7 So Jesus spoke again, “I assure you that I am the gate of the sheep. 8 All who came before me were thieves and outlaws, but the sheep didn’t listen to them. 9 I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out and find pasture. 10 The thief enters only to steal, kill, and destroy. I came so that they could have life—indeed, so that they could live life to the fullest. I am the good shepherd 11 “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. 12 When the hired hand sees the wolf coming, he leaves the sheep and runs away. That’s because he isn’t the shepherd; the sheep aren’t really his. So the wolf attacks the sheep and scatters them. 13 He’s only a hired hand and the sheep don’t matter to him. 14 “I am the good shepherd. I know my own sheep and they know me, 15 just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. I give up my life for the sheep. 16 I have other sheep that don’t belong to this sheep pen. I must lead them too. They will listen to my voice and there will be one flock, with one shepherd. 17 “This is why the Father loves me: I give up my life so that I can take it up again. 18 No one takes it from me, but I give it up because I want to. I have the right to give it up, and I have the right to take it up again. I received this commandment from my Father.”
“Ego
Eimi: The “I AM” Discourses of Jesus Christ,” Week Three
The
outdoor façade of the inpatient psychiatric ward of the California Pacific
Medical Center is utterly unassuming.
Crammed into a compact building in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights
neighborhood, it is dwarfed by the main hospital complex just across the street
from it. You would pass this building
once, twice, many times and never give it a second glance.
But
as soon as you walk inside, you are immediately hit with how secure it is. The receptionist is in a completely
glass-enclosed cubicle, and every door in or out of the waiting room has locks—even
the door that goes back outside. You are
literally locked in, and must be let out by a psych ward staffer.
Even
as the intern in the hospital’s chaplaincy program assigned to minister to the
inpatient psych ward, I could not get in.
My ID card that let me into almost any other door in the hospital had to
be brandished, and I had to sign in. I
even was allowed into the ward only on request—unlike almost every other
hospital department, I was not allowed to make rounds to visit patients
throughout the day.
But
sitting in the middle of this hermetically sealed bubble of security and mental
instability is a tiny courtyard of cobblestone and chairs, with umbrellas and
trees to provide shade, and with the building surrounding it on all sides to
block out the ambient noise of a crowded San Francisco, it was, and is, an
oasis of calmness and peace where I would sit down and listen to the stories of
schizophrenic and suicidal people who have known no such peace for a long, long
time.
Guarded
from the outside world—and the outside world being guarded from it—that small courtyard
was where the most mentally ill and vulnerable people would go to find
sanctuary…to find, as Jesus says here in John 10, pasture, a place not to be
stolen and slaughtered and destroyed by the wolves of the world, but to be
protected from them.
It
is a pasture that some of us so very rarely find.
We’ve
made it to week three in this latest sermon series—a series that will take us
through the month of August, and whose name, ‘ego eimi,’ is actually the Greek
words “I am.” A lot of Jesus’ most
famous teachings are immortalized one-liners—turn the other cheek, do unto
others, love your neighbor, that sort of thing.
We’ve done a pretty good job of remembering the one-liners themselves,
but perhaps less of a good job remembering the contexts from which they
came. And the one-liners Jesus uses to
describe Himself fall into the same camp—we may remember that Jesus says He is
the Way, the Truth, and the Light, or that He is the Good Shepherd, but we may
not remember the circumstances in which He said those things. Well, all of those “I am” one-liners come
from the Gospel of John, and we’ll be walking through John’s Gospel to visit
almost all of these one-liners in turn.
We began with the first “I am” statement in John: Jesus proclaiming that
He is the Bread of Life; and continued last week with His second “I am” statement:
Jesus proclaiming that He is the Light of the World. We now have come to the third and fourth “I
am” statements: Jesus proclaiming that He is the Gate, and that He is the Good
Shepherd. But because both of these
statements take place in rapid succession, we will tackle them both in one fell
swoop here this week!
It
is no accident that Jesus uses both images—the Gate and the Good Shepherd—at once
here, and it all has to do with the reputation that shepherds would have had in
ancient Israel, because it was a mixed reputation. On the one hand, they contributed to the
agrarian economy of their time, and the image of the Good Shepherd did not
actually originate with Jesus, but with King David…after all, the 23rd
Psalm begins with the immortal words, “The Lord is my shepherd.”
But
the flip side of the coin is that shepherding was a destructive occupation—sheep
eat anything and everything, they do their business wherever they darn well
please, and before the arrival of the sheepdog, getting them to all go in the
same direction would have been a little, I suppose, like trying to herd the
proverbial cats. In any case, the flocks
of shepherds often ate up so much land that the shepherds themselves were
really not that high on the socio-economic totem pole back then—you couldn’t
imagine many young boys telling their parents, “I want to be a shepherd when I
grow up!” (Less well-known is the parents’ retort, “Yeah, well, your dad’s a
mason, so guess what? You get to be a
mason.” I think it was the first ever
instance of a parent telling their kid that life isn’t fair.)
More
to the point, a gate around peoples’ properties was necessary to keep out not
only burglars and bandits, but also, honestly, shepherds and their hungry
flocks. My New Testament professor in
college said that Jesus saying that He was the Good Shepherd would be akin to
today, someone saying that they were the Good Used Car Salesperson.
Which
is what necessitates Jesus also saying, in this exact same passage, that He is
the Gate as well. A gated fence is
pretty good at keeping out annoying sheep led by their inconsiderate shepherd. But the combination of the two is an odd one—Jesus
is saying that He can protect us from the shepherds/used car salesmen in life,
but that He also is one of them.
Of
course, you might say, “But pastor, that’s why Jesus says he’s the GOOD
Shepherd.” You know, like being the good
stormtrooper in Star Wars, or the good Mariners fan. But keep in mind as well, Jesus conjures up
the image of the Good Samaritan as well, but that didn’t necessarily mean that
all the other Samaritans out there were jerks, it just meant that the
Samaritans had a bad reputation, and as we all know, reputation may or may not
equate into actual reality.
No,
it is important that Jesus says that He is a shepherd because with each and
every step of His ministry, He has aligned himself with the people who need Him
the most—the people whom the world has otherwise forgotten. He heals women and children in a patriarchal
ancient Near East, He converses with Samaritans and Syrophoenicians in a
nationalistic Biblical Israel, and perhaps most importantly, He came to earth for
each and every one of you, un-famous and unspoiled, thoroughly lacking in fame
and fortune and other such fleeting trappings of materialist status.
The
sheep have inherent worth to the shepherd because they define his occupation—without
them, a shepherd is just a guy in a field with a crooked staff. And Jesus, in contrast to the hired hand, is
utterly defined by, and devoted to, His mission to the sheep—to us.
Jesus’
mission is everything to Him, and that is the identity we are to live by as
Christians. A book I received as a
baptism present as a child took a chapter to try to boil down each of the major
world religions into one question—as in, what is the bottom line for each
faith. And what the authors came up for
in Christianity’s case was, “How can I love the way that Jesus loved?”
More
to the point, who are the sheep in our own lives? And by that, I don’t mean, “who should you love,” because the obvious,
simple, and clear answer to that question is, “everybody.” No, what I mean is, who is most in need of
your care and ministry right now?
Because
you will sometimes be amazed to find that the person most in need is the one
furthest away—not geographically, necessarily, but emotionally, mentally, and
spiritually. Put up around their souls
has been a ward full of locked doors and foreboding walls, even if, on the
outside, they appear completely unassuming and on the surface are blending in
perfectly to their surroundings. It is,
after all, another characteristic of the sheep—to try to blend in with the
herd, hoping to protect themselves through strength in numbers.
But
inside, we may feel like instead that the chips are down and we’re down to our
last card we can play. It is in those
moments of a person’s greatest need that Jesus would step in to intervene…that
He steps in to intervene even still.
There
is a line from the Jewish Talmud, made famous by Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, that says, roughly, “He
who saves a life, it is as though he has saved the world entire.” That is, to me, the Good Shepherd in a
sentence.
It
is also, in a sentence, how we too can, and should, and must live, uplifting
and empowering and rebuilding one life at a time, until the world itself cannot
possibly comprehend the wonder and splendor of the life it carries within.
Thanks
be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
August
19, 2012
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