The Good Shepherd

Life in our time and place often feels safe. We don’t deal with high crime rates, frequent natural disasters, social unrest or war. This sense of safety could lead us to complacency about things that are genuinely dangerous. In 2010 while Carolyn and I were living in South Korea, tensions flared up with North Korea. The North had sunk a South Korean submarine, and words between the two countries got heated. We lived in a suburb on the south side of Seoul. It was a relatively affluent area with great modern amenities and no crime to speak of. But it was also within range of the artillery guns the North Koreans had lining the border. My sense of security suddenly felt precarious because if war broke out, most experts believed that the proof would be the artillery bombardment of Seoul. The place I lived no longer seemed quite so safe.

Too often our sense of safety is tied up in places that feel safe. Our actions are governed by our desire to put our own safety above all. But this morning I want to look at some of Jesus’ teaching that upends our way of thinking about safety.

In John 10 Jesus uses two I Am statements in close succession, painting a picture with some mixed metaphor goodness:

Therefore Jesus said again, “Very truly I tell you, I am [egō eimi] the gate for the sheep. All who have come before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep have not listened to them. I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

“I am [egō eimi] the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it. The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.

“I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me—just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.

Jesus, in this passage uses the picture of a sheepfold, a place of perceived safety for the sheep. But he says that there have been people in the sheepfold who have had no business being there. They weren’t the shepherd, but thieves who scaled the walls to steal, kill and destroy. Jesus seems to be referring here to the religious leaders of Israel. These leaders use their power and influence for their own good at the expense of the poor and needy. We saw this at work in the previous chapter when we witnessed them throw out a man whom Jesus had healed because that man had perceived that Jesus’ miraculous powers validated his mission from God. So despite the fact that the sheepfold seems a safe place to be, Jesus implies that it can be dangerous. Even the religious elites among us might be abusive and exercise their authority in their self interest rather than for the good of the flock.

SERVING TO GROW

For the purposes of our discussion here, I’d like to focus on verses 9 and 10. “I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” The first part seems like the normal way we understand the gospel. Faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection are the only way into the community of God’s people. What is counterintuitive is what comes next: They will come in and go out, and find pasture. Our entrance into the church isn’t the end of our story. Once we come into the sheep pen, we become a part of the flock, but the shepherd doesn’t leave the sheep in the sheep pen, but leads them out to pasture. It isn’t the sheep pen’s walls that keep us safe. It is the presence of the shepherd (here Jesus’ abruptly changes metaphors, proclaiming in verse 11, that he is the good shepherd). As I pondered this verse, it seemed important to me to point out its implications.

In the past, it has been common for people to think of church as that which happens inside. We attend worship services and programs. We call the room where our life together is centred the sanctuary. There is a sense of safety and solidarity in the walls of the church. There is certainly value in what we do here. As the writer of Hebrews admonishes us: “Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching. Church is a place where we encourage, support, admonish and teach one another, and a place where we collectively discern the will of God. It is a place of safety. But it is not safe because it is a church building. The unending series of recent scandals involving church leaders goes to show us how even the place we feel should be safest isn’t always safe. Safety doesn’t come from the walls, but from our collective submission to the shepherd.

If safety were found in the walls, and that is all we needed, we’d be content to stay inside the church. But Sheep need pasture, and so Jesus calls the sheep out, beyond the perception of safety, outside the walls of the sheep pen/church to the luscious riches of the pasture. The pasture is the world. To be led into the pasture is to follow Jesus into the world to engage in mission. Mission, in the presence and direction of our good shepherd, is the food that sustains our souls.

This is a bit counter-instinctive. We might think that we need nourished souls so that we might be strong enough to engage in mission. But here Jesus tells us that we need to engage in mission so that we might become strong. Can that really be true?

First, let me start by saying that if we were to wait for the completion of our spiritual journey to engage in mission, none of us would ever engage in mission, since our formation is a lifelong process. Imperfect people need to engage in mission.

Jesus’ own approach backs this up. Jewish Rabbis took on disciples who they instructed. They would look for the most promising young candidates. Jesus...didn’t. Jesus doesn’t recruit the most pious and learned. Instead, he goes out and grabs a rag-tag group of people that no one would describe as the right stuff. His twelve disciples even include a tax collector (someone who collaborates with the Roman government) and a Zealot (someone who dedicates his life to killing collaborators with the Roman government). Jesus’ collection of disciples seem more like the cast of a reality television show with built in conflict than a collection of serious individuals. But Jesus commissions these men to start his church. He sends them out to announce the kingdom ahead of him, warts and all. They don’t become followers of Jesus and then go into mission. Rather they become followers of by going.

Before the twins were born, I spent a few years volunteering at a drop-in centre in Belleville. Three times a week, we opened the doors of a storefront downtown and hosted whoever wanted to come in and have coffee. I was on the Friday team, so each Friday night I spent my evening chatting and drinking coffee with an assortment of people unlike the people I was used to. Most of the guests were either on ODSP or Ontario Works. Many were alcoholics and drug addicts. Some had mental health issues. In the process some of them became friends and all of them became acquaintances.

This is mission: we go into the world like Jesus did, and live out, in practical ways, God’s generous love for all people, especially those relegated to the bottom of the heap.

This experience shaped me. ‘Poor people’ had always been an abstraction to me. Now, I knew a bunch of them. I’m not the kind of person who feels comfortable getting up on a soap box on a crowded city street to tell people they need Jesus. But over a cup of coffee with a friend, the conversation sometimes naturally gets around to issues of faith. In those context, telling people about your story with Jesus isn’t so jarring.

If spiritual growth comes from learning to love, then encountering new and different circumstances challenges us to learn to love in new way. One of the guests we had gotten to know over the previous year or so came in and told us that the next time we saw him, he would be a she. I had never met a transgendered person before. I had never wrestled with what loving such a person looked like. Suddenly this wasn’t an academic reality, but it was a concrete one. I had to learn to follow Jesus in loving people where they are at. That practical experience helped me learn how to follow Jesus. I wasn’t really equipped to do it, because no prayer meeting, Bible study or seminary class can teach us how to love real people in all their complexity. We just need to do it, even if we’re going to make mistakes along the way.

SHEEP FROM OTHER PENS

The experience of serving the kind of people I wouldn’t meet at church also helped shape my view about God’s inclusive love. Jesus talks about how he has sheep in other pens. In his culture, families had a few sheep, so they would band together to hire a shepherd. The shepherd would come by each house and collect the sheep and lead them out to pasture. Jesus’ contemporaries were used to the idea that God had a single flock. The children of Israel. But Jesus uses this imagery to show that God has in mind a larger group of people. The church is more than this one family, but is open to other families too. In this case, to gentiles.

We do well to remember God’s inclusive vision of his church. Churches often look homogenous. We tend to cluster in groups of similar age, social status, race and theological outlook. Within these isolated communities, its easy to start looking at our way of doing things as the way of doing things. We begin to think of Christians as people who look like and worship like me.

In my time in the drop-in centre, I had to reconsider this approach. Many of the guests weren’t open to faith. Some considered themselves to be Christians, but their walk of faith didn’t look much like the kind of faith we see in our churches. I had to ask myself if I could make room for them in my concept of ‘us’.

In Jesus’ day, the exclusion wasn’t just addressed toward the Gentiles, but also to the religious outsiders. Jesus announces the kingdom of God among a group of people who didn’t spend much time in the temple. They were the sort of people whose jobs made them unclean, whose education meant they were looked down on and excluded. They were the same sort of people that I met at the drop in centre. And they are the people with whom Jesus seems to spend the majority of his time. Jesus could turn up his nose at their immoral and irreligious lives, but instead, he goes to them first and invites them to come into his kingdom.

In our practice of mission, we will encounter people who aren’t like the people with whom we are used to worshiping. Our temptation will be to ‘other’ them, either by refusing to engage them or by engaging them condescendingly. “God is shure lucky to have people like me who are so spiritual that they’ll hang out with people like you”. But Jesus is clear, though his sheep come from many different sheep pens, they must be a single flock under a single shepherd. This means that we have to make room in our collective identity for others. When we speak about ‘us’ we must also include them in that identity.

Sheep from other pens don’t always do Christian faith like we expect they should. Jews were horrified that a person might call themselves a Christian and eat a ham sandwich. We might be horrified that a person who calls themselves a Christian uses language that we find scandalous. Sometimes we mistake cultural issues for moral issues. Other times God’s, in his wisdom, has decided to start the sanctification process with areas in their lives other than the ones we would start with. It’s not our job to sanctify them. It’s our job to love them and show them God’s gracious hospitality.

Jesus calls us out of the safety of our church walls and our comfort zones. He asks us to trust that he will support and sustain us ‘out there’. We follow him into the world where he feeds us in places that don’t always feel safe. As David put it, “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” Contrary to our expectations, Jesus doesn’t cloister us in the safety of the sheep pen while we grow mature, rather he matures us through the work we do outside of the pen, through the practical actions of learning to love others like he does and learning to get comfortable with the other sheep in the flock, even the sheep we’re not sure belong there. If you want to go deeper with God, Bible Studies, prayer techniques and small groups are great, but sooner or later, growth is going to have to involve a trip to the pasture. Will you follow your shepherd there?

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you had to learn to love people in ways you never did before? Did that teach you anything about yourself, or about others in general?

What tools do we need in the church, and what opportunities outside of the church best help us to grow in faith, love and dependence on Jesus?

What sorts of things can we do to help us meet and serve the kinds of people we don’t normally meet at church?