as the fine hymn by the late seventeenth-century divine Richard Baxter puts it, “Christ leads me through no darker rooms than he went through before,/ and he that to God’s kingdom comes must enter by this door.”

And beyond trust, dependence: our willingness to recognize what the Good Shepherd does for us; most pointedly, to recognize that he nourishes us, Sunday by Sunday, with his Supper – the Lord’s Supper, for us, not our achievement. And that he guarantees our corporate body: his church, against which “the gates of hell shall not prevail” [Mt. 16:18]. In the face of all our apparent ecclesiastical troubles and fragmentations, to remember, and rely on, those words of Jesus’ is to acknowledge our total dependence on him.

Our trust and dependence, thus deepened, call forth our devotion. Again, the image should not be solely that of the single lamb cradled in the arms of the shepherd – the kind of picture that used to appear on the fans provided by funeral homes for the faithful to use in the un- airconditioned churches of my childhood – but rather that of the entire flock, devoted to the shepherd who protects and sustains them. Despite all the backslidings and wanderings away that will provide us with steady matter for repentance, it is our corporate devotion that ultimately marks us as “his people, and the sheep of his pasture.”

“Ultimately,” in that devotion is the final mark of the creation of a people – in this case, a royal generation, a chosen people. And “ultimately” in another sense: that devotion is what we live towards and die towards. At the end of the immensely long and complex unfolding of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the poet-narrator is granted a vision of the ultimate state of the blessed. He tries to put the vision into words under the figure of a multi-foliate rose: a vast number of lovely petals around a central core. Despite the proximity of the Morehead rose garden to this church, I find that a difficult image to get my mind around. Can we try instead to go back to the thousands gathered in the Milwaukee baseball stadium and see them as a potential image of the whole of Christ’s flock engaged in devotion, even adoration? Imagine them all, ransomed, redeemed, made beautiful by divine love; and by that love enabled to perform, in flawless synchronization, the perfect wave. Saints, no longer sheep but saints, rising in numberless ranks and, with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, praising and magnifying the glorious name of our God, Father, Son, and Spirit: Hosanna in the highest, and peace on earth.

© 2008: Chapel of the Cross