Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan on 12th May 2019, the 4th Sunday of Easter, year 3, Good Friday Sunday.
‘My sheep hear my
voice’, says Jesus, ‘I know them and they follow me’.
Now, I don’t have much
experience with sheep, but one day as a child I helped my Grandfather move a
flock to fresh grazing. It wasn’t easy – the sheep took every opportunity to
get away through gaps and over ditches as we drove them down the public road. We
got them all there in the end, but I’ve never forgotten how wilful sheep can
be.
One Sunday, years ago,
I was preaching about the Good Shepherd, and I remembered this experience. I expressed
my surprise that in Jesus’s time shepherds could expect their sheep to follow
them – surely shepherds then must have had a different relationship with their
sheep than they do today, I said. After the service a wise and experienced
farmer came up to me and said, ‘My sheep follow me’. I asked him how he did
it, and he replied, ‘I walk in front of them with a bucket of sheep nuts –
they’re intelligent animals, they recognise me, and they know very well what
the bucket means’. I learned a good lesson about leadership that
day.
On a previous occasion Jesus had said, ‘I am the good shepherd.
I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the
Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.’
Those who heard him couldn’t
agree whether he was the long expected Messiah, or not. Some thought he must be
mad to talk about laying down his life, but others pointed to his miraculous
deeds, such as causing the blind to see, which was just the kind of thing they expected
of the Messiah.
Jesus returns to this
shepherd theme in today’s reading from John’s Gospel 10:22-30. He is walking in
the temple, sheltering in the portico of Solomon from the winter weather,
during the festival of the Dedication. This festival commemorates the
re-dedication of the temple 200 years before, after the great Jewish leader
John Hyrcanus had defeated the Greek Seleucid king Antiochus IV, who had
desecrated it. In Hebrew the festival is called Hanukkah, and Jews still
celebrate it around Christmas time – this is why some people, particularly in
America, prefer to say ‘Happy Holidays’ rather than ‘Happy Christmas’.
A crowd gathers around
Jesus, asking him to put an end to the debate about his identity, ‘How long will
you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.’ Jesus
knows that many in the crowd are looking for a Messiah who is a great military
leader, like John Hyrcanus, one who will liberate them from Roman oppression
and re-establish the kingdom of Judah, one who will make Judea great again –
but this is not the kind of Messiah that Jesus knows himself to be. He surely also
knows that others in the crowd hate him, and hope he will incriminate himself
as a subversive, so they can get rid of him.
So Jesus does not
answer directly. Instead he says, ‘I have told
you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to
me; but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep
hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.’ Jesus is
pointing them to God, who he calls his Father. God works through me, says
Jesus, I know those who believe in me, they listen to me and follow me. But you
do not.
He continues, ‘I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No
one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater
than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand.’
Jesus is saying that he gives those who follow him the eternal life which is to
know God, and he will keep them safe, because God has given them to him.
‘The Father and I
are one’, he finishes.
This last phrase infuriates the crowd. Jesus is claiming identity with God,
which pious Jews see as blasphemy. In the verses following today’s reading the
crowd get ready to stone him, but Jesus makes his escape and travels away from
Judea, across the Jordan. His time has not yet come.
As Christians we believe Jesus when he says, ‘The Father and
I are one’.
We believe that God
the Father, God the Son, who is our Saviour Jesus Christ, and God the Holy
Spirit are three persons but one God.
We should take great
comfort from Jesus’s words. We are his sheep, and as our shepherd he gives us
eternal life and will keep us safe – nothing and nobody can take us away from
him, so long as we believe in him. As the 23rd Psalm appointed for
today puts it:
‘Though I walk in the shadow of
death, I will fear no evil;
for you are with me; your rod and
your staff, they comfort me.’
The truth is we are
not alone. Jesus lives and Jesus is with us. And not just with you and me, here
today, but with everyone who has ever believed, and will ever believe in him,
from those first apostles and disciples like Peter and Tabitha we heard about
in the 1st reading (Acts 9:36-43), down through the centuries to us, and forward
in time to Christians yet unborn. United with them, and led by Jesus our Good
Shepherd, we make up the eternal church, militant here on earth and triumphant
in heaven.
We should listen to
the physicists and cosmologists, I think, and look beyond the four dimensions
of space and time in which we live our little lives. Because God is not
constrained by space and time.
Whenever and wherever
we live, we are all included in St John’s great vision of the eternal kingdom expressed
in the poetry of today’s reading from his Revelation (7:9-17). We all belong to
that
‘great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all
tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the
Lamb, robed in white’.
In the fullness of
time, seen from a place outside space and time, in a higher dimension,
we stand with them ‘before the throne of God,
and worship him day and night within his
temple,
and the one who is seated on the throne will
shelter us.
We
will hunger no more, and thirst no more;
the sun will not strike us,
nor any scorching heat;
for the Lamb at the
centre of the throne will be our shepherd,
and he will guide us to springs of the water of life,
and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes.’
Jesus is not just our
Good Shepherd, but also the Lamb who laid down his life to bring us to eternal
life.
I shall finish in prayer with a Collect of the
Word:
Gracious God,
you sent Jesus, the good shepherd,
to gather us together:
may we not wander from his flock,
but follow wherever he leads us
listening for his voice and staying near him,
until we are safely in your fold,
to live with you for ever;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen
