Acts 9:36-43
Ps.23
Rev.7:9-17
John 10:22-30

4 Easter C-RCL
HE 2A 10:00

HE LEADETH ME: GOOD SHEPHERD

Credits: Our Church Times 5/2/82 pp.1-2; The Living Church 5/2/82, pp.2,10; Our Church Times 4/24/91,p.1; Pulpit Resource 4/28/85; Christ Church Fitchburg Courier 4/28/85 pp.1-2

Previous: 82,88,91,94,97,98,00,01,03. Revisions each time. Also 07,08, the last at Bedford.

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This Fourth Sunday of Eastertide is known as Good Shepard Sunday. Yet John's lovely image of Jesus as a shepherd who cares for his sheep is not the sort of world that most of us live in today. The pastoral, countrified setting that herds of sheep imply, has been replaced, by and large, with industrial cities and a network of roads that whisk us by the barns and grazing sheep. They are somewhere on the back roads.

Few Americans - except for Navajo Indians and Wyoming sheepmen, have first-hand experience caring for sheep out on open prairies or mountain-sides. Most of us have never seen a real shepherd. In fact, urban people in Western nations have been unfamiliar with shepherds for centuries. Maybe there are some sheep in certain places where I have been, but there are certainly none in Boston or Brookline or Chelsea, and not likely in Westford either!

Yet the image of shepherds is very much alive, and remains so. Generation after generation, the twenty-third Psalm retains its popularity, and pictures of Jesus as the Good Shepherd continue to appeal to young and old. I grew up in the Church of the Good Shepherd, Waban (part of the City of Newton), and the Good Shepherd window over the altar is vivid in my memory. I learned a prayer in childhood,

"Jesus, tender shepherd, hear me:
bless thy little lamb tonight.
Through the darkness be Thou near me:
keep me safe till morning light."

Yet no conceivable modern alternative to the Good Shepherd has grabbed anyone's imagination. Does a figure like the Good Building Superintendent, the Good Customer Relations Officer, the Good Life Guard, appeal to you in the same way as the Good Shepherd? Or the Good Nurse or Doctor, the Good Pastor or Priest, the Good Mother or Father, the Good Teacher or Social Worker? Yet all of these are illustrations of what Jesus was talking about. They all, as shepherds, reflect the love and concern and care so vividly realized in Jesus.

During His earthly life, there is not the slightest evidence that Jesus Himself ever was a shepherd, ever actually tended sheep. Yet whether we like it or not, the Risen Christ remains the Good Shepherd. Whether we think that shepherding is a relevant matter or not, in that role, the Lord continues to call countless souls to Himself - as He also calls each one of us to be shepherds to one another.

II. Why is it that this image has been so compelling as to endure through 2000 years or more, of history? Perhaps the image has endured because it speaks so deeply to the basic nature of the relationship between God and His people.

A. Old Testament imagery certainly pictured God as the leader of His flock, His people Israel. Besides the twenty-third Psalm, we have various figures such as Jacob and Moses and David, appointed by God to serve as shepherds over His people. And in the Book of Numbers, which we often skip reading, there are a few lovely verses (27:15-18) where Joshua is appointed to take the place of Moses as the shepherd of Israel. The phrases remind us of the Good Shepherd: Joshua is to "go out before them, and come in before them, to lead them out and to bring them in, that the congregation of the Lord may not be as sheep which have no shepherd." Do you hear an echo in how Jesus had compassion on the multitudes, because they were as sheep having no shepherd? And the Hebrew name of Jesus was Joshua (See Mark 6:34). And we know the beloved story of the lost sheep, searched out by the shepherd who leaves the ninety nine others and goes after the lost, until he finds it (Luke 15:4-5).

And in the Gospel of John (Chapter 10), several themes are woven together for Jesus is pictured as both the shepherd and as the door to the sheepfold. In one section of that chapter, Jesus appears as the shepherd who unites, who draws together several flocks not previously united, so that there will be one flock, one shepherd. And in another section, Jesus is described as the door of the sheep: "Whoever comes in by me, will be saved."

The willingness of Jesus to care for the flock even to the point of dying for them, is the special contribution of Jesus to the picture: "I am the Good Shepherd who is willing to die for the sheep" (John 10:11).

B. Well, that is the background. But we are still faced with the question of why this old Biblical image continues to have relevance in our modern world.

People seem to be looking for a shepherd, desperately. Some of you will remember as recently as 1978 when the papers and other news media were crammed with stories of a self styled preacher-shepherd, Rev. Jim Jones, who had taken many of his followers to Guyana in South America. Nearly all of them lost their lives. Many other self-styled leaders are more or less as guilty as Jim Jones. The point is, that people are still looking for a shepherd, and if they do not find a real one, they will follow a false one.

People in this age seem to be running out of control, with drugs and alcohol; and others, like the Jonesville frantically seek external control in their lives through cults or communes. We need to recognize the leadership of Christ, and His teachings that we are much like sheep who tend to wander off, without the discipline and control provided in the teachings of Jesus as set down in the Gospels and proclaimed and practiced in the Church. So what do these things teach us?

First of all, the image of the Good Shepherd sets itself against a tendency prevalent in this century, to tie in with a form of doit-yourself Christianity. The image of Jesus drawing the flock together as a redeemer and a unifier, seems to make some statements pretty strongly about the need and importance of community and discipline and order, and against an established pattern of television and radio religion, religion entirely at home and separated from people. The dangers of this are in the ideas that a person can be his own shepherd can save himself. I have spent a lot of time trying to help people who have fallen into that trap and who, too late, have found that false shepherds lead into dead-ends where all the joy and beauty have gone out of life. That is true whether the false shepherd be a Jim Jones, or drugs, or alcohol, or solitary religion. This may say something about our Church's loss of numbers nationally. What kind of shepherding have we been doing?

Probably the shepherd image is timeless, an for all time, because it is like Christ Himself: it is not bound by culture, even though it came from a particular culture, as Jesus did. But it speaks to us of the mystery of God, and of our relationship with God. In a world of concrete realities and hard-headed scientific technology, the image of the Good Shepherd recalls us to a deeper and neglected part of our nature, a part which science and technology ignore - that is, our relationship with our Creator.

III. In fact, Jesus challenges us to be shepherds, as He challenged Peter. In last week's Gospel, when Jesus asked Simon Peter three times, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" Peter answered each time, with growing protest, "Yes, Lord, you know that I love you." And Jesus answered more strongly each time, "Feed my sheep".

Jesus challenges you and me in the same way: if you love me, then feed my sheep. Be shepherds to others: teach and feed them as I die for you.

So how do we do that? What is the art of shepherding? The pastor of a church in Wyoming a couple of Christmases ago, was looking for a real shepherd's staff to replace the piece of bent pipe he had been using in his Christmas pageant - and which did not seem to carry much authenticity. So he asked an expert Wyoming sheepman where he could find a real shepherd's staff. The sheepman said he probably wouldn't find one. "You must remember," he said, that it is in the Middle East that the sheep are led. In the West, they are driven." That was a good reminder to that pastor, and to us as well, how the task should be done. And it is one of the surest tests of the good shepherd: the good shepherd leads rather than drives. Leading is done out of love; driving is done out of desperation. The carrot is better than the stick, every time.

Amen!