Lectionary blog for April 26, 2015
Fourth Sunday of Easter
Text: Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23;
1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18
My fourth-grade teacher, Miz George, died a few weeks ago. (This was not Miss, for she was married, not Ms. for though she was quite liberated, she wasn’t a modern feminist, not Mrs. – just good, old-fashioned, general purpose, southern Miz George.) She was in her 90s. The last time I saw her was at my daddy’s funeral 12 years ago. She came with my second-grade teacher, Miz Collins. They taught the four oldest Chilton children at Redbank Elementary School in Claudville, Va., which is the reason none of us will ever end a sentence with a preposition or say “can,” when we mean “may.”
When I saw Miz Collins and Miz George at the funeral, I was reminded of how well they took care of us, their little flocks of illiterate sheep, of so many years ago. They did more than teach us the rudiments of grammar and the building blocks of mathematics. They also taught us to tuck in our shirts and to say “Yes, ma’am” and “No, sir,” and “please” and “thank you.” They taught us to respect ourselves and to respect others. They kept us safe, they led us beside the still waters of knowledge; they created a space in which our minds could grow. They were good shepherds.
That image of those tough, kind, independent and bossy women as “good shepherds” was helpful to me in thinking about today’s Gospel lesson, where Jesus says of himself, “I am the Good Shepherd.” For those of us without any direct experience of sheep and shepherds, this analogy falls a bit flat. If we’re honest, we’re not exactly sure what being a shepherd actually entails, most of us would not be able to tell a good shepherd from a bad one without a lot of help from someone in the know.
It’s important to know that even Jesus is not directly referring to himself as a keeper of sheep; rather he is tapping into a long-standing image used by the Hebrew people to refer to the kings, priests and prophets of Israel. These people were seen as having been given responsibility by God to take care of the people, God’s flock. And as many of them failed in this assignment, the Hebrew Scriptures are filled with tales of bad kings and false prophets.
When Jesus calls himself the “Good Shepherd,” he is contrasting himself with all those previous leaders who had been poor and incomplete shepherds, no better than hired hands. By contrast, Jesus identifies himself as the Good Shepherd, the one truly ready to “lay down his life” for the good of the sheep. Of course, that is what Jesus eventually did upon the cross. It was that act of laying down his life for the sheep, all God’s people – which are, after all, all people from every time and every place – that created the new community, the new flock, that we call the church. In this new flock, we are all both shepherd and sheep – called of God to care for each other and for the world.
The movie “The Bridge over the River Kwai” told only part of the story. Behind the movie is another more important story. In his book, “Miracle on the River Kwai,” Ernest Gordon says that Scottish soldiers, forced by their captors to labor on a jungle railroad, had degenerated to a level of barbarity, of animalistic behavior toward each other in a struggle to survive.
One afternoon, a shovel was missing. The officer in charge became enraged. He demanded that the missing shovel be produced, or else. When nobody in the squad budged, the officer took out his gun and threatened to kill them all, there, on the spot. It was obvious the officer meant what he said. Then, finally, one man stepped forward. The officer put away his gun, picked up a shovel and proceeded to beat the man to death.
When it was over, the survivors picked up the bloody corpse and carried it with them to a second tool check. This time – no shovel was missing. There had been a miscount at the first tool check.
The dead man was innocent. He had voluntarily died to spare the others. What was it Jesus said, “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep”?
That’s not the end of the story. The fact that someone had died to save them created a profound change in the prisoners. As one of them said, “We wanted to be worthy of the sacrifice.” Rather than compete with one other to live, the prisoners began to treat one another as brothers, looking out for each other and taking care of each other.
When the victorious Allies swept in and liberated the prison camp, the Japanese guards were terrified. They fully expected to die, to be executed on the spot. Their former prisoners, now little more than skeletons, lined up in front of the guards and began to shout, “No more hate. No more killing. What we need now is forgiveness.” The Japanese guards were stunned and broke down weeping. (“Rumors of Another World,” Phillip Yancey)
Sacrificial death had transformative power. The death of an anonymous prisoner transformed the POWs from isolated and competing individuals into a community that cared about and for one another. The sheep became shepherds to one another.
One man’s sacrificial death also transformed the way the prisoners saw their captors. When the war was over, they chose to treat their oppressors as lost sheep – not as ravenous wolves. They saw them as the “sheep not from this flock” that Jesus spoke of and decided to forgive them and love them.
We are invited today to reflect upon the sacrificial death our Good Shepherd died for us. We have an opportunity to open ourselves up to the transforming power of the gift of new life, letting our lives be changed by the Risen Christ living in us and in this community. We are called to continue the work of the Good Shepherd, caring for one another, loving each other, dying a little for each other, opening doors and tearing down barriers, bringing everyone into the sheepfold, into God’s beloved flock.
Amen and amen.
