Sermon for the Second Sunday after Easter, 8:00am service

admin | 22 April 2012

“Jesus said, I am the good shepherd”

It is a familiar and a comforting image but I fear we overlook its radical meaning. It is one of the great images of God’s providential care for his wayward and wandering sheep, meaning us. It is an image, too, which belongs at once to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christ bears us in his arms. The same arms that are stretched out upon the cross are the arms that have embraced our humanity, the arms that gather us into the love of the son for the father. He carries us into the hands of the Father.

The great image of God’s care, its greatness lies in the cure it provides. The cure is the triumph of God over human sin and death. Christ the Good Shepherd, after all, is the “Lamb of God that takest away the sin of the world,” as we pray so often in our Liturgy. The Good Shepherd is the one who has laid down his life for the sheep, for you and for me. The image is rich in meaning. We live in the care of the Good Shepherd who has triumphed over human sin to carry us home to the Father.

But the image is even stronger because we live in that care now in the power of the Risen Christ. God’s providential care is the active principle which sustains and maintains creation redeemed and restored, the active principle which sustains and maintains our redeemed humanity. In a way, so many of the biblical images of God’s providential care meet in the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. As I Peter 2 puts it, we “are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of [our] souls.”

We live in the care of the Good Shepherd. Yes, but how do we relate to that care? Are we grateful and alive in the joy of redemption as the community of the redeemed? Or are we a pack of complainers? Do we rejoice or do we murmur? Do we praise or do we mock? These are the questions which are also set before us, the questions which speak directly to human freedom and dignity. I fear that the therapeutic culture which, on the one hand, calls us to take care of one another and wonderfully and rightly so, yet, on the other hand, creates a culture of dependency, a culture of the depressed and the walking dead. Which will we be?

In the providence of God, we are reminded of some of the stories of God’s providential care for his people; ultimately, God’s providential care for our humanity, we might add. And yet here is the challenge. God provides for us but we, you and I, are our own worst enemies about that care. We end up as often as not denying the nature of that care precisely because we want it to be something else than what it is and miss the joy and the truth of what it is.

One of the wonderful stories of God’s providential care and our confusions about that care is found in the Old Testament story of the spies sent into the land of Canaan and returning with some of the fruit of the land. “They came to the Valley of Eshcol, and cut down from there a branch with a single cluster of grapes, and they carried it on a pole between two of them.” It is a marvelous image and one which has caught the imagination of generations of Christians. Sadly, I think, it is almost totally unknown to modern Christians. And yet, the story is frequently captured in the art of the Church, particularly in the stained glass windows of the medieval world.

In some cases, the depiction of this story celebrates the guild of wine-dressers and wine-makers who would have contributed to the building and decoration of the great cathedrals. How wonderful that their actual labour is seen in biblical terms and that their labour is, as it were, brought directly into the fabric of the Church and is seen as belonging to the liturgy of redemption. The image of the spies carrying the cluster of grapes signals both the labours of the workers in the vineyards but also the sacramental life of the Church which is part and parcel of God’s providential care.

At Canterbury Cathedral, the window that depicts the Crucifixion is surrounded by a series of Old Testament stories that are understood to foreshadow the Crucifixion. Above the image of Christ Crucified is the image of Abram’s intended sacrifice of Isaac, the promised son, a most intriguing and yet disturbing story, to be sure , but one which is seen to foreshadow God’s sacrifice of his own son. Underneath the image of Christ Crucified is the image of the spies carrying the cluster of grapes from the Valley of Eshcol. At once a sacramental image, it is also part of the Christian understanding of the Old Testament stories. Here the cross is signified as well as the life which flows from the cross sacramentally; the grapes signify the wine of the Eucharist.

To drive the point home even more intensely, the Latin inscription that accompanies the image states “the one refuses to look back at the cluster and the other thirsts to see it; Israel knows not Christ, the Gentiles adore him.“ This of course reflects on the sense of difference between Jew and Christian, and, no doubt, in ways that trouble our sentiments and feelings. Yet it is a profound point.

This story, however, is about more than the fruit of the land being brought back to wandering Israel. No. The spies who are sent into the land do, to be sure, return with the fruit of the land, the fruit which promises so much that seems good and holy. The spies describe the land as being “the land of milk and honey,” the proverbial promised land, we might say, but they also signal their fear and anxiety about the inhabitants of that land in relation to whom they say, “we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers.” What is this? Fear. The very thing which in the providence of Christ, crucified and risen, has been overcome; the very thing which is the meaning of Christ the Good Shepherd. The Resurrection frees us from the tyranny of bullies, be they bishops, dictators, self-serving politicians, or the very forms of tyranny in our own souls, the tyranny of mediocrity and victimhood which diminishes us all and compromises our charity.

Easter is the season of the Resurrection yet it does not let us forget the reality of suffering and death. The God who cares for us bears the marks of his care in the body of his son. Suffering is not ignored nor denied nor simply done away. Suffering r’us. The wonder and miracle is that we are given something more. What is it? A way to face such things with joy and confidence in God’s deep love for our humanity. We only live when we live in the providential care of God’s love. It is at once our challenge and our comfort. And it is wonderfully before us in the words of Jesus who says,