by CCW | 5 May 2019 15:00
The accounts of the Resurrection, especially in John’s Gospel, are particularly instructive about a fundamental feature of Christianity which extends to other religions. That is “a sacramental understanding,” which we attempted to explore in our Lenten series this year. A sacramental understanding, we suggested, connects to the idea of creation and to the idea that the things of God are made known through the things of the world and that our participation in the life of God is precisely through the things of the world becoming the instruments of grace and salvation. A sacramental understanding extends necessarily as well to the Resurrection, itself a new creation. In a way, the Resurrection is made known to us sacramentally, as it were.
We see this in Luke’s Gospel too in such things as the wonderful story of Christ and the disciples on the road to Emmaus where Jesus “opens their understanding of the Scriptures” about his death and resurrection but is really only made known to them “in the breaking of the bread;” in short, by recalling them to his words and actions at the Last Supper. In John’s Gospel after Mary Magdalene’s discovery first of the empty tomb and then her encounter with the Risen Christ, and after Jesus appears in the midst of the disciples twice behind closed doors and makes himself known directly to Thomas, there is the wonderful story of a beach barbecue breakfast with Jesus. This is not quite the same thing as the Men’s Club breakfast. “Have you any fish?” Jesus asks, and then invites us, “Come and have breakfast.” That story leads to the end of John’s Gospel where Jesus asks Simon Peter three times “do you love me?” and commands him each time “to feed my lambs,” “tend my sheep,” “feed my sheep.” Peter who had betrayed Christ three times is reconstituted in love three times. It is a wonderful statement about the radical power and nature of the Resurrection. Something new and wonderful is made out of the nothingness of our sins. The past is not denied nor forgotten but becomes the vehicle and vessel of new life. Such is redemption.
This brings us to today’s readings. Sheep and shepherds. We are the sheep who have gone astray; Christ is the Good Shepherd who gathers us and returns us to himself, “the Shepherd and Bishop of [our] souls.” The image of Christ the Good Shepherd is profoundly a resurrection image that belongs to our sacramental understanding. Today’s Collect speaks of Jesus as being “unto us both a sacrifice for sin and also an example of godly life”. He is the sacrifice for sin. He is the cure, the Good Shepherd who gives his life for the sheep. He stands in the face of the destroyer of the sheep – ultimately our sins are his destroyer. He is the shepherd who wills to be struck, not so that the sheep may be scattered but so that through his being struck and their being scattered he may gather them to himself. He is our care. He cares for us through his cure for us.
The condition of his being the Good Shepherd, first and foremost, is that he knows his sheep in his knowing and being known of the Father. The relation of the Son to the Father establishes the real context for the meaning of Christ the Good Shepherd. We are gathered into the knowing love of God. He cares for the sheep because they – we – belong to him. We are not our own. We are his and that alters the whole question of care. It has altogether to do with the nature of our humanity as reconstituted in the image of God. Because we belong to him, he cares for us; because he cares for us, he lays down his life for us. The Son of God became the Son of man so that he may lay down his life for us; “by his stripes [we] are healed”. He is our cure.
Yet he is also an example of godly life. “For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps.” It should be our care to follow in the steps of him who is our cure. There are things for us to lay hold of actively. What he has done for us in his free-willing sacrifice – justification is his cure for us – becomes the measure of his life in us – sanctification is his care for us.
The interplay between cure and care, between justification and sanctification, belongs to the ordered life of the church. The extended care of the Good Shepherd for the sheep is the church’s pastoral ministry. This is wonderfully illustrated, I think, in the mosaic in the apse[1] of the 6th century church of Sant’ Apollinare in Classe, near Ravenna on Italy’s Adriatic coast. There, in a paradisal garden (the garden of the resurrection perhaps?), St. Apollinaris stands in the centre under the cross, his hands extended in prayer. He stands in the midst of the sheep, indeed, twelve sheep, symbolic of the apostolic church. Above the vault of the dome those same twelve sheep, as it were, are ranged towards the figure of Christ whose hand is raised in episcopal blessing, alongside of whom are the symbols of the four evangelists. The mosaic portrays the mission of the Church in the proclamation of the gospel and the cure of souls. It tells this story.
St. Apollinaris is sent forth as as shepherd to the sheep under the sign of the cross, even as the twelve apostles who are the sheep, too, of the shepherd are sent forth to be the shepherds of the sheep in the name and with the blessing of the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep, for he, too, is the Lamb of God. That sounds awfully complicated but simply put: the shepherds are the sheep of the Good Shepherd who is the Lamb of God; a sacrifice for sin and an example of godly life, our cure and the one who cares for us.
“Christ the Victim; Christ the Priest,” as one of our lovely Easter hymns puts it. Christ is the Good Shepherd precisely because he lays down his life for the sheep. He is the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world in whom we find new life and joy. His sacrifice is his love for us in his love for the father; we participate in that life sacramentally. This is the point of another great image in the famous 15th century Ghent Altarpiece known as ‘The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb’[2] by the brothers Hubert and Jan Van Eyck. In the foreground of the central panel is a fountain, symbolic of the waters of new life conveyed to us sacramentally through baptism. In the center is an altar on which a lamb stands radiant with rays of mystic light but out of whose breast blood flows into a chalice, symbolic of the Holy Communion. Such is the rather graphic portrayal of our sacramental participation in the life of Christ. We are the sheep who have gone astray but who are gathered back to God and to our life with God through the Good Shepherd who is the Lamb of God. In him we learn the true meaning of our vocation and life; care is grounded in cure. His sacrificial love is given to us sacramentally. His sacrificial love is our life of service and sacrifice.
Fr. David Curry
Easter 2, 2019
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2019/05/05/sermon-for-the-second-sunday-after-easter-10/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.