God the True Shepherd

God the True Shepherd
by Rev. Jonathan Gale
Sunday 15th May 2011

Readings: Old Testament – Ezekiel 34: 11 – 31.

11 For thus says the Lord God: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. ¹²As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. ¹³I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land; and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the watercourses, and in all the inhabited parts of the land. ¹⁴I will feed them with good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel shall be their pasture; there they shall lie down in good grazing land, and they shall feed on rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. ¹⁵I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God. ¹⁶I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.

17 As for you, my flock, thus says the Lord God: I shall judge between sheep and sheep, between rams and goats: ¹⁸Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, but you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture? When you drink of clear water, must you foul the rest with your feet? ¹⁹And must my sheep eat what you have trodden with your feet, and drink what you have fouled with your feet?

20 Therefore, thus says the Lord God to them: I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. ²¹Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide, ²²I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep.

23 I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd. ²⁴And I, the Lord, will be their God, and my servant David shall be prince among them; I, the Lord, have spoken.

25 I will make with them a covenant of peace and banish wild animals from the land, so that they may live in the wild and sleep in the woods securely. ²⁶I will make them and the region around my hill a blessing; and I will send down the showers in their season; they shall be showers of blessing. ²⁷The trees of the field shall yield their fruit, and the earth shall yield its increase. They shall be secure on their soil; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I break the bars of their yoke, and save them from the hands of those who enslaved them. ²⁸They shall no more be plunder for the nations, nor shall the animals of the land devour them; they shall live in safety, and no one shall make them afraid. ²⁹I will provide for them splendid vegetation, so that they shall no more be consumed with hunger in the land, and no longer suffer the insults of the nations. ³⁰They shall know that I, the Lord their God, am with them, and that they, the house of Israel, are my people, says the Lord God. ³¹You are my sheep, the sheep of my pasture,^* and I am your God, says the Lord God.

Gospel – John 10: 1 - 10

Jesus the Good Shepherd

10‘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. ²The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. ³The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. ⁴When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. ⁵They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.’ ⁶Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.

7 So again Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. ⁸All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. ⁹I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. ¹⁰The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

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Following the Good Shepherd

Following is one of those neutral things that can have different meanings and different results in different contexts. “Follow that cab!” is different from “Follow me, I’m the Pied Piper.” “Are you following me?” is different again from “Are you following what I’m saying?”

In the dining room of the school I attended was an old brass plaque with an inscription to a 14 yr old boy which read, “To Guy “Dido” Falcon, who with laughter on his lips and innocence in his heart, chased a butterfly over the Gordon Falls and into eternity.” Dido followed a butterfly.

In Deuteronomy 1 we read of God saying of Caleb: “I will give him and his descendants the land he set his feet on, because he followed the LORD wholeheartedly.” Caleb followed God.

Human beings are followers. Sometimes we don’t like to think so. S. I. McMillen, in his book None of These Diseases, tells a story of a young woman who wanted to go to university, but her heart sank when she read the question on the application sheet that asked, "Are you a leader?" Being both honest and conscientious, she wrote, "No," and returned the application, expecting the worst. To her surprise, she received this letter from the university which read: "Dear Applicant: A study of the application forms reveals that this year our college will have 1,452 new leaders. We are accepting you because we feel it is imperative that they have at least one follower."

Speaking of followers, that makes me think of sheep. Following is the thing sheep do, though they seem to follow the first thing that moves, and without much commitment. At the first distraction they rush off after something else. And we’ve all heard at some stage in our lives that in the Middle East sheep followed the shepherd. They weren’t herded with dogs as we tend to do in the West.

In our gospel passage Jesus talks of sheep and shepherds. The passage follows immediately upon a confrontation Jesus had with the Pharisees. He was always clashing with them and on one memorable occasion (Matt 23: 15) he berated them for the effect they had on their followers: ¹⁵ “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.”

So in the passage on the Good Shepherd Jesus was not talking to his followers. He was addressing the Pharisees. They were accusing him of being from the devil because he healed a blind man on the Sabbath – a blind man who had worshipped him. His response was that he was the Good Shepherd, not like the hired hands who collected their pay for watching the sheep, but abandoned them in their time of need, because they didn’t really care for the sheep.

Now for thousands of years, the Jewish people had used the Good Shepherd image for God. It goes all the way back to Genesis 49:24, which says that Joseph was saved "By the power of the mighty one of Jacob, by the Shepherd, the Rock of Israel, the God of your father ..." Such imagery was used by Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Zechariah, and of course by David in his Psalms. Psalm 80 begins "Shepherd of Israel, listen, guide of the flock of Joseph, from your throne upon the cherubim, reveal yourself ..." And who can forget Psalm 23: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want."

So the Pharisees knew exactly what Jesus meant — he was claiming to be God. They also knew he was contrasting himself to them — the hired hands entrusted to care for God’s people, but caring only for themselves.

Now while Jesus on the surface of it was addressing the Pharisees, he was of course also warning his disciples: making sure they knew who not to follow.

The Pharisees were the respectable religious elite in Judaism. One could almost compare them to academics in today’s society. The power they held was one of influence. While they held little political power, they held the power of ideas. That’s why Jesus warns his disciples (Matt 16: 12) against the teaching of the Pharisees. Their faith was intellectual, but as Jesus makes abundantly clear in the section immediately following our reading, they did not care.

The practical side of their religion was legalistic, for where love is missing, God is understood in terms of dos and don’ts. Obedience to law was their default position because those are the only choices when dealing with God: we either experience him to be obeyed, or we experience him as loving and to be loved (but that’s an entire sermon in itself).

Jesus knew the scriptures and he knew the Pharisees knew them too. His words on the Good Shepherd in the gospel of John hark back to the first part of Ezekiel Ch 34 just prior to our Ezekiel reading where God absolutely roasts the Shepherds of Israel (i.e. the religious authorities) for not caring for the sheep.

Implicit in Jesus’ words to the Pharisees was a question: who are you following? And these words ring true for us today. The prophet Isaiah (Is 53: 6a) once said “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way;” It’s a characteristic of this post-modern age that we tailor-make our own spiritualities – often self-serving and seldom self-sacrificing. In the time of the Judges, the Scripture says, (Judges 17:6) “In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”

All too easily we follow our own whims; we too exhibit an inbuilt tendency to independence, to avoid what we perceive to be commitment and to seek short-term pleasure. We’re in an age of push-button solutions and instant coffee. We are creatures of our culture. But because innately we know that it’s only fellowship with the Shepherd that brings us peace and joy, the question comes to us too: who are you following?

Now Jesus does go on to say that he gives his life for the sheep, but it’s in our passage from Ezekiel that we see the grace and love that God the Shepherd pours out upon his people.

¹²I will rescue them

¹⁴I will feed them with good pasture

¹⁵I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep

¹⁶I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.

I shall judge between sheep and sheep, between rams and goats:

I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep.

²²I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep.

23 I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd.

25 I will make with them a covenant of peace

I will make them and the region around my hill a blessing

I will send down the showers in their season; they shall be showers of blessing.

I break the bars of their yoke

²⁹I will provide for them splendid vegetation,

³⁰They shall know that I, the Lord their God, am with them, and that they, the house of Israel, are my people, says the Lord God. ³¹You are my sheep, the sheep of my pasture,^* and I am your God, says the Lord God.

This is the blessing God intends for humankind. If we knew the commitment God has towards making us whole, embracing us with his love, setting us free from everything that works against wholeness in our lives we would run to him. We would make him THE priority in our lives.

The scripture I read from Isaiah 53 a moment ago, “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way;” concludes with these words, “and the Lord has laid on him, the iniquity of us all.”

The apostle Peter – whom Jesus asked to shepherd his sheep – has this to say in 1 Peter 2: 24 – 25: “²⁴ He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. ²⁵ For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.”

The question implicit in Jesus’ words to the Pharisees remains for us: who are you following?

³ The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. ⁴ When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice.

Amen

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