The Second Sunday After Easter (Good Shepherd Sunday)
“And Jesus said, ‘I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.’”
Often when we talk about or read scripture, when we try to imagine it or depict it in art, in film, in books, we have a tendency of sentimentalizing it. Not watering it down so much, but of treating it, believing it, and imagining it to be something less, something more gentle, something easier than it truly is.
Take for example angels, who make various appearances in the Scriptures. Nowadays our image of angels has been so cleansed and made palatable that there’s nothing particularly frightening about them at all, but in many cases in the scripture the appearance of an angel is a terrifying thing. The prophet Ezekiel described the angelic beings he was shown as being a series of interconnected wheels, the face of each wheel being covered completely in eyes; Isaiah describes the angelic beings, the Seraphim, which surround God’s throne singing holy, holy, holy to be beings with six wings, two for flying, and four for covering head and feet. Daniel talks about the angel appearing to him as a man with a body like a blue gemstone, his face like lightning and eyes of fire. All a far cry from either winged diapered babies or winged men that looked like they stepped off the cover of a romance novel you’d buy at the checkout of the superstore.
The risk, of course, is that we begin to imagine the awesome things of God as being in some ways less awesome than they are.
Today is Good Shepherd Sunday, so called because of the Gospel reading which is typically read sometime in the Easter Season, and this image of Jesus as the good shepherd is likewise one that has fallen victim to sentimentality and gentle-izing. I am sure I remember from my grandmother’s house that well-known image of Jesus bathed in soft light, looking like he stepped off of the cover of a Bee Gees record, with a fluffy white lamb cradled gently in his arms.
Now on the hand this is not an unfaithful depiction – though I doubt he looked exactly like that – because He does of course treat us tenderly and lovingly, he does of course cradle us and hold us, find us when we’re lost, comfort us – but is that all?
For the very early Christians the image of the Good Shepherd was powerful and important, a depiction and really a thought that brought great comfort in times of unimaginable distress.
If you go to Rome and go down into the ground about twenty metres you’ll run into a network of tunnels, catacombs. It was illegal to bury the dead inside the city walls of Rome, mostly because of worries about disease, and so burials went further underground into these tunnels. And all through these tunnels which stretch for miles and miles you will find room after room, niche after niche, tomb after tomb of the dead.
But not only was this vast network of tunnels a burial site, it was home to many of the first Christian churches. In the early years of the church, when Rome was still a pagan empire, Christians began to suffer terrible persecutions. It wasn’t until the year 313 that the persecution formally ended with the Edict of Milan, until that point Christians were fair game often used as fodder in the gladiatorial rings, hurled amidst starved wolves and lions to entertain cheering and jeering crowds.
Being a Christian during those first centuries was, as it continues to be for many people in the world today, a life or death kind of thing. And so in response to the persecution Christians went underground, fleeing to those catacombs where they found secret places to pray, worship, and receive the Eucharist, often amidst their loved ones who were buried there. And just as we decorate the graves of our loved ones so they adorned the catacombs with images dear to their heart.
The most common image found in those catacombs? The Good Shepherd.
For the Christians in those tombs this was not a sentimental image, not – as one preacher said – an image of “Gentle-Jesus-Come-and-Squeeze-Us”. When you’re facing the very real possibility of being arrested and thrown to starving wolves to entertain a crowd, it’s not a schmaltzy good shepherd you think about – it’s the shepherd with the staff, the shepherd who will go toe to toe with the wolves to protect the sheep, the one who’ll risk the ninety-nine and trudge off in the darkness to find the one that’s missing. Jesus the Good Shepherd, such as he describes himself in John’s Gospel today is Jesus the protector, Jesus the one who fights for us, Jesus the one who, “lay[s] down his life for his sheep.”
The Good Shepherd is really an image not just of Jesus as our protector, the one who with staff can keep the wolves at bay, but is also an image and reminder of God’s shepherding – of everything, every one, and every moment – something that we theologically call God’s providence. Nothing, nothing, in this world or in your life, no matter how much it may seem, is beyond God’s shepherding; no moment, no hurt, no darkness, no dark valley, no trauma is beyond the shepherd’s care. We are reminded of this so poignantly in Holy Week when the murder of the Son of God becomes for us the means of union and return to God – total light out of total darkness.
In our lives we sometimes want to make substitutes, we want the hired hand that Jesus talks about in the Gospel rather than the Shepherd himself, that is, we try to think things, or do things, we develop habits, or addictions or find crutches to help deal with hurt in our lives, things that seem good, but when the rubber hits the road they, like the hired hand are nowhere to be found. The Good Shepherd does not flee. Put more simply perhaps, it’s about recognizing that, “The Lord is my shepherd, therefore can I lack nothing.”
I’ve lost count at this point of the number of times that I’ve been called to be present with a family, often one I don’t know, around a death bed or at a funeral, a family who called me in simply because ‘grandma was religious’, but most of the family aren’t in the least, and the number of times at these events that the prayers and the sermon and readings illict nothing…but then I begin to hear sniffling, crying, sobbing, and the rustling of tissue boxes when I say the words, “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me…”
Because at the end of the day or at least in our daily living, this is what we all need to know. It’s what we all want to hear. The promise of everlasting life is of course the greatest gift but so hard to imagine and can seem so far off while we’re living; but those dark valleys that we walk through, those shadows of sin, and death, of pain and hurt – those are real and often a daily encounter. What a joy, what a comfort, what hope to hear the words of the Gospel of the Psalmist, and to know that in those times and in that darkness, no matter how much it seem to the contrary, we are never without the Good Shepherd at our side.
