Sermon for the Second Sunday after Easter
“The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.”
It is a powerful and familiar image and yet one which I think we utterly fail to comprehend. Perhaps the most familiar of all of the biblical images and certainly the one which is most commonly represented in the church culture of the Maritimes, it has, I fear, been co-opted by the therapeutic culture and emptied of its deeper meaning. It speaks to us about care, of course, but it does so in the deeper context of sacrifice. It is about something more, though not less, than hugs and squeezes, far more, though not less, perhaps, than the comforts of pharmacare as wonderful as those can be.
We forget that this image so popular and familiar belongs to the pattern of death and resurrection and the way that pattern informs our lives of sacrifice and service. For centuries upon centuries the Gospel of Christ the Good Shepherd has been read on the Second Sunday after Easter. The Collect makes the explicit point that Christ, the only Son of God, has been given to us as “both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life.” These are powerful and profound theological concepts that relate to the quality of our lives in faith. There is something quite suggestive, important and necessary about connecting the image of Christ the Good Shepherd to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
And yet, that is exactly what our readings do this morning. The lesson from 1st Peter is quite explicit. It speaks about Christ “who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree” as well as signifying that it is by his stripes – his wounds at our hands – that we are healed and even more, “returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of [o]ur souls.” This is strong stuff; the theological idea that God can make something good even out of our evil and the philosophical idea that attends it that the power of the good is always greater than all and any evil.
