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November 26, 2006
Jesus, the Trustworthy Shepherd
Jeremiah 31: 7-14
John 10: 1-6
November 26th, 2006
Every Sunday morning for many years you have heard me end the service with an ascription of praise to God that includes a blessing, a benediction. With three fingers of my right hand extended, an ancient sign of the Holy Trinity, I will say, “Now the God of peace that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus that great shepherd of the sheep, make you perfect in every good work to do His will.” You leave worship with these last words ringing in your memory. Jesus, the Great Shepherd has a good and perfect will for me to.
The blessing goes on with another word-picture that suggest Jesus is like a lamb—“through the blood of the everlasting covenant make you perfect in every good work to do His will.” Jesus, the Lamb of God, took away the sins of the world. The goal of this Shepherd-Lamb is to make you and me perfect in every good work to do His will, leading us in a life well pleasing in God’s sight.
This was what the Great Shepherd did, after all. He said, “My will is to do the will of Him who sent me.” And He leads us to do the will of the One who sent Him. Through His blood of the everlasting covenant He makes this possible.
Increasingly I savor the words of this benediction. They come to me during the day. I say them slowly every Sunday so they may sink in to us all. We leave worship reminded of our purpose in life, to do what is well-pleasing in the sight of our Great Shepherd. I see some of you moving your lips, repeating with me those familiar words.
Here is the hope of the Gospel—Jesus the Great Shepherd that I can claim as my Shepherd. Here is the goal of the Gospel, to make us “perfect in every good work to do His will.” Perfect means complete, fulfilled, the purpose of your life and mine achieved. Here is the means of the Gospel, the blood of the everlasting Covenant. It applies to us sheep that leave worship to follow the great Shepherd of the sheep.
As I pondered not only the Scriptures before us this morning but also the many other Bible references to God as shepherd I saw so many directions I could lead us in our thinking this morning. How clever it is possible for us sheep to become with this teaching!
Indeed, if I were to open up the tenth chapter of John carefully, many questions come to mind. What did Jesus mean, “Other sheep I have that are not of this fold?” Who are these other sheep? In the sixteenth verse Jesus speaks of one fold (in Greek, aules) and one flock (in Greek, poimen). The fold of the sheep is the enclosure in which they are kept. All sheep in the flock not in the same enclosure. But there is still one flock that belongs to the shepherd. How suggestive are these words of Jesus. We scrutinize and interpret them in our day of great diversity and splintering of Christendom. We set out to prove how we are in the right fold, the one for which Jesus is shepherd, while others may not be in the right fold. Who are these other sheep of His, we wonder? Because we believe strongly we are sure ours is the one fold as well as the one flock.
I see the vast development of ideas since New Testament times and how this doctrinal development has occurred here and there as a means of self-approval as well as an attempt to understand. And I think, “O if we could see ourselves as sheep more than as theologians, how would we see the Shepherd differently.”
When we look at the relationship between shepherds and sheep, do the sheep think of the meaning of that strange creature with two legs that guides them, protects them, provides them enough to eat and drink, pours oil over their wounds, and goes hunting for them when they stray? Sheep probably think nothing at all about their shepherds. But we do. Of course, we are sheep with different brains than the four-legged kind have.
In the metaphor of sheep and shepherd we see that all the sheep do is trust their shepherd. Faith for them is a verb, an action word not a noun. It is not a synonym for “right belief.” Faith is trust in the shepherd. They go where the shepherd leads. They eat what the shepherd feeds them. They drink from the still running water to which the shepherd leads them. They feel safe in the shepherd’s presence. And in that most favorite of all psalms that we want to hear when death is near they trust that “even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
Of course, one reason why we don’t think of ourselves only as sheep is that the Bible gives us more images of God than of a shepherd. God is a righteous Judge too. He is angry with the wicked every day. Our thoughts of God are tinged with fear, reasonably so, in the presence of One who knows all about us. God is the Lord of Hosts, the Commander of invincible heavenly forces. God is the Creator of all things. The Bible does not only tell us of God as our Shepherd, with Jesus as the personification of this gentle image. So we do not think of God only as our Shepherd.
Not only that but we are not of the species called “sheep.” We are human beings. We are at the top of the heap in the animal world, with minds capable of brilliant thoughts. Real sheep are not capable of great art, great virtue, and great sins. We are. We can launch space-craft to the moon and Mars. We discover quantum theory and the vocabulary of DNA. We can produce gifted artists like Michaelangelo who can paint glorious pictures and sculpt marble into detailed likenesses of David and Moses.
We can become suicide-bombers and follow leaders like Adolf Hitler. Sheep have no capacity for this. Their thoughts, such as they are, never stray far from eating and drinking. So it is harder for us to remember that “we are the sheep of God’s hand,” when we are busy with the many things that people think about.
So there are red herrings we go chasing after that deflect from this basic teaching of the Bible that puts us into the humble position of sheep.
The sheep and shepherds that we read about in the Scriptures are different from western images of sheep farming that we see on TV or reading National Geographic. We know of vast sheep farms in New Zealand. There helicopters as well as horseback riders are used to move great populations of sheep from here to there. Since the market for wool has been reduced by cheaper synthetic materials for making clothing, the sheep are headed for market as lamb chops rather than as providers of wool for wool coats and blankets. Those who herd sheep to the butcher shop do not come to know them well over the years.
Agri-business sheep farmers hardly fit the image of the shepherds in the Bible. Sheep-for-meat-farmers don’t know their sheep by name. They don’t worry about the one lost sheep because when there are thousands of sheep to care for it’s far different from leaving ninety and nine. It is economically unfeasible to leave the ninety-nine thousand to look for the one lost sheep.
So we have to let our minds drift to olden times in the Middle East where there was an intimate relationship between a small flock sheep and the shepherd. Then sheep were kept for the wool they could give, year after year. So shepherds knew their sheep by name. “Here brown-leg. Here “Black Ear.” The shepherd calls, and Brown-leg and Black-ear know their names. They know the voice of the shepherd. Some times shepherds talk in sing-song sounds using a strange language developed between him and his flock. Over the years the language grows, unique to this flock known by name to the shepherd, and known uniquely by voice to the sheep. This is the picture of Jesus the Good Shepherd we are to see.
In our Gospel lesson this morning Jesus is a good shepherd, the kind that gives his life for the sheep. William Barclay reminds us that when John refers to Jesus as the “good shepherd” he uses a word for “good” (kalos) that means winsome, loving, and kind. Jesus is not just a skilled (agathos) shepherd, one simply good at caring for sheep. He is kind. Not only that, He puts their wellbeing before His own. He lays his life on the line to protect them.
But I see that I have gone on and done what I proposed we need to do less—talk about the Shepherd. What we need is to recover some sense of being the people of His pasture, the sheep of His hand. How can we do this in a day of so many competing ideas of what it is to follow the Shepherd?
In past weeks we have noticed that faith is an action verb rather than a noun. Obedience has far more to do with being faithful sheep than believing great ideas about Him. When you and I come to the end of the day we may discover that our present orthodoxies more or less hit the mark, but we can tell for sure if we have obeyed the will of the Shepherd.
When I remember that the Lord is my Shepherd and I am His sheep, I will try far more to follow the voice of my Shepherd than to argue about what He means. I know where my Shepherd guides me—in ways of righteousness—that is, deep goodness. I know that my Shepherd wants me to love God with all I am, and that an index of whether I love God is how I’m doing with loving my neighbor. I know that God wants me to feel as He does about people who suffer from want or sickness, or who are in jail. I know that God is compassionate over all, so I should be too. And I know that following in these ways that my Shepherd guides me gives me a lot to do that I can only do if I keep my eyes on Him, and my ears—listening to His voice rather than to my own self-protecting voice.
Above my father’s desk was a plaque given to him by Moravian missionaries in Costa Rica when he taught one summer in their seminary. It is the Moravian “coat of arms.” I showed it to the children this morning. It depicts Jesus as the Lamb of God striding forward, its right leg raised to take the next step. It seems to hold in that hoof the pole on which hangs the banner of the cross. Around its head is a yellow halo with a Latin cross on it. It walks on green grass. Around the border we read: Vicit agnus noster; eum sequamur. Our Lamb conquers. We will follow Him.”
Let us pray: O God our Shepherd, we thank you for Jesus our Good Shepherd, the Good Lamb of God. Grant that we may follow Him. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at November 26, 2006 09:30 AM