Sermon for the Second Sunday after Easter
“For ye were as sheep going astray;
but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls”
“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way,” Isaiah remarks in a powerful passage that belongs to our Good Friday considerations and indeed to the General Confession in the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer: “we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.” But as Good Friday also makes clear “the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” The idea of sheep and shepherd takes on a whole new meaning and complexity in the image of Christ as the Lamb of God. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,” as John the Baptist says in John’s Gospel. And in an even profounder image, John the Divine in his Revelation proclaims that “worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing,” a passage that serves as the Eastertide Offertory sentence.
The liturgy underscores the image of lamb in the Agnus Dei , which means “lamb of God,” as part of our communion devotion, recalling us to Christ as the “Lamb of God,” “that takest away the sin of the world” whose mercy and peace we seek in the receiving of the sacrament of Holy Communion. The point, too, is taken up in the repeated refrains for mercy in the Gloria which emphasizes Christ as the “Lord, the only-begotten Son,” “the Lamb of God, the Son of the Father, that takest away the sin of the world” and who “sittest at the right hand of God the Father.”
All of these Scriptural references that inform our liturgy contribute to our understanding of one of the most familiar of all Christian images, the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. The deeper point is that the Good Shepherd is also the lamb of God, the Son of God who is for us “both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life,” as today’s Collect puts it. Something has been done for us and something happens in us that revolve around the image of Christ as the Good Shepherd “who giveth his life for the sheep.” We are the sheep, lost and astray, “but [we] are returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of [our] souls” by Christ the Lamb of God whose sacrifice “takes away the sin of the world.”
