Sermon for the Second Sunday after Easter

by CCW | 18 April 2010 15:11

Jesus said, “I am the Good Shepherd.”

What distinguishes a good shepherd from a bad shepherd? The answer is care. The good shepherd cares for the sheep. Unlike the parable of the Good Samaritan, which does not explicitly identify the Samaritan as the Good Samaritan, let alone naming Jesus as the Good Samaritan of our wounded humanity, par excellence, this Eastertide Gospel is clear and unambiguous. Jesus identifies himself as the Good Shepherd. But what, then, is the care that defines the Good Shepherd?

The care is that Jesus lays down his life for the sheep. The Good Shepherd is the sacrificial Lamb of God. His sacrifice is the cure for our sins and it also imparts his care for our lives.

The pastoral ministry of the church is rooted in this sense of care as “the cure of souls.” It goes beyond the superficial and external matters of comfort and ease to address the radical distempers of our souls. There is no pastoral care without the naming of the cure and there is no cure without the acknowledgement of our need to be cured in the very root of our being.

Today’s Collect speaks of Jesus as being “unto us both a sacrifice for sin and also an example of godly life.” He is the sacrifice for sin. He is the cure, the Good Shepherd who gives his life for the sheep. He stands in the face of the destroyer of the sheep; ultimately our sins are his destroyer. Our lives are scattered lives. Sin scatters us from ourselves and from one another. Grace gathers and redeems our scattered lives. The grace is the grace of the Good Shepherd who wills to be struck so that he may gather us to himself. He gathers us through his care for us. He cares for us through his cure for us.

He lays down his life because the condition of his being the Good Shepherd, first and foremost, is that he knows his sheep in his knowing and being known of the Father. The relation of the Son to the Father establishes the real context for the meaning of Christ the Good Shepherd. He cares for the sheep because they – we – belong to him. We are not our own. We are his and that alters the whole question of care. It has altogether to do with the nature of our humanity as constituted in the image of God.

Because we belong to him, he cares for us; because he cares for us, he lays down his life for us. The Son of God became the Son of man so that he may lay down his life for us; “by his stripes we are healed.” He is our cure.

Yet he is also an example of godly life. “For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps.” It should be our care to follow in the steps of him who is our cure. There are things for us to lay hold of actively. What he has done for us in his free-willing sacrifice becomes the measure of his life in us. Justification is his cure for us even as sanctification is his care for us, to put it theologically. The challenge for us is to act upon the divine care that is our cure. More than a constant challenge, it is equally our vocation as belonging to our identity.

Care means more than being nice. Niceness, after all, can just be a posture or a feature of character. Care is something much more principled, something requiring sacrifice and commitment to an ideal which governs our approach to one another regardless of whether we are very nice or not. A friend of mine once announced, “I am not nice and neither is God,” both of which things were true. The idea of God as niceness is disturbingly shallow and does little justice to the transcendent grandeur of God or to the truth of human dignity. God’s love for our humanity is born out of the divine love of the Trinity. That is a far, far greater reality than all the tropes of niceness.

The divine love that shows itself as care is seen on the Cross. There, too, we see the radical meaning of the Good Shepherd whose crucified arms embrace our wounded and broken world. In the Resurrection, the wounds of the crucified become the marks and signs of divine love. The Risen Christ shows us his hands and his side. He continues to embrace us in his love. Such is the love of the Good Shepherd.

The interplay between cure and care, between justification and sanctification really, is crucial to the ordered life of the church. The extended care of the Good Shepherd for the sheep constitutes the church’s pastoral ministry. It is, I think, wonderfully illustrated in the mosaic in the apse of the 6th century church of Sant’ Apollinare in Classe[1], near Ravenna[2] on Italy’s Adriatic coast. There, in a paradisal garden, the garden of the resurrection perhaps? the saint – Sanctus Apolenaris [sic] – stands in the centre under the cross, his hands extended in prayer. He stands in the midst of the sheep, indeed, twelve sheep, symbolic of the apostolic church. Above the vault of the dome, those same twelve sheep, as it were, are ranged towards the figure of Christ whose hand is raised in episcopal blessing, alongside of whom are the symbols of the four evangelists.

[3]

The mosaic portrays the mission of the Church in the proclamation of the gospel and the cure of souls. It tells this story. St. Apollinaris is sent forth as a shepherd to the sheep under the sign of the cross, even as the twelve apostles who are the sheep, too, of the shepherd, are sent forth to be the shepherds of the sheep in the name and with the blessing of the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep, for he, too, is the Lamb of God. To put it all rather simply: the shepherds are also the sheep of the Good Shepherd who is equally the Lamb of God; a sacrifice for sin and an example of godly life, our cure and the one who cares for us.

We meet in the care of the Good Shepherd. His Word is proclaimed; his Sacraments are celebrated. Here is his care and his cure for us. Where the word is proclaimed and the Sacraments are celebrated faithfully, there is the Church without which there is no care, no cure. Jesus Christ is the Good Shepherd of our souls through the Church, his body, by which he gives us his Word and the tangible and effective signs of his care for us, his Sacraments. His care is rooted in his love for us. That love is our cure.

Jesus said, “I am the Good Shepherd.”

Fr. David Curry
Easter II, 2010

Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2010/04/18/sermon-for-the-second-sunday-after-easter-2/

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