The Good Shepherd.

John 10:7-21.  (August 23, 2015)

I.

Jesus is kind of on a roll here, so he keeps on talking about the sheep, the sheep pen, the gate, and the shepherds.  It is becoming a marvelous metaphor for the people of God and their leaders, as well as the individual human soul and the inner influences we choose to follow.  The image and symbolism works on both levels.  

On one level, Jesus is talking about the corruption and selfishness of the Pharisees and other leaders in his society, and we may extend this to the political, economic, and religious leaders in our own context.  These issues are perennial; they come up in every society and every age.  

And at the same time, seen from a different point-of-view, he is also talking about the voices, influences, powers, in our own soul.  In this sense the sheep are thoughts, memories, feelings, hopes, desires, habits, and other aspects of our instinctual, emotional, and rational nature.  

So whether he is talking about the “sheep” in our heads, or the “sheep” in our communities, the message is the same.  Jesus is critical of self-centered leaders and voices whose leadership is not beneficial for the whole body, especially the weakest members.  He calls them thieves and outlaws, who are only out for themselves.  They distort and cripple the life of both soul and community.  They turn God’s intention of a beloved community of equals in mutual service, into a hierarchy of oppression in which wealth and power coagulate with the few at the top.

So when he says “I am the gate,” he means that he is the criteria, the filter, the lens sifting through and separating good influences from bad ones.  He means first of all that his life and teachings — which is to say compassion, forgiveness, healing, acceptance, justice, non-violence, humility, and love — are the qualities that we should both receive into our lives and express into our world.  Influences and leaders that exhibit other qualities will not make it through him as the gate.  A rapacious, self-centered, exclusive, retributive, condemning, and violent approach is not his and is therefore illegitimate.  That would be the way of the thieves and outlaws.

And on a deeper level he means that he, the I am, the integrated unity of true humanity — the Son of Man, the Human One — with true divinity — the Son of God, the Word and the Light that enlightens everyone — this convergence that he himself is, is the basic truth about our life; that if we go deep enough into our humanity we find him, and through him discover our union with the Creator.  

This is where he is going with this whole discourse in chapter 10.  He is aiming to bring people to the realization that they are “participants in the divine nature.”  He is opening hearts to the goal of Christian spirituality and human life itself, which is called “divinization,” or “becoming God.”  It is becoming real, or sharing in the true life that “I am” expresses.

II.

“I came so that they could have life,” he says.  But the thieves, these illegitimate leaders, enter “only to steal, kill, and destroy.”  

Jesus then shifts the metaphor.  Not only is he the gate, he is also at the same time the good shepherd.  And we can tell he is the good shepherd, distinguished from the hired hands, which is his term for the bad leaders who are only out for themselves, because he “lays down his life for the sheep.”  

“When the hired hand sees the wolf coming, he leaves the sheep and runs away.”  Perhaps the hired hand is reasoning that he can’t do any good for the flock if he is dead, so he saves himself first.  This is the way self-centered, self-righteous leaders think.  They have to be paid more than anyone, and they have to be protected from harm and liability.  “The wolf attacks the sheep and scatters them.  He’s only a hired hand and the sheep don’t matter to him.”  So he runs away and from a safe place calls out, “Hey, watch out for that wolf!”  Then, when the wolf is done eating a few of the sheep and leaves, the hired hand comes back to lead a workshop or something, probably about how to run faster than the other sheep.

But Jesus says the good shepherd gives up his life for the sheep.  He knows the sheep personally and loves them; indeed, his relationship to the sheep is an extension of his Father’s relationship to him.  He identifies with, lives with, and shares life with the sheep.  When the wolf comes, he puts himself between the wolf an the sheep, and even dies, letting the wolf devour him, so that the sheep may escape to safety.

Obviously, the Lord is alluding to his coming death on the cross where he attracts and absorbs the murderous injustice and unspeakable violence of the world, emerging on the third day to give his life to his disciples and through them to the whole world.  Giving up your life for your friends is what he will say is the ultimate act of love.  And Christians will follow him in this literally and repeatedly throughout history.  Indeed, this willingness to die for others is one of the indicators of true Christian faith.

So when Jesus goes on to talk about “other sheep that don’t belong to this sheep pen,” he means that it is not just Jewish disciples that are his friends to die for, it is everyone.  He is beginning to extend the ministry at least in anticipation, to Gentiles.  Non-believers.  The indifferent, and even enemies.  “They will listen to my voice,” he says, and there will be one flock, with one shepherd.”

The movement the Lord is inspiring is opening up.  He is the gate, and the gate is widening, yawning, broadening, spreading like open arms to embrace and receive and welcome the whole world.

III.

Jesus is not forming a closed, bounded, tightly defined, walled-off institution… even though that is what the church would largely become over the centuries.  He is declaring a church without walls and boundaries, without in-groups and outsiders, without Pharisaical standards and regulations, and most importantly, without… leaders.  His is the one voice forming one flock; he is the one Shepherd.  The closest thing we are to have to a leader would be a disciple who is a bit further along on the journey; someone who facilitates a gathering of disciples around the Word.  But it is the Word of God, Jesus Christ, who is our only Leader.

The Good Shepherd is the one who gives up his life.  Jesus even says that this is why God loves him: because he does give up his life so that he can take it up again.  And that giving up of his life began way back in the beginning, when he was the overflowing of God’s love emerging as the new creation.  And it continued when the Word overflowed and boiled over into the world finally becoming flesh to dwell among us full of grace and truth in Jesus Christ.  And his giving up of his life will be finally consummated and completed in the cross and the resurrection, when he is lifted up for the life of the world, and he leaves behind the Spirit, which he breathes on the disciples after his resurrection.

He gives his life for the sheep… he also gives his life to the sheep.  He gives them his body and blood as nourishment and thereby he becomes them and they become him.  He doesn’t just sacrifice himself so the sheep may survive.  No.  He also feeds the sheep with himself so that the sheep become him and follow him in giving their lives for others, and taking their lives up again in this new transfigured form.  

For in order to take on the new life, the ultimate and eternal life he gives, we have to give up our old lives.  We have to surrender this old life and even allow the powers of the world to kill us, to terminate and snuff this old life, so that we may descend beneath its limitations and boundaries, and connect with the deeper ocean of “I am” we share with Jesus and with everything.  This is what he means when he says elsewhere that we have to take up our cross and follow him.  This is what Bonhoeffer means when he says that discipleship means dying.

Here we have one of the most alarming and offensive things about following Jesus, because if we don’t see who he truly is — God-with-us — and if we don’t see that he calls us to our truest life in him, then Christian faith just sounds like a suicide cult.  

But Jesus here talks about giving up his life so that he can take it up again.  And the life we take up after having given it up is that life we never dared hope for, our true life, our deepest Self, our identification with him in our humanity by which we gain access to his, and our, divinity.

IV.

The leaders who are gaining at everyone else’s expense are false.  They are thieves and outlaws.  Their agenda is to steal, kill, and destroy.  The Good Shepherd doesn’t take from the sheep, he gives life to them.  He doesn’t profit from his work, he loses his life.  And by losing his life he takes it up again in a transfigured form.  And so do we.

I have realized in recent years how much of the Bible is all about the pronouns.  Who is the “I” that Jesus means here?  Of course, on the most obvious level he means himself, speaking 2000 years ago in Jerusalem.  But remember that his “I” is transferable and inclusive, as we saw with the man born blind who kind of caught it.

Maybe Jesus’ “I” is radically expansive and broadens, like the gate of the sheep pen, to embrace many.  Maybe when he says “I” he is including all of us to follow him; maybe he is including all people… but most tragically never realize he is within and with them.  Because we also receive new life when we lay down our old one.  This is what Paul means when he says that if we were baptized with him in a death like his we will surely live with him in a resurrection like his.

Maybe we who hear his words don’t really get them until we receive his mind and are able to identify with his “I;” maybe we find that when we give up our old, ego-centric, personality-driven “I,” the “I” we recover is that of Jesus Christ within us, the One with whom we share in true humanity, the One by whom we come to participate in God’s nature.

My point is how imperative it is that we give up our addictions and our loyalties and our habits of following the dictates of our old, fallen, limited, blind, lame, fearful, and narrow self.  We have to say no to the pompous and self-important, self-righteous, self-aggrandizing, self-centered, self-satisfied little dictator that is always appealing to our fear, hatred, shame, and anger.  Then we can also say no to the larger, pompous, self-important, et cetera, leaders and structures we have projected into power over us in our common life.  If we can ditch the judgmental, critical, condemning, threatening, soul-sucking Pharisees within our own soul, we will be able to free ourselves of the bad leaders we are enduring and suffering under in our society.

The narrator reports that “there was another division among the Jewish opposition because of Jesus’ words.”  Of course there was!  How could there not be?  Not only were the Pharisees and other leaders well aware that Jesus was attacking their authority, power, and gravy train, the smarter ones would have realized that his threat was even more potent because he was undermining the psychological, spiritual, and theological foundations of their whole regime.

V.

They are divided because he is saying things they are either unable to, or refuse to, understand.  So some conclude that he “has a demon and has lost his mind.”  But others rightly recognize that he doesn’t sound like people who have demons sound, which is usually incoherent  and violent bluster.  Plus, demons were known for bringing disease and paralysis.  The healing of the person born blind is a major problem.  Only God could do such a wonderful thing.

We find the proof of who Christ is in what he does.  This is not theory or some kind of word game.  The facts on the ground are that Jesus Christ heals, transforms, redeems, forgives, renews, and frees people.  I mean this actually happens; people’s lives are changed.  This is the incontrovertible raw data that proves his truth and Presence.  People can see who had been born blind.  

The church is supposed to be a factory for miracles, where lives are changed, where people are set free, where eyes are opened and the dead raised.  It is supposed to be a laboratory where souls are healed and made whole, and people realize who, and whose, they truly are.  It is where our old selves are shed like the skin of a snake, and our real, true, deeper Selves in Jesus Christ are revealed.  

And because we are no longer slaves to our inner demons, we no longer have to be subservient to destructive and fearful orders and regimes in the world.  

Jesus is presenting himself — true God and true humanity — as the antidote to the toxic mess we mistake for reality.  And he is giving us himself as an alternative.  And in following we become him, and in becoming him we overcome the darkness by the power of his light.  He is the light of the world; and because he is the Light of the world what he says in Matthew is also true: You are the Light of the world.

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