Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Easter, 2:00pm service for Atlantic Ministry of the Deaf

admin | 28 April 2013

“The good shepherd gives his life for the sheep.”

It is a powerful and familiar image. 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 in the Easter Season. 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 the Good Shepherd to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

There is the strong theological idea that God can make something good even out of our evil and the philosophical idea that attends it, namely, that the power of the good is always greater than all and any evil.

We forget, I think, that Christ the Good Shepherd is also the Lamb of God. We forget that the care of the Good Shepherd has cure in it, the cure of the radical dis-ease of our souls because we are so wrapped up in ourselves that we no longer know how to live beyond ourselves and for one another. We can’t on the strength of our own power. We can only through the power of Christ living within us. But that means precisely dying to ourselves and living for God and for one another, the very thing that God shows us as belonging to his very nature.

What the image of Christ the Good Shepherd properly teaches is the nature of redemptive suffering. There are things which we would rather not face and things which we are not willing to endure whether in patience or in prayer. We seek the easy way out and want no part of the sufferings of Christ which are part and parcel of the reality of his resurrection.

The image of Christ the Good Shepherd makes no sense apart from the image of Christ crucified. The challenge is to see that the arms of the Good Shepherd are the arms that are stretched out upon the Cross. The images go together. It is the care that has cure in it far beyond the curative wonders of our own world, and wonders those are, to be sure. The deeper cure here is the one which has taken death into itself and radically transformed the meaning of death.

There is perhaps no stronger message for our troubled and anxious world than the deeper meaning of Christ the Good Shepherd. This image in its deeper significance speaks ever so profoundly to the disturbing realities of the disorders of our contemporary world. We have to learn again how to care for one another, for our children and our families. It means sacrifice and commitment. It means recalling the principles that dignify and honour our humanity and realizing again just how deadly and mean things become when we forget the spiritual principles that define us.

The image of Christ the Good Shepherd is more than a comfort in times of stress, a kind of visual Prozac, as it were. No. It recalls us to the divine love which gives itself completely for us so that love can live in us in our care for one another. That love is a named love; it goes beyond the merely sentimental and challenges, too, all the temptations towards wrath and vengeance in our souls. In a way, we need to be re-awakened to the deeper meaning of God’s love for us in Christ Jesus. He is “the good shepherd who gives his life for the sheep.” The image belongs to the reality of Christ’s death and resurrection. We live in the radical care of Christ for us.