John 10:1-21 · The Shepherd and His Flock
The Shepherd Who Loved His Sheep
John 10:1-21
Sermon
by George Bass
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Nearly everybody who visits the Holy Land seems to buy an olivewood carving of the Shepherd with the little lamb upon his shoulder. It is one of the most beloved symbols portraying the nature of Christ to people. But that type of carving is radically different from the representation of the Good Shepherd which has graced the apses of Christian church buildings ever since they were first built. High on my tourist-agenda, when I first visited Rome, was the Church of Santa Costanza, mainly because I had heard a priest describe the "Christ in Glory" mosaic, the oldest Christian mosaic in the Eternal City. It is really a Good Shepherd symbol, because it depicts the risen Christ standing with arm upraised as Peter and Paul flank him; several sheep stand at his feet and are looking up at him. But there is also another "Christ in Glory" mosaic in the building, opposite the first, and this one portrays Christ seated upon a throne and laying claim to the earth and everyone upon it. The combination catches and sums up the theme of this gospel for Good Shepherd Sunday, and does it quite well.

But this section of John’s "Good Shepherd chapter" seems bent on taking us behind Easter to the Passion and death of our Lord. Jesus not only calls himself the Good Shepherd, but he declares, "The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep." In that action, Christ becomes one of the sheep, and a sacrificial lamb at that. But even in death he was the Good Shepherd, because he was in charge of his destiny, laying down his life to fulfill the intentions of God for his mission in the world.

It was an act as deliberate and measured as that of the unknown truck driver who, on that Sunday morning in October of 1983, smashed through the gate of the American compound at the Beirut airport right into the building housing several hundred U.S. Marines, detonated the two thousand pounds of explosives in the truck, killing over 230 Marines - and himself. Several sentries, who were unable even to fire at him because their weapons were not loaded, remarked that he had a smile on his face.

That driver did lay down his life - for a cause and for others - but it was an action that claimed, rather than saved, other human lives. And, of course, it had nothing to do with salvation and eternal life. Jesus laid down his life to save the sheep and deliver them from death, through his death and resurrection.

Christ as the Good Shepherd always stands in contrast to - and, in a sense, in condemnation of - the world in which we live. Human beings seem bent on destroying one another, not only through the threat of the Bomb, but particularly for reasons of self-interest. Richard Cohen, of the Washington Post, tells the too familiar story of Maria, who left her home in Guatemala because she was afraid to remain there. Sheer terror and fear, not ideology, moved her to emigrate to the United States; it was no longer safe to live in her village. Cohen says that she "only knows that her former neighbors are dead." She doesn’t know who killed them, or why they were killed, but she knows the stories about their deaths: "Roberto was decapitated. Men in uniform came to the prayer room in the church where he slept and took him away. It is not known if he was killed by soldiers or by guerillas wearing army uniforms. All that is known is that Roberto was decapitated." Someone took away his life. She tells similar stories, some very brief, about others, too: "Felipe, 23, married and with two children, disappeared. Juan, 45, was roused from his sleep at night and has not been seen since. He was married and the father of three. The military said he was a guerilla, although they did not say they killed him. Ernesto, twenty, went to the market and never came back. Gabriel, 25, married and the father of three children, was taken from his house at night. He was held for two weeks by the military before friends managed to free him. But it was too late. By then he had been blinded."42

The whole wide world, not only Central America, seems to be in the grip of a reign of terror. And nobody seems able to do much about it - or about the poverty, injustice, corruption, and other factors responsible for the terror.

Those "Christ in Glory" Good Shepherd mosaics seem, sometimes, to be relics of another age, appropriately gracing the walls and ceilings of churches that are more museums than they are places where people gather to worship in the name of the risen Lord. It is almost as if Christ were oblivious to what is going on here upon the earth, or that the Lord God Almighty is powerless to change the order of things and life on this earth. But we know differently. We know that he laid down his life precisely because he was aware of the nature of the human predicament and realized that the only way something could be done to free people from sin and death was in surrendering his precious life, giving it for others, (the sheep), and that this was the gracious will and plan of the Father. And for that action alone - his intentional sacrifice to set us free from fear and guilt and death - we know him and call him Lord and Savior. We love the wonderful things he said and the stories he told while he was alive; and we revere and study most carefully what he taught and preached. We wonder about the miracles that he performed to heal and cure people of all sorts of maladies, and we are amazed at the depth of his compassion for the poor, the hungry, and the oppressed. In all that he did and said, we see the hand of God and the voice of God operative in this world; no one has ever spoken as he spoke or has done the works of mercy and miracle that he has done in the name of God. But it is supremely in his death, and his resurrection, that we know him to be our Lord, our deliverer, and our hope, simply because he is the Good Shepherd. He has claimed us for God, and he will never let us go.

As Christians, it is (or ought to be) perfectly clear to us that we can, and ought to, do some of the things that he did while he lived physically on the earth. I remember some lines from a poem:

And if I said "I love Thee, Lord,"
He would not heed my spoken word,
Because my daily life would tell,
If verily I loved him well.
- Charles F. Richardson

Love for Christ is best expressed in obedient ministry - in serving Christ by caring for others who can’t care for themselves. A few of us get to wrestle with global problems and issues, such as does Norman Borlaug, the "father" of the "Green Revolution" and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. He believes that population growth, especially in developing countries, is the monster that threatens the very and continued existence of life here on earth, simply because it involves food, employment, education, housing, and clothing. He says: "It took us from the beginning of agriculture, 12,000 years ago, up until 1975, when we were four billion people (globally), to produce 3.3 billion metric tons of foods. With population growth the way it was in ’75, it will take us forty years to double our population from four billion to eight billion. That means to keep the situation from getting worse, we would have to increase again as much in forty years as we were able to achieve slowly in 12,000 years."

In less than a decade, Borlaug notes, population growth is slowing to where it will take sixty years to double the 1975 population, but the production of food and its attendant problems is still a massive problem that can only be solved by science and technology. Borlaug is not what he would call a doomsayer but, he says, "I’m not the tremendous optimist, either ... But if we can get a handle on this population growth, we will be all right."43 He has devoted his life - laid it down, in a manner of speaking - to this cause. And we admire him and are grateful to him, and to God, for Borlaug’s dedication.

Some of us are involved in dramatic actions that occur on a much more limited basis. The same month that Borlaug was in Washington to participate in a global conference on environment, a woman startled a newspaper executive by telling him, rather hysterically, that she was going to "fetch her daughter Amy, return and camp in these offices until she got what she wanted or was arrested." Larry Batson, the columnist who tells her story, reports her explanation: "I went a little crazy. I’m not emotional. I’m an accountant, a businessperson. People don’t see me cry. But Amy is special. She’s my Achilles’ heel." You see, Amy is retarded and has an IQ of about forty; she’s also hyperactive and has autistic tendencies. The woman, Joyce Day, was upset because she and her divorced husband desperately need foster care for Amy during the school week. Health problems complicate an otherwise complex situation; Joyce has cancer for the second time in three years and was about to begin chemotherapy; her ex-husband, Robert, has had open-heart surgery twice and has continuing health problems and is nearly worn out from caring for Amy full time.

Despite their divorce, they are determined to keep Amy with them as much as possible: "We’d take her alternately, on most weekends. We’d rather handle her problems, take her to the doctor, visit the school. There must be someone in the Twin Cities (whom they could employ) willing to provide foster care; the only boarding institution suitable for Amy is full."44 But they couldn’t find anyone to help, thus the frustration and desperation. Both of them love Amy very much, have since they first saw her at three years of age and, knowing that she was retarded, adopted her as their own child, and cannot bear the thought of losing her. In a way, too, they have laid down their lives for another, their adopted and retarded daughter Amy. Some of us get to do such acts of love and selflessness. And such works of love and mercy must make glad the heart of Christ, partly because they are done in the spirit of his intentional sacrifice, but also for their own sake.

On rare occasions, we literally lay down our lives in the attempt to save the life of another, but seldom is such a sacrifice intentional. Ray Bradbury once wrote a short story that he called "The Women." It was about a nameless woman and man who had been enjoying a vacation in an ocean-front hotel. On their last afternoon on the beach, the woman fell asleep and had a terrifying dream about her husband; it was so horrible that she wouldn’t tell him about it. The story makes it clear that she dreamed that the ocean would prove as seductive as another woman and would take him away from her if it could. They got ready to leave the beach as it started to rain, but suddenly he cried out as she walked on a little ahead of him: "Hold on!" And to his wife, he yelled, "There’s someone out in the water! Drowning! Wait here!" he shouted. "I’ll be right back. There’s someone there! A woman, I think." His wife cried out, "Let the lifeguards get her!" "Aren’t any. Off duty; late!" And as he ran into the water, she screamed at him: "Come back! There’s no one out there! Don’t, oh, don’t!" "Don’t worry, I’ll be right back!" he called. "She’s drowning out there, see?" She ran after him, tears rushing from her eyes, crying, "Don’t!"45 But he did, and she stood there on the beach, waiting, until his body washed up at her feet. His sacrifice was for nothing; there was no woman out there to rescue from impending death. At best, his death was unintentional; but it still accomplished nothing.

The one thing that we can’t do for other people, even if we lay down our lives intentionally in service or literally in a life-saving situation, is deliver people from sin and death. Only Christ is able to do that, because he is the only one who has surrendered his life - laid it down at Calvary - and has taken it up again in the Resurrection. That’s why his name is above every name, and why people can know salvation and all that it means through Jesus Christ. No one else has come back from beyond the grave, able to communicate with his disciples, able to be perceived by people whom he knew and loved, and able to eat with them again. There is no assurance of pardon and forgiveness apart from Jesus Christ, and no real hope of eternal life. He alone is the Good Shepherd who would have every person know what he has done, and have us love him enough to call him Lord.

And that’s why the mission of the church is so important. There are, indeed, "other sheep that are not of this fold" who, at Christ’s command, must be brought into it. And for this - especially through our prayers and our sharing of our lives and life-supporting finances - we participate in telling the Good Shepherd’s story to everyone able to hear it. And, in time, there will be one flock, one shepherd.


42. Published in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, July 5, 1983.

43. From an article by Al McConagha, "Ex-‘U’ Wrestler Borlaug Now Grapples Global Woes," Minneapolis Star and Tribune, June 5, 1983.

44. One of Larry Batson’s columns, published in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, June 5, 1983.

45. Ray Bradbury, Stories of Ray Bradbury. (New York: Knophf, 1981).

CSS Publishing Co., Inc., Tree, The Tomb, And The Trumpet, The, by George Bass