Easter IV
Good Shepherd Sunday! Or, one of the times in the year when the lectionary gives us one of the Gospel texts where Jesus refers to himself - and, by implication, the Body of Christ in the world - as the Good Shepherd. There are others. This is the one in John's Gospel, and for us it's in an Easter context this time.
The Good Shepherd was the favorite subject of many a church window built in the later 19th century -- intriguingly or perhaps understandably so as much of the western world industrialized and moved away from a common experience of shepherding life. A bucolic image, a - literally - pastoral one. A self-sacrificing one -- the shepherd will defend the sheep and 'lay down my life' for them.
What does it mean to listen for the voice of this shepherd, and be part of this flock? This is the good shepherd, and Jesus does not mean to tell us that we are sheep; he means to contrast himself with previous, or other, shepherds of the people of God who have not been 'good'. (The prophets of old would often refer to the bad kings or evil leaders as 'bad shepherds.') What does it mean to be part of this flock?
John's Gospel can concern itself overly-much with who is in the flock and hears the shepherd's voice... and who does not. More broadly, though, we also read today from one of John's letters, which says that '...we are to lay down our lives for one another' as the shepherd models for us. We are to emulate him and thus become ever more like him.
Laying down our lives for one another. Images of self-sacrificing choices range from the ultimate ones involving death to the many ways we lay things down in order to lift up another person, or another part of God's creation. John asks in the letter:
"How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. And by this we will know that we are from the truth..."
By this sort of avoidance of greed, and 'redistributive' action we will know that we are from the truth. Quite the combination of the lofty and the highly specific in this letter.
We abide in the truth as we abide (we live! we come alive!) in God. John spends a lot of time describing all this 'inter-abiding' - we get the great image of the vine and the branches next week, which has been powerful in the contemplative tradition in Christianity. We abide in God, and to abide in God is to live in truth. Or, to learn to swim in it like a fish in the ocean. It permeates us, and animates our actions and our words. Yet, this is not only a contemplative, inner concept, or a self-improvement technique. It causes us to move toward self-examination, in truth, always. Materially, it causes us to lay down our lives for one another and discover the richness that is not lodged in countable possessions. If our truest, deepest self abides in God -- in truth, in love -- then there is no end to this accounting. There is always more, there is always enough. Our material lives simply move to mirror this reality.
'Simply.' Well, it isn't always simple. But, it reveals to us the ways in which we are reluctant to lay down our lives for one another. And, perhaps, an inkling of why.
Sometimes, it's just plain smart (true, of the Truth) to be wary around some places, times, people. Jesus talks of bad shepherds, after whom we would not want to model what is laid down and what is taken back up. Always consider that - with Jesus - the practice of laying down and taking back up is done for the life of the world. Not punitively, not primarily so others can see, but always with the growing faith that your life will be handed back to you in greater, larger, more loving and open ways than you might have imagined.
This is the truth of the Resurrection. This is what John means -- at its deepest -- to do things in Jesus' name, to 'believe' in his Name. It isn't dogmatic, or a list of intellectual assertions about Jesus - useful as signposts from the ancestors though those assertions may be at times - but rather it is a patterning ourselves after him.
In this is belief -- that which we learn to stake our lives on; that which transforms us; that which we become over time, with grace and the Spirit's life within and among us.
Follow the Good Shepherd. Listen to this kind of Love. Stay near this Person. In this Truth is Life, and is life abundant for you, for all creation, for the cosmos. "I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever." Amen.