John 10:1-10
Jesus said, “Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.” Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.
So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
One of the things we do in our enquirers’ classes here at St. Paul’s is to explore our pictures of God. To get into this discussion, I draw a kind of formless mass on one side of an easel pad and a pair of spectacles on the other that look in the direction of that formless mass. Between the two, I write up a list that the class generates of all the different pictures or images of God we’ve either heard about in Scripture or we’ve noticed from our own lives.
The point is that for many of us, for good or for ill, these pictures influence how we experience God. And so it matters if our image of God is that of a loving father or an angry father, a nurturing mother or a smothering mother. It matters if our image of God is that of a whirlwind, a dread warrior, a rock, a lover or a friend.
After doing this part of the exercise (and if it isn’t already on the easel pad list) I write up the word “Jesus.” This takes us into a conversation about the idea that for Christians, Jesus is THE definitive picture of God.
But what does this mean? Who is Jesus? And what does he show us about God? How does he speak about himself in the gospels? What images traditional or new does he draw on? What pictures of God are in Jesus?
“The Lord is my shepherd” says Psalm 23. “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not be in want.”
Drawing on this very psalm, one of the images that Jesus uses for himself is that of a shepherd. Because we know this psalm so well, we can believe that God as shepherd is a dominant image in the psalms. But as one commentator puts it, the image of God as shepherd is really “a minority point of view” within the immense storehouse of images for God found in the psalms. The dominant image is not the shepherd but images of might and protection that reflect a kind homeland security mentality: God as shield, high tower, fortress, high place, refuge, rock, warrior, and stronghold.
In our gospel Jesus reaches back and plucks the image of the shepherd and holds it out before us as he tries to suggest what he’s about, and, therefore, what about God he’s bringing near to us.
God is like a shepherd—not warrior or stronghold or fortress. God is like a shepherd.
So there are many places to go with this. One of the favorite places preachers go is highlighting the downside of this image: that if God is like a shepherd, we’re like sheep and that with all our capabilities, we are, of course, more than sheep. To this, I would say that images of God are not meant to capture either all of God’s or our reality. So then the question becomes which dimensions, both about God and about the nature of our own godliness, is this image meant to bring to us, dimensions that perhaps forever come out of a “minority point of view”?
I’d like to talk about just one dimension today, the one that I believe is central and that after all these years, still represents a minority point of view about God and about our own way of imaging God in the world
God as shepherd is one who is in relationship to us, who, in fact, is wired into us. In the gospel, Jesus speaks of this as the shepherd who knows the sheep by name, who knows their collective and individual nature and who acts out of this intimate relationship and knowledge. God is relationship: scandalously specific and costly, intimate and sacrificial in the way parents are with their children, adult children are with their aging parents, people are with their dearest friends, spouses and partners are with their beloveds, and, yes, humans are with the animals they may choose to spend their lives with.
Relationship—heart lifting, heart-breaking, up at night worrying, patience trying, time giving self emptying and self-fulfilling relationship—that’s where our God comes from with us and that’s what our God asks of us in this world. And I believe it is still a minority point of view.
It is a minority point of view because it asks us to be a human being rather than just manage our relationships whether those relationships are in our families, in our friendships, in our work life, or in our civic life.
It’s a minority point of view because like all things that are important it asks us to open our hearts to others, and maybe even to risk having our hearts troubled or broken in the process.
It is a minority point of view because it’s easier to deal with the world and others as objects that can be turned away form rather than as intimates because when we can see and deal with them as objects it’s easier for us to settle back, get back to our glass of wine, our lovely dinner and our sleep.
And I know whereof I speak on this.
Since August 15th of last year I have lived alone. And while it has not been an easy time, it has been in my house, a time of reclaiming a kind of zone of “it’s all about me.” And then along came Teddy. Teddy is a 12 week old West Highland white terrier puppy. Now to be clear, he did not knock on my door one day asking to be adopted. I chose him. But, like many of us, I did this not fully understanding what it would mean to take on the care of a creature that I would fall for, to whom I would be declaring my love exactly thirty minutes into our ride home from the breeder.
And so life at my house of late has been a kind of love and sacrifice roller coaster—dancing around the room with a perplexed little puppy one moment and ready to throw myself into oncoming traffic on my little street the next, the latter happening one morning after Teddy wormed his way under the front fence and bounced toward the curb of the street.
This love and sacrifice roller coaster is, I believe, what God as the Good Shepherd is all about—the same love and sacrifice roller coaster that Jesus beckons us to ride as we risk falling for, being related to and giving our lives to those with whom we are in relationship or to those with whom we should be in relationship. From this, everything else comes—the ability to be led and therefore to lead, the ability to be fed and therefore to feed, the ability to be accompanied in dangerous and deadly places and, therefore, the ability to accompany others through deadly and dangerous places.
And so blessed be our God, seen and known by us in Jesus, the one who plucks out the minority point of view, the image of God as our shepherd, and places it before us, the one who is God riding the love and sacrifice roller coaster. And blessed be you who dare to fall for those in your life, who dare to call them by name, who dare to pour out yourself in leading them, in feeding them, in accompanying them. For you are God’s good shepherds, the living image of God in the world.
