As the “wilderness” continues to shrink, the highly populated suburbs weirdly become the new “edges” of civilization. Why else would coyotes have become the greatest danger for small dogs and cats? Why else would deer have replaced moles, grubs, and crabgrass as the biggest landscaping challenge all over suburbia?
The only thing worse than having all your flowers nipped off by marauding Bambi’s is the absolutely abhorrent smell of deer repellent. To keep deer from munching down your roses, pansies, zinnia’s or cosmos, you now have to willingly endure a certain degree of . . . what shall we call it? Stink! Stench! Wretchedness!
It goes by the formal name of “deer repellent.” But it a noxious, nasty‑smelling nostrum, made up of something called “blood meal” and some form of “tough‑guy” animal urine (you know like cougars, wolves, coyotes, repo‑guys). It smells disgusting — almost unbearable to humans for the first twelve hours. The good news? It smells disgusting to deer for two to three weeks. The bad news? It smells like Tom Ford Tuscan Leather to dogs. So if you are putting out deer repellant and have dogs, you have to make a choice: More munched flowers, or stupendously stinky dogs sleeping under your bed. What the deer smell as repellant, the dogs believe is canine cologne. So if you have dogs, and flowers, and deer, stock up‑‑on both deer repellant and dog shampoo. You will need lots of both.
In today’s text, Jesus uses similar familiar information to carry a new message to his listening audience. After bringing sight to a man blind from birth, you would think everyone is now lauding Jesus as a great, miraculous healer. But no. Instead the healed man was subjected to an inquisition and then ultimately was rejected and thrown out of his synagogue because he had been healed by Jesus. Who was it who first said, “No good deed goes unpunished”?
Today’s text is offered in the aftermath of that fiasco. It declares that Jesus’ way is THE WAY, that Jesus is THE GATE, and that all other attempts to approach safety, to apply for “salvation” and to live THE LIFE are bad entrances. They and all other ways offer “no access,” no “gateway” to the good way.
It is hard to overstate how unusual it is that Jesus chooses shepherding images to illustrate his message. One of the most popular family shows a few years ago was “Tool Time,” featuring the comedy home grown humor of “Tim, the Tool Man, Taylor.” The funny was so familiar because we all have home‑grown, half‑baked, “handy‑men” in our lives. Well‑meaning, yet witless, “helper‑people” who claim they can “Fix” anything, but really do not have a clue.
Jesus may seem to come across as a “Tool‑Time” kind of guy at times. But although Jesus may have been raised as a stone carver and mason, he also had deep roots in agriculture. The first “hands‑on” activity for God recorded in the Bible is as a “mud‑pie” maker. In Genesis 2, the oldest creation account we have, God is an artist crafting humanity out of dirt and water, a classic mud pie mixture known to potters of all ages.
Throughout the Hebrew Bible God is referred to with shepherding imagery. God is Israel’s shepherd. God herds Israel away from harm. Israel is repeatedly referred to as the “sheep,” the favored “flock” that belongs to God.
These pastoral, agricultural images mean the most to Jesus. This is the new identity that Jesus most wanted those listening to him to embrace and embody. But why?
Sheep were NOT and still are not the poster children for “amazing, impressive, creatures.” It is more like sheep are stupid, defenseless, easy to fleece and gullible. Sheep are flock animals who need at least one companion for them to be happy. So what is it about “sheep” that spoke to Jesus? What is so important about sheep that he wanted to make sure we got? Why use sheep to communicate to the new, first generation of witnesses to the Messiah?
Jesus offers himself, his identity, as the Good Shepherd, as the only one who extends his voice of identity and safety to those who call upon him. Jesus as the “shepherd,” as the one who saved the sheep, was a huge slap in the face to the Temple bureaucrats, to the powers that controlled the religious life of the Jewish people.
Instead of continuing in the Temple traditions, a tradition steeped in the blood sacrifice of simple sheep, Jesus offered to save all future sheep, all future generations, and to end the corruption of the Temple bureaucrats (I call them bureacritutes–rhymes with prostitutes).
The slaughter of creatures was over. So ruled the Ultimate Shepherd. Jesus, the one who was born in Beth‑Lehem, in old Hebrew the “house (beth) of Bread (lehem),” declared that the sacrifice of “Meat” would no longer be the “gateway,” would no longer be “the way,” to God’s salvation and God’s presence. Bread would become body, his flesh, his meat, and God’s presence would now be found around tables as much as at temples.
Most people know that Bethlehem means “House of Bread” in Hebrew. What more fitting place for the “Bread of Life” (John 6) to be born than in this breadbasket where Ruth gleaned in the barley fields of Boaz, the great‑grandfather of King David (1Chronicles 2:12‑15, Matthew 1:5‑6), of whose lineage came Joseph, wedded to Mary, who gave birth to Yeshua known as the Messiah. Through the centuries, wheat and barley have grown on Bethlehem’s east side. But you can predict that where grains grow, close by you will find the animals that feed upon them growing.
And sure enough, on Bethlehem’s west side, there are the sheep to go with the wheat. There is an Arabic side to go with the Hebrew side. For the Arabic cognate of Hebrew lechem is meat, flesh. In Arabic “beth‑lehem” translates into bet lahm (bayt lahem) or “house of meat.” In fact, the Syriac gospel and Peschitta (Syrian is most similar to Aramaic) use the Aramaic cognate for lachma for bread (house of meat). Even in Hebrew lechem can mean food in general and in one instance at least refers clearly to meat: Lev. 3.11.
When Jesus suggested that this bread is his flesh, he was bringing together the east and west hills of Bethlehem, something that already was connected in the minds of his hearers that we have lost.
Do you see where Jesus is going with this metaphor of sheep? Do you see where it’s more than a metaphor? Can you hear Jesus saying now, “I am both Shepherd and Sheep?” Can you see Jesus moving us from Temple to Table?
Much has been written about that little town of Bethlehem just inside the West Bank. But many of the most important features of that little town of Bethlehem have yet to be explored. What is postcard familiar is that Bethlehem was celebrated as the royal city, a city that birthed princes, because King David was born in Bethlehem and as a boy tended sheep in these very west side hills where today shepherds still tend their flocks of sheep and goats.
But what is less widely known, and what connects with the Arabic translation of “Bethlehem” as a “house of meat” is this: The kind of sheep cared for by Bethlehem shepherds was a special kind of sheep, which made the name “Bethlehem” synonymous with sacrificial lambs. Or a slaughterhouse: hence “house of meat.” These shepherds were not just any shepherds tending sheep. They were descendants of David tending “David’s flock,” sheep destined for the temple (another possible translation of “Beth” besides “House of” is “Temple”). You might even think of these shepherds as outsourced employees of the Temple.
According to the Torah, every day two lambs were required for sacrifice in the Temple that’s 730 lambs needed each year. The twice daily offering of a male lamb was known as the tamid (or “the continuous offering”). It was the first offering and the last offering of each day (Numbers 28:1‑8). During the hour of the final sacrifice of the day the Final Sacrifice was offered up.
On top of that there were tens of thousands of lambs needed by Jewish families at Passover and other religious rituals. According to Exodus 12:3, there was to be a lamb sacrificed for every household at Passover, all the lambs ritually killed at the same time in the same place. But before they were slaughtered, each lamb was to be a pet in the family for a least two days. So the day after the final Sabbath before Passover, shepherds from the Bethlehem hills drove thousands of lambs into Jerusalem, where they were taken in by Jewish families for at least two days and treated as members of the family. By the way, we celebrate this day by a different name: “Palm Sunday.”
There were special techniques and rituals for birthing sacrificial lambs that the priestly shepherds had to learn and follow. The Bethlehem lambs born for slaughter were treated as special lambs. Each newborn lamb was wrapped in “swaddling cloths” to prevent harm and wounds from thrashing about after birth. After being placed in a manger or feeding trough where they could calm down and not harm themselves, they were carefully inspected. Any “spot or blemish” (Exodus 12:5), no matter how slight, meant instant rejection (i.e. slaughter). The Hebrew word tamiym, (translated for lambs "without spot or blemish") means complete, whole, entire, sound. It is the same word used as "perfect" describing Noah in Genesis 6:9 and by YHVH to Abraham in Genesis 17:1.
The shepherds who gathered around the Bethlehem stable where the Lamb of God was born were not witnessing anything new, except the object that was in the manger: the most important sacrificial Lamb who had ever been born, the Lamb who would close down the slaughterhouse of sacrifice, the perfect Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.
In John 10 Jesus presents himself as the new gateway, the Good Shepherd.” It was a way completely different from the “meat” sacrifices of the old Temple. The sheep now have a good shepherd who feeds them and does not slaughter them. The sheep now have a good shepherd who is one of them and understands them as one of them. The sheep now have a protector, one who covers up all their spots and blemishes and presents them spotless and blameless.
Mortality rates for lambs and ewes are high at birth. Mother sheep or ewes are notorious for not accepting orphan sheep. So every shepherd learns two methods to get a mother sheep to accept an orphan lamb. One is to take the mother’s placental blood and fluids and smear the orphan lamb with her smell. That will work most of the time. But what works all the time is to wash the orphan lamb in the blood of the dead lamb.
Here in this morning’s text is where the “House of Meat,” the Temple rituals of sacrifice and slaughter, were transformed into the “House of Bread,” Jesus’ own offer of himself as the “Good Shepherd.”
Here in this morning’s text is where the Good Shepherd and the Sheep became one.
Here in this morning’s text is where Jesus moved us from the Temple to the Table.
[I suggest ending this sermon by your lining out the first stanza of the hymn “What can wash away my sin?” About half of the congregation will sing back to you, “Nothing but the blood of Jesus.” Then you line out again: “What can make me whole again?” This time almost all of them will sing back “Nothing but the blood of Jesus.” At this point you can motion for everyone to join in the song, with the words either printed in the bulletin or flashed on a screen. So the ending would be the singing of a few stanzas of this old song.]