The Good Shepherd (John 10:1 - 18)

It’s the fourth Sunday in Easter, and as such, it’s Shepherd Sunday.  And on the surface of it, at least, our passage seems sort of straightforward, I am the shepherd, he says, and the good shepherd at that, and that must make us the sheep, and the Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.  And this makes a lot of sense, and it’s how it many times is preached: the Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, and of course, that’s what he did on the cross, on Good Friday three weeks and change ago.

And we turn it into a morality tale: the hired hand, who is definitely not the shepherd, doesn’t have ownership of the operation—and how many times have we seen that?  How many times have we seen a restaurant go down the tubes when the owner turns operations over to a manager, or a car-repair place, or anyplace else where the owner wants to get out of the grind and take a rest?  If you’re not the owner, if you don’t have your life tied up in it, you’re not gonna do as well, so the business goes down the tubes.

And the moral of this story, boys and girls, is be like the Good Shepherd, give your life for your flock—maybe it fits better for pastors!—give your life for your flock, the people under your care, don’t be like the hired hand and run like a puppy with your tail between your legs.  And that’s not bad, exactly, especially if you lay it on preachers equally, but it ignores some … irregularities, some strangeness, in the passage, and that’s why I read the first ten verses of this section in addition to the last eight.

And anyone who doesn’t enter the sheepfold by the gate, Jesus says, is a thief and a bandit, and that makes a lot of sense: the one who enters through the gate, in broad daylight, in full view of God and everybody, belongs there, he’s the shepherd, the person who the sheep are used to.  He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.  They trust him because they know him. And that makes a lot of sense as well, even sheep, not the brightest animals in the known universe, will get to know a shepherd.

But I don’t know how many sheep-pens you all have been around, how many sheep-folds, but I’ve never seen one with a gate-keeper . . . somebody who minds the gate for the sheep.  Have you?  Reminds me of some guy standing outside the Hilton or a high-rise, New York apartment in one of those little door-man outfits, opening the taxi-cab door for an elegant woman, or carrying her packages in the door . . . but these are sheep! What do they need with a gatekeeper?  There’s only a couple of times I can think of a sheep-fold needing a gatekeeper, one when there’s a loading chute and they’re loading them on a truck, and another at the stock-yard, as they’re entering into the slaughter house, the gatekeeper lets them through one at a time.  There were no trucks in ancient Palestine, that I know of anyway, so could this be a slaughter-house gate?

There was, in fact, such a gate in Jerusalem, and it had a name: it was called the Sheep Gate, and it was on the Northern side of the city.  And it had a gatekeeper, as well, who would let the sheep enter into the walled city.  Pharisees—to whom Jesus was speaking at the time—would’ve known it well.  And the reason it was so well-known, and the reason that it had a gate-keeper, was that it was the gate through which animals entered the city on their way to be slaughtered at the Temple in the sacrificial system of the ancient Hebrew faith.

In fact, throughout the New Testament, the primary way sheep are spoken about, the primary image for lambs is not as a Sunday dinner for well-off Jerusalem-ites, nor as an ingredient in mutton stew for those not so well to do.  Sheep in the New Testament are overwhelmingly a symbol of sacrifice.  And in fact in the book of John, the very first time Jesus is referred to by another person it’s by John the Baptist, who says: “Behold, the Lamb of God.”

And so it is highly likely that we’re supposed to think of sacrifice when we think of sheep in the sheepfold, specifically those who enter Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate . . . and looking at it this way, the shepherd takes on a sinister role: the sheep follow him, because he knows their voice, but they are being taken to sell at Temple mount, they’re being taken to slaughter to appease the sacrificial machinery of ancient Judea.

Do you remember a couple of months ago when we looked at John’s version of turning over the tables in the Temple?  How he made a whip of cords and drove the moneychangers out, who changed foreign money—at a healthy profit—into local currency?  The reason the foreign Jews—Jews from outside of Palestine—would change money would be to buy animals—sheep and cattle and doves and goats—to sacrifice in the Temple.  And Jesus not only overturned their tables, but ran the animals off as well.  And we discovered that this was a symbolic act, by which Jesus symbolically destroyed the Jewish sacrificial system by which innocent animals were killed to make individuals and the entire people right with their god.

In that episode, Jesus in effect demonstrates what he’s going to do—overturn the sacrificial system—and in today’s passage he tells us how he’s going to do it.  The Good Shepherd—as opposed to the shady shepherd who leads the sheep off to sacrifice—the Good Shepherd lays down his life for the herd, who will come in through him and go out and find pasture.  They will not be sacrificed, or to put it another way, they will not be scape-goated for the uncleanness, for the sins of others.  Because that’s what sacrifice is: a kind of scapegoating, where the sins of the many are put onto the backs of the few.  And just as that shady shepherd knows his flock, so the Good Shepherd knows his own, only instead of leading them to slaughter, to sacrifice, they will be led to pasture, they will have life, not death, and have it abundantly.  Notice he’s not talking about eternal life, as in going to heaven, here.  He’s just saying life, good old, earthly existence.  They won’t be killed, but live, and live abundantly.

And the Good Shepherd will lay down his life for the flock, and he will not do it accidently, or unwillingly, because he is forced to, but willingly: he will lay it down of his own accord.  He has the power to lay it down and then take it back up again, that power has been given to him by the divine, which the Good Shepherd calls Father.  They key here is that the Good Shepherd willingly lays down his life to end the sacrificial system at the heart of Hebrew civilization at the time.

 Well.  That’s all well-and-good, but what does it mean for us?  We Christians don’t sacrifice chickens or sheep or lambs, we’ve never done it, at least since the Temple was shut down 70 years after the birth of Christ.  So where’s the application to us?

First of all, story is metaphorical.  By speaking of shepherd and sheep and sheep-folds and the like, he’s not just talking about animal sacrifice.  Jesus has come to end all sacrificial systems, to lead human beings not to death, not to the altar of sacrifice, but to find pasture, so that they may have life and have it abundantly.  He has come to put an end to the sacrifice of the weak and innocent, those who have no power or voice, for the comfort and wealth of what Paul calls the “powers that be,” the rulers of this age, of the world, who are the ultimate insiders.  Did not Jesus say, over and over again, that the last shall be first and the first shall be last?  In human culture, which the New Testament often calls “the world,” in human culture the marginalized—those with no political voice or power—are sacrificed for the “good” of the non-marginalized.

The classic 20^th century example was the Holocaust, wherein Jews of Europe were scapegoated for all the economic woes of their own country.  Ghetto-ized, marginalized, and finally all but exterminated, the German people were convinced—by a madman, but they were convinced nevertheless—that (a) the Jews were the root of their problem and (b) if they were gone, everything would be all right.  Therefore they watched their Jewish neighbors, many of whom they’d known for years, get rounded up and deported, better not to know where; sometimes, they even ratted them out.

Today, in this country, the scapegoats du jour are illegal immigrants.  They are being blamed for all our ills, from our crumbling infrastructure to our failing schools.  In fact, not only are they innocent (as a group, remember: of course there are criminals among them, just as there are among us) not only are they innocent of what they are accused, they perform valuable services, create wealth for people who hire them, paying them under the table, and thus without having to pay benefits or taxes.  Perhaps this avoidance of taxes has more to do with the failing schools and the crumbling infrastructures than the scapegoated immigrants.

In a pivotal teaching, Jesus uses children as exemplars for the lowest on the totem pole, the weakest group with no voice or political or economic clout.  In most cultures they are a classic sacrificial group: without voice or vote, they are the first group whose funding is cut to avoid raising taxes, or to cover a budgetary shortfall.  In many states, Education budgets are slashed year after year. Children don’t have big lobbies like the telecom or the agricultural industries do, they can’t feather the nests of lawmakers, take ‘em on junkets or pass them “campaign contributions,” so they get sacrificed on the altar of budget shortfalls and the idea that all taxes are evil.

Sacrifice pervades all human culture, it is built into the structure of it; it is how power hierarchies are built and maintained, how wealth is aggregated into fewer and fewer hands.  But Jesus came to overturn those inequities, to unmask the sacrificial system at the heart of all human culture, at the core of what Paul calls “the flesh,” and what us modern preachers call “the world.”  And how does he do that?  By becoming the Good Shepherd and the Lamb at one and the same time, by becoming the ultimate scapegoat himself, and demonstrating once and for all the innocence of the victim.  And at the same time, he urges his flock, his sheep, his people to do the same: not only does he lay down his life for his flock, but he does it willingly, demonstrating the way his followers, his flock must follow.

Brothers and sisters, as we seek as a congregation to be transformed by God, remember that the One who transforms us, and who continues to transform us, has shown us how to do it.  He has shown us that to be Good Shepherds ourselves we must, like Jesus, also become lambs.  We must also give of ourselves to transform ourselves, to renew ourselves.  As we seek a season of renewal, we cannot expect it to be done without it, we cannot expect to be transformed without giving of ourselves.  I say these things in the name of the One who creates us, the one who sustains us, and the one who redeems us by his blood, amen.