Sermon for the Second Sunday After Easter
“The Good Shepherd giveth his life for the sheep”
In our social culture today is Mother’s Day but in the culture of the Church it is Good Shepherd Sunday. The Eucharistic gospel which orders our reading and thinking about the Scriptures on The Second Sunday after Easter is the passage from John’s Gospel about Jesus as the Good Shepherd.
A familiar image, even too familiar, perhaps, Christ the Good Shepherd is almost a commonplace theme. And yet, we fail to appreciate its radical meaning.
It is not by accident that this Gospel is read in Eastertide, in the season of the Resurrection. That helps us to realize its radical intent. Christ the Good Shepherd is the Lamb of God. Christ the Good Shepherd “giveth his life for the sheep.” The image of Christ the Good Shepherd cannot be understood apart from the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The Resurrection is about our freedom from sin and death but only through Christ’s death and resurrection.
Exodus is one of the Old Testament books which belong to our Eastertide thinking. It is about liberation. There is an important parallel between the Exodus and the Resurrection, between the liberation from captivity under Pharaoh’s bitter yoke and the greater liberation from sin and death. In both cases, there is the necessity of learning.
The lessons are not always easy. We are not always ready learners. Today, in the Exodus lesson we confront a certain aspect of ourselves. For an ancient story, what we confront here about ourselves seems positively contemporary. There is always time for whine in Canada, it seems, to use the old cliché!
