Fourth Sunday of Easter
“The Good Shepherd” — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Ezekiel 34:1-10/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (John 10:1-11/NRSVUE)
One summer when our daughters were very young we took them to a local carnival where they wanted to play one of those games of chance in which the prize was a goldfish swimming around inside a small plastic bag.
I have to be honest with you: I was rooting for the house, not the kids, in this particular casino — not because it would have been terribly difficult for us to care for the jackpot had they won it, but because carnival goldfish aren’t known for their long life expectancies, and I was not relishing the prospect of having a conversation about life and death with two three year-olds when the inevitable happened.
Well, I’m sorry to say, the kids ended up beating the odds and winning a fish (which they named Dorothy, after Elmo’s goldfish on Sesame Street). And Dorothy ended up beating the odds by living for an unusually long time. But poor Dorothy — God rest her soul — ended up meeting her maker in a most unfortunate way, which created a whole different set of problems for us.
Our place at the time was very small, so Dorothy’s tiny tank ended up residing on the bathroom vanity next to the sink. In some sense, this was a nice setup for her — she was positioned right in front the mirror so she probably thought she had a roommate to keep her company. But in another sense, it proved to be not so nice.
You see, one day we opened the lid on Dorothy’s tank in order to feed her and forgot to close it. Now, in a perfect world this might not have been a problem but, as we all know, we don’t live in a perfect world. I say this because that open tank was positioned right underneath the soap dish, which also might not have been a problem but for the bar of soap in it that somehow fell into the tank, which also might not have been a problem but for the bubble machine in the tank that now had a lot more fuel to work with than it did before. And that, my friends, is what ultimately led to Dorothy’s sudsy demise — as we learned when we eventually found her belly up and clean as a whistle.
In our house, we generally believe that honesty is the best policy, but we didn’t that day. I hope you won’t judge us too harshly for our moment of weakness, but we did what many desperate parents in that situation might do: one of us kept the kids occupied while the other snuck out to Petco to score a replacement fish. This was not a difficult thing to do because Dorothy was pretty nondescript as goldfish go; she was of average goldfish size, and uniformly orange with no distinctive markings whatsoever. If you’d have put Dorothy in a lineup it would have been hard to pick her out from amongst the other fish.
The lookalike fish we got lived for a long time too (let’s just call her Dorothy the Second, even though Dorothy the First’s loyal subjects didn’t know at the time that she had been succeeded by a pretender to the throne). When the kids were a little older and better able to understand all that had happened, we explained the whole sordid incident to them. And while it wasn’t exactly the high water mark of our parenting life, it really wasn’t all that bad either.
Besides, I did learn a few lessons from that experience. First, don’t ever put a fish tank that close to a bar of soap because you’re just asking for trouble; second, that saying about desperate times calling for desperate measures is sometimes true; and third, it’s not easy to tell one completely orange goldfish from another completely orange goldfish. I mean, I certainly couldn’t distinguish the genuine article from the imposter (and apparently my kids couldn’t either). Thankfully, in this case, the ability to discern that difference wasn’t all that important in the grand scheme of things. But what about when it is important?
That’s the question up for consideration in today’s reading from John’s Gospel. Right before this story begins, Jesus does a very Jesusy thing: He heals someone, restoring sight to a man who is blind — and on the sabbath no less. In response to this miracle, the man declares that he believes Jesus has been sent by God.
None of this makes the Pharisees, who were watching and listening to all of this unfold, very happy. And so Jesus does another very Jesus thing: he provokes those Pharisees a little more, accusing them of being blind (in a spiritual sense), before launching into the closest thing to a parable that we get in John’s Gospel (they’re all over the other three gospels, but not this one), which leads to all of this talk about sheepherding.
The imagery here is kind of confusing: Is Jesus the shepherd? Is he the gate? Is he the gatekeeper? In the span of just ten verses, he seems to be representing himself as all three of these things. So who is he? Well, if we take Jesus at his word, he is, in fact, all three. In John’s Gospel, Jesus says he’s a whole bunch of things, and these declarations even have a name: they’re commonly referred to as the “I am” statements.
In the previous story — the one in which Jesus restores the man’s sight — Jesus claims that he’s sent by God and says “I am the light of the world.” The recipient of this healing miracle says that Jesus is “a prophet” and affirms that Jesus has been sent by God before eventually telling Jesus that he believes in him — that he believes Jesus is the Son of Man, that he believes that Jesus is the light of the world, that he believes that Jesus is the Messiah, which the Pharisees overhear (because they’re spying on him).
The Pharisees’ contention throughout all of this is that Jesus is none of these things, that he’s an imposter. And they claim that he’s an imposter because he’s not exactly what you’d call classic Messiah material: He comes from the backwater of Galilee, not from Bethlehem like King David did; he’s a little rough around the edges; he engages with outcasts; and he does unseemly things like healing people on the Sabbath. In the minds of these Pharisees, Jesus couldn’t possibly have been sent by God because he lacks pretty much all of the characteristics they believe that a Messiah should have.
And so Jesus’s parable-like tale here is essentially a refutation of that mistaken premise. Speaking directly to the Pharisees, he chooses to couch his argument in a story that would have resonated with all sorts of folks in that place and time because the experience of sheepherding was really familiar to them — you know, kind of like any adult these days who’s ever taken a young child to a carnival would understand what everyone in our family was thinking and feeling when the kids said they wanted to spin the wheel in the hopes of winning a goldfish.
In those days, shepherds would often work together, protecting their sheep by gathering their respective flocks in one community pen. They would take turns guarding the gate to that pen in order to prevent sheep from escaping and to keep anyone who wasn’t supposed to be there from entering.
All of the legitimate shepherds would have had access to the pen through that one gate (where the person standing guard would presumably know who they were) and anyone who tried come in otherwise (say, by climbing over the wall) was obviously doing something they shouldn’t have been be doing – with the intent of either harming or stealing the sheep.
Jesus explicitly compares himself to that gate, the protector of the flock that resides inside. And while he doesn’t come right out and say it, it’s pretty clear that he’s comparing the Pharisees to the thieves and bandits who are trying to climb over the wall to do bad things, and his disciples (both current and future) to the sheep.
Jesus then makes things a little more complicated when he suddenly shifts and starts comparing himself to the shepherd, the one the sheep will follow because they recognize his voice but, more importantly, because they have come to trust that he’s the one who will always do the right thing by them, that he’s the one that will take care of them no matter what. And once you cut through all of the sheepherding imagery here (which probably resonated more with folks back then than it does with folks today), that’s what this whole story is all about, really: understanding the difference between who is there to do good and who is there to do harm.
In the episode leading up to our reading for today Jesus is the one who heals the man who can’t see, while the Pharisees are convinced that he’s a sinner who must have done something to deserve his blindness and is thus unworthy of healing (or of anything else good, for that matter); and they remain convinced of this even after the man’s sight has been restored; “I was blind and now I see,” he proclaims before going on to declare that Jesus must be from God. And what do the Pharisees do in response to all of this? They run him out of town.
This presents an interesting contrast to what’s going on in today’s story. Here Jesus compares himself to the gate and to the shepherd, but there’s no talk whatsoever about good sheep and bad sheep, about which sheep deserve to be allowed in the pen and which deserve to kept out, about which sheep have earned the right to be cared for and which are left to fend for themselves. And there no talk about this stuff because, in God’s way of seeing things, it doesn’t matter; in God’s reign, everyone is welcome and everyone is cared for.
So when Jesus declares that he is that he the gate and that whoever enters the fold by him will be saved, he’s not setting up some kind of admissions test to determine who’s worthy of eternal life and who’s not, he’s not saying that you’re in if you just proclaim him to be your personal savior; he’s saying that we find salvation when we live as he lives and calls upon us to live — when we love God and our neighbor, when we give and nurture life; when we work for justice and peace, when we hear the voices of those in need and care for them without regard to who they are or where they’re from or what they’ve done or what we think they can do for us.
It’s pretty simple when you get right down to it: the good shepherd is the one who does all of those things; the imposter is the one who dresses up like the good shepherd to make it easier for them to steal and kill and destroy. So follow the former, not the latter.
And if a bunch of sheep can manage to figure out which is which and follow the right one, why can’t people seem to do that?