Shepherding in the ancient Middle East
is difficult, lonely work. You are alone
with the herd, alone with the elements . . . if it is excruciatingly hot, you
are there, in the middle of it. If there
is a sudden rain, and maybe a flash flood to boot, you are there, in the middle
of it. If there are bandits or wolves or
some other critter relishing a mutton dinner, you are there, in the middle of
it. There’s not a lot of shelter from
the elements or unscrupulous predators, but it’s your job to protect
your charges from it all, so a certain toughness—of mind and body—is part of
the job description.
Your life moves along with a diurnal rhythm:
you lead your flocks out to pasture in the morning, and back down into
shelter, into a sheepfold, at night.
The sheepfold is made of stones from the surrounding rough pasture, so
it looks like it has risen from the surrounding soil, or maybe weathered from
centuries of scouring wind. You can feel
that wind, day by day, night by night, pelting your skin with sand and
sometimes even small pebbles, fired with the velocity of an arrow. Or at least, that’s what it feels like
sometimes. Toughness of mind and body is
a requirement.
As is—of all things—compassion. You don’t last long in the shepherding
business without compassion for your charges.
You don’t put up with nostril-clogging sandstorms or blistering heat or
sneaky, dangerous thievery if you don’t truly feel for them. And that isn’t necessarily the easiest thing
to do. Sheep aren’t the most lovable
creatures on the face of the earth, nor are they the brightest. What they are is stubborn and
obstinate, they want to do things they want to do, the way they want to
do it, and it helps to know what that is. In fact, to do the job of protecting and
nurturing a flock right, you have to be able to think like a sheep, to put
yourself in the place of a sheep, to almost become a sheep yourself . .
.
This image, the image of a shepherd is
used frequently in the bible to describe a wise, compassionate protector . . .
it was used of good kings, like Josiah and Solomon and most famously, David,
the Shepherd King, who started out life as a shepherd of his father Jesse’s
flock.. And Jesus uses the image in our
passage, which is the first half of the so-called shepherd discourse
which goes through verse 18. And so
strong was this image, so potent the metaphor, that up until the time of
Constantine, the primary title for Jesus was Kristos Poemen, Greek for
Jesus the shepherd. In fact, the
oldest known depictions of Jesus are as a gentle shepherd. It wasn’t until the coming of Constantine,
and the need for Christ to be a strong,
emperor-like figure, that the image of Kristos Pantocrator—Christ the
Supreme Ruler—became primary, and it’s been that up until this day, just look
at the violent-final-day fetishes of folks like Tim LaHaye or Hal Lindsey.
Well, how I do go on . . .
today is sometimes called Good Shepherd Sunday, and we sing all the shepherd-y
hymns—some of my favorites—and we are well accustomed to thinking in those
terms, but it’s important to realize that this Jesus uses two metaphors
to describe himself in this passage: he is both Good Shepherd and sheep-gate.
And with our logical Presbyterian minds we’re likely to go “say what?
Which one is it, Lord?
Shepherd or gate? We’re much more
comfortable with the notion of a shepherd . . . after all, it is
an animate object . . .” And I urge you
to get over it and consider what the metaphor might mean. (Ok, ok, if you insist, then it was
common for a shepherd to sleep in the opening to the sheepfold, making him both
shepherd and gate . . . there?
You happy?)
Anyway, let’s look at the overall
structure of the story: there’s the sheepfold, which pens up the sheep, the
shepherd, who enters through the gate, and the gatekeeper, who opens the
gate. And anyone who doesn’t come in
through the gate is a predator of some kind, either a thief or a bandit, as
Jesus mentions, or a big bad wolf. And
so, the sheep, if they are bright enough to distinguish who comes over the wall
from who comes through the gate, can tell friend from foe. They can also tell the difference through
sound: they’ll follow the shepherd when he leads them out ‘cause they know his
voice. They won’t follow a bad
guy ‘cause they don’t know his voice.
So.
Sheepfold, sheep-gate, gatekeeper, shepherd. And notice that in the first half of the
passage, he doesn’t identify any of them.
That is, he doesn’t tell his audience—Pharisees, and the like—who represents
whom in the allegory. Does the gate
represent . . . scriptures? Does the gatekeeper represent . . . the
religious authorities? Just who is who
in this metaphor? Evidently, he expects them to get it, and when they don’t,
that’s when he has to spell it out, no doubt with a heavy sigh: “I am the gate for the sheep,” he says, “and
all who came before me are the thieves and the bandits.” And I can see the religious authorities
getting kind of nervous, maybe tugging at their collars, or getting real mad,
steam coming out their ears like in a Popeye cartoon or something, because now
he’s getting personal, because they represent who has come before, don’t
they? They represent the religious
apparatus which had become corrupt and rotten in the centuries before that
time. And here Jesus is accusing them
of being thieves and bandits, whose voice the sheep—and who else could that be
but the children of God—no longer hear.
Remember: the thieves and bandits
climb over the walls, they don’t enter by the gate—which, we now learn, is
Jesus himself. And Jesus is the
sheep-gate, the one who keeps out, but also the one who lets out. The sheep must get out of the sheepfold
to feed and be fed, so even though it may be tempting, there’s not a one-to-one
correspondence between the sheepfold and the afterlife. And in fact, Jesus says as much: whoever
enters by him will be saved, and come in and go out to find pasture.
And here’s another thing: Jesus uses the word “saved” to describe what
happens when the sheep enter through him, but it’s clear that he doesn’t mean
by that where you go when you die. It’s
clear that he means that this salvation begins right here on the earthly plain,
that the sheep who are saved will go in and out, and have life and have it
abundantly. Thus,
being saved, in this context, at least, has to
do with abundant life in the here and now, not—or not just—life after
death. Perhaps the best that can be said
is that the sheepfold represents the condition of
being children of God, of resting in the presence of the almighty.
The image of Jesus as the sheep-gate,
when it has been considered at all, has been preached as keeping those on the
inside from those on the outside, for purposes of (a) protection or (b)
privilege—those on the inside get all the goodies God is offering—or (c)
both. The Gospel of John is particularly
concerned with this: after all, it’s in John where Jesus says “I am the way,
and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through
me.” And in John’s time, this made
sense: those who had entered through Christ the sheep-gate necessarily had to
close the gate on the flock who remained in the synagogue. On both sides, questions of exclusion and
inclusion raged: who was in and who was out theologically, morally, ethnically?
Since John’s time, there have been
many who have led the people of God in different ways, splitting the flock into
separate folds, and they have turned out to be strangers, not shepherds. They have been popular preachers, leaders,
teachers who have led the flock astray, promising to show us the kingdom for
the price of a seminar or a DVD. But they are not the gate, they are not the
shepherd . . . abundant life is not to
be found through their voice, through their teachings, only through Christ, who
is the gate of the sheep-fold.
But how do we separate the myriad
voices in our culture from the one true voice of the Shepherd? How do we recognize the voice of Christ from
that of false teachers, well-intended or not?
Well, we have time-honored ways of doing that—Bible study is one way,
familiarizing ourselves with the only record we have of Jesus’ voice, of Jesus’
teachings . . . worship is another, as we worship our Lord and Savior we are
energized and readied to go out into our communities and our city and our
nation, we are equipped to meet the third source of Jesus’ voice: the least of
these, our neighbors and friends and, even, those whom we consider to be
enemies.
And it’s something of a paradox, isn’t
it? We listen to the Shepherd’s voice
through scripture and preaching and worship, and we try to avoid listening to
the bandits and thieves, who come not through the gate, but over the walls via
the internet and self-improvement seminars and pop-psychologies, and yet one of
the prime ways we hear the shepherd’s voice is through others outside of the
fold . . . but did he not tell us that he is in us all? Don’t Benedictine monks spend much time and
energy discerning Christ’s voice in the world?
Paradox or not, we see and hear his voice every day, in the people we
meet and the sights we see. We only have
to learn to distinguish the shepherd’s voice from all the background
babble.
And that’s where the other two pieces
of the puzzle fit, the other two legs in the discernment stool—because that’s
what we’re practicing when we learn to hear the shepherd’s voice. Within the community of believers, within the
flock we study scripture and engage in corporate worship, then we go out of the
doors to encounter Christ’s voice in the world.
Each leg of the stool reinforces the work of the other . . . what we
learn in Scripture helps us to worship rightly and meaningfully, and helps us
to understand and seek Christ’s voice in the world. In worship, we are sustained and fed for our
journey back into the Bible and out in the world. And finally, as we listen for Christ’s voice
in the world, as we seek those places and those people through which Christ
speaks, it directs our study and worship in increasingly meaningful ways. In science, we call it a feed-back loop.
In strophes from his poem Spanish
Trilogy (III), Rainer Maria Rilke describes a shepherd he experienced in
his travels in Spain:
With slow and steady strides, his
posture is pensive
and, as he stands there, noble. Even
now a god might
secretly slip into this form and not
be diminished.
Rilke, who was a Christian, clearly is
speaking of incarnation, and it is apt: our God slips into the form of a
shepherd, and like a shepherd, he leads us into the fold, into God’s loving
arms, into the arms of our Christian community for rest and study and rejoicing
and praise, then out to pasture in the world.
And as we do, as we enter through Christ the sheep-gate and are led by
Christ the Shepherd, we experience ever more sacred and abundant life. Amen.
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