Homily for the 2nd Sunday after Easter, 2022
“Christ the Good Shepherd”
The Second Sunday after Easter, 2022
The Rev. Dcn. Kyle Hughes
THE COLLECT.
Almighty God, who hast given thine only Son to be unto us both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life: Give us grace that we may always most thankfully receive that his inestimable benefit, and also daily endeavour ourselves to follow the blessed steps of his most holy life; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
THE EPISTLE. 1 Peter 2:19-25
THIS is thank-worthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully. For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently? but if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently; this is acceptable with God. For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps: who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth: who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously: who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed. For ye were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.
THE GOSPEL. St. John 10:11-16
JESUS said, I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth: and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep. The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep. I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine. As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep. And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold; them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one flock, and one shepherd.
Tags: St. John Chrysostom, Old Testament, John Behr
“As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep.” You may be seated.
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The image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd invariably conjures up warm feelings of our Lord’s care and compassion for each one of us. Intriguingly, though, close attention to the context Christ’s teaching about the Good Shepherd shows that there may, in fact, be more going on in this passage than initially meets the eye. After all, in verse 19, at the conclusion of our Lord’s teaching, we learn the response of those listening to these words of Jesus: “There was again a division among the Jews because of these words. Many of them said, ‘He has a demon, and is insane; why listen to him?’” What, then, was so provocative about what Jesus said that it led some to claim that Jesus was insane and demon-possessed? There are, I suggest, at least three layers of meaning that we are meant to find in this passage that can help us to see just how striking–indeed, shocking–this teaching of our Lord actually is.
First, Jesus’ claim to be the Good Shepherd placed him in stark opposition to the Pharisees, who claimed to be authority figures in Jesus’ day. Here the preceding context is critical. Jesus’ teaching about himself as the Good Shepherd follows the account in John chapter 9 of his healing of a man born blind. Because this healing took place on the Sabbath, it generates conflict with the Pharisees, whom Jesus castigates as themselves being spiritually blind for not understanding the true purpose and meaning of the Sabbath. Chapter 10, then, continues Jesus’ polemic against the Pharisees. Thus, when Jesus, at the start of chapter 10, contrasts the figure of a shepherd with that of a thief or a robber, he has in mind the Pharisees as the thieves and robbers who are leading the sheep of Israel astray. In contrast, the sheep, like the man born blind whom Jesus has just healed, know the voice of their shepherd, who calls them by name and leads them out into green pastures. As Jesus explains in verse 10, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” This brings us to our Gospel lesson in verses 11 through 16, in which Jesus identifies himself as the Good Shepherd, who lays down his life for the sheep. Again, Jesus drives home the difference between himself and the Pharisees; as we read in verses 12 and 13, the hired hands flee at the first sight of a wolf, because he cares nothing for the sheep. Unlike the aforementioned thieves and robbers, these hired hands don’t appear to have ill motives; rather, they simply treat their care of the sheep as a job, a way of putting food on the table, and as such they are not prepared to risk their lives for these sheep who don’t even belong to them.
Historically, then, the church has read this passage as an example for how pastors, those under-shepherds serving under the Great Shepherd, should care for their flocks. As St. John Chrysostom once preached, “A great matter, beloved, a great matter it is to preside over a Church: a matter needing wisdom and courage as great as that of which Christ speaketh, that a man should lay down his life for the sheep, and never leave them deserted or naked; that he should stand against the wolf nobly.” This charge to pastors feels particularly appropriate on this bittersweet Sunday, when we send off our curate, Fr. Jesse, to return back to his church plant in Colorado Springs. Fr. Jesse, thank you for your selfless care of our flock here at Christ the King, and we pray that the Lord would strengthen you and equip you to “stand nobly” and “lay down your life” for the sheep in that city. Your humility in taking on even the most mundane tasks, cheerfulness in serving the members of our parish, and your sweet family will all be sorely missed. We are excited to see what the Lord does through you and the Oratory in Colorado Springs in the years to come.
Returning to our passage, we should not be surprised, then, that the Pharisees would react negatively to this thinly veiled criticism of their attempts at care for God’s people. It does not, though, seem to justify the charge of insanity and demon-possession. We press on, then, to a second layer of meaning at work in this text. Thus, our second layer of significance in this passage is Jesus’ striking claim that as the Good Shepherd, his death would be substitutionary. When Jesus in this passage speaks about the shepherd laying down his life for the sheep, in verses 11 and 15, he clearly has the cross, his own substitutionary death, in view. Our Epistle this morning, from 1 Peter 2, helps us understand this theme in more detail. According to verse 24, Christ “bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.” Peter immediately follows this in verse 25 with a reference to Christ’s own teaching on the Good Shepherd: “For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.” There is, therefore, a fundamental, inextricable link between Jesus being the Good Shepherd and his atoning, substitutionary sacrifice on behalf of the sheep on the cross, which we see in both our Gospel and Epistle readings. Moreover, Peter also commends Christ’s patient endurance through unjust suffering as an example, not just to pastors, but to all believers; as he writes in verse 21, speaking of suffering, “For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.” In this way, our Collect for this morning accurately summarizes the teaching of both these passages: Christ is “both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life.” Therefore, the Collect has us pray, we should “most thankfully receive” the benefits of Christ’s atoning death, and “daily endeavour ourselves to follow the blessed steps of his most holy life.”
It is difficult to know what exactly Jesus’ opponents would have made of this particular claim, that he would die for his people. After all, contemporary Jewish messianic expectation did not envision a suffering Savior. If anything, Jesus’ words would have called to mind the suffering and martyrdom of the servant of Isaiah 53 or of those pious Jews, such as those in the times of the Maccabees, whose deaths were believed to be somehow a propitiation on behalf of the people. Such comparisons would, no doubt, arouse the anger of the Pharisees who had set themselves against Jesus. But to fully understand the enormity of their anger and outrage at Jesus’ teaching about himself as the Good Shepherd, we must consider a third and final layer of meaning within this text: when Jesus described himself as the Good Shepherd, he was making not just a potentially messianic claim but a claim to divinity, to be doing that which was only for Yahweh, Israel’s God, to do. For Jews steeped in the Old Testament Scriptures, Jesus’ imagery in this passage would have most clearly called to mind the famous prophecy of Ezekiel 34. In this portion of the book of the prophet Ezekiel, the word of the LORD comes to Ezekiel, telling him to prophesy against the false shepherds of Israel, who have failed to take care of the flock of God’s people, such that they have been scattered across the whole earth. Then, in a most remarkable passage of Scripture, Ezekiel records the following words, beginning in verse 11: “For this is what the Sovereign LORD [Lord here standing in for the divine name, Yahweh] says: I myself will search for my sheep and look after them. As a shepherd looks after his scattered flock when he is with them, so will I look after my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places where they were scattered on a day of clouds and darkness. I will bring them out from the nations and gather them from the countries, and I will bring them into their own land. I will pasture them on the mountains of Israel, in the ravines and in all the settlements in the land. I will tend them in a good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel will be their grazing land. There they will lie down in good grazing land, and there they will feed in a rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. I myself will tend my sheep and have them lie down, declares the Sovereign Lord. I will search for the lost and bring back the strays. I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak, but the sleek and the strong I will destroy. I will shepherd the flock with justice.” When Jesus, then, claims to be the Good Shepherd, he is taking on himself a vocation reserved only for Yahweh himself. His claim to be the Good Shepherd, therefore, would not have been received as a nice, comforting word, but rather as a shocking, even blasphemous claim to divinity. And this is precisely how the Pharisees heard it, explaining the extent of their outrage.
Do you experience the same level of shock when you hear Jesus describe himself as the Good Shepherd? While we, on this side of the cross, won’t be shocked by Jesus’ announcement that he will suffer on behalf of God’s people, or even his implicit claim to be God, we should be shocked by this: that the very Son of God–the one by whom all things were made, the Word made flesh, who is now ascended at the right hand of the Father and is reigning as Lord and King–this One intimately knows each of us, his sheep, and allows us to know Him, to trust Him, and to be led by Him. The King of the whole universe and the Lord of all the world laid down His life for His sheep–for you, and for me. The implications of this for our lives, especially in this age of anxiety, aimlessness, and apostasy, are huge. Because the Lord is our shepherd, we can trust that we shall not want. Because the Lord is our shepherd, we can have confidence that He will make us lie down in green pastures and lead us beside still waters. Because the Lord is our shepherd, we can cling to the truth that even when it is dark and we seem to have lost our way, when we find ourselves plunged into what feels like the valley of death, that His rod and His staff will comfort us and lead us through. Brothers and sisters, let not our hearts and our minds be numb to these shocking, wonderful, seemingly impossible truths by which we can catch a glimpse of the intimate relationship between ourselves and our Savior.
To return to the Collect one last time, though, it is not enough that we should “most thankfully receive” the benefits of the Good Shepherd laying down His life for us, His flock, for we are also challenged to “daily endeavour ourselves to follow the blessed steps of his most holy life.” Not for nothing does Jesus say in John 15 that, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” As we go through this Easter season, even as we carry in our hearts the joy of the resurrection, let us recall the truth that we are most like Christ when we give ourselves to others in love and service. As the Orthodox scholar and theologian John Behr writes, “It is in laying down his life that Christ shows us what it is to be God and what it is to be human.” We all will have opportunities this week–no doubt, this very day– to practice laying down our lives for one another: for our spouses, for our children, for our roommates, for our parents, for our bosses, employees, and co-workers, for the people who live next door. Let it be said of us, Christ the King Anglican Church, that we, like our Good Shepherd, laid down our lives for others. Amen.