The Lunatic Shepherd
John 10:1-21
Cascades Fellowship CRC, JX MI
April 20, 2008
Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation
I hate to do this to you but I am going to use yet another illustration drawn from one of the Star Trek series – this time from Voyager. The back story to Voyager isn’t really important, so if you want to know more about that, talk to me after the service. What is important is that the crew of Voyager runs across what is known as a generational spacecraft – that’s a ship built to have families onboard who grow up on the ship and assume positions of responsibility on the ship. Typically these types of ships have deep space travel as their mission – travel that will take several generations to complete.
In the case of this particular ship, they were interstellar nomads. So they weren’t going anywhere in particular, they simply traveled through space, one generation after the next. Their ship, however, was beginning to show its age so Voyager tried to help. As you might expect with such a setup, one of those romantic situations arise where two people from completely different cultures – in this case, different species - seem made for each other and in the crucible of compressed time fall quickly in love.
The catch is that the nomadic species has a unique bio-chemical characteristic that imprints them irrevocably on the psyche of the other that bonds them for life – imprinted couples literally become addicted to one another. Young Ensign Kim is the one who falls in love and when the two ships part ways, he begins to experience what amounts to withdrawal symptoms.
Now, let’s remember – this is the 24th, 25th, 26th century, somewhere in there; 400-600 years in the future, so these people are smarter than we are and have figured out all the chemical processes of the human body and how to control them. So the doctor, seeing his shipmate in physical distress brought on by the emotional, mental and physical trauma of being separated from his bonded soul-mate, offers Ensign Kim a remedy – a way to deal with the love addiction painlessly until his soul and mind have the opportunity to grow a scar over the wound caused by the separation.
Ensign Kim’s response is both startling and profound. He refuses the treatment – why? The implication the viewer is left with is because Ensign Kim deemed it better to suffer under the tutelage of love lost than to exist without the notion of love. He thought it better to suffer for love than to live without the constant reminders of its absence.
Isn’t that crazy? Yet love sometimes moves us to do some crazy things.
You know, the parallels of this episode of Voyager to the Christian narrative are obvious – God also chooses to suffer for love. Does that mean God is crazy? Well, I guess it depends upon your perspective. Certainly from the perspective of those who opposed Jesus, what he had to say about being a good shepherd seemed kind of loony to them. But did they consider Jesus crazy because – well what Jesus was saying was just plain crazy? Or did they think Jesus was crazy because they didn’t understand?
Jesus’ discourse on the Good Shepherd comes in the context of his healing of the blind man, which we talked about last week. Jesus heals the guy on the Sabbath, which puts him in conflict with the religious leaders of his day. We didn’t read the last part of chapter 9 last week, but it is important that we realize what happens there to understand our passage this week.
After the blind man, who Jesus healed, is thrown out by the Pharisees Jesus heard about it and went looking for him. Now get this image in your head, because it plays right into the image of the shepherd that Jesus uses in Chapter 10. Consider the healed, blind man as a sheep. The shepherds he has trusted all his life – the ones he trusted when he could not see both physically and spiritually – cast him out of the fold. A sheep alone in the world is vulnerable – vulnerable to the wolves who would tear him apart, vulnerable to treacherous terrain and raging waters, vulnerable to the slow murder of isolation.
But Jesus, who in just a few more verses will call himself the Good Shepherd, goes in search of this one lost sheep, to draw him in and comfort him. And after revealing that he was the Messiah, Jesus tells him that he came so that the blind could see and those that see will become blind. He is referring of course to the religious leaders, who believed they had 20/20 spiritual vision but were revealed by Jesus to be blind as bats. In fact, their blindness is so great, they don’t even realize they are blind look at v. 40-41 of chapter 9:
Some Pharisees who were with him heard him say this and asked, “What? Are we blind too?”
Jesus said, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.
It is in this context that Jesus begins to talk about the Good Shepherd. Actually, he begins by talking about the true shepherd as compared to the false shepherds. What is interesting, however, is that he is not talking to his disciples or followers – at least not directly. His comments are directed at the Pharisees and religious leaders who have cast the healed blind man out.
That’s important – because so often when we hear these verses they are spoken in pastoral, comforting tones, sort of along the lines of Psalm 23, “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want….” But when Jesus speaks them, he has another part of the Old Testament in mind – the prophet Ezekiel – chapter 34. Listen to just a few excerpts from that chapter.
This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Woe to the shepherds of Israel who only take care of themselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock?
You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured….
You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally….
This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I am against the shepherds and will hold them accountable for my flock. I will remove them from tending the flock so that the shepherds can no longer feed themselves. I will rescue my flock from their mouths, and it will no longer be food for them….
For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I myself will search for my sheep and look after them. As a shepherd looks after his scattered flock when he is with them, so will I look after my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places where they were scattered on a day of clouds and darkness.
When Jesus begins talking about being the Good Shepherd, its not to comfort his followers, it’s to confront the Pharisees. It is for judgment that Jesus invokes the image of the shepherd. And as we shall see, it doesn’t go unnoticed.
Let me ask you a question, how many people here know a shepherd? Not the American type of shepherd who fences in a 40 acre spread and allows the sheep to freely graze within that acreage while he tends to other business, enjoys his family and sleeps in a warm, comfortable bed at night. But the kind of shepherd who spends the day out in the field with his sheep and then watches over them by night. My guess would be that none of us know someone who is that kind of shepherd – it’s simply not part of our way of life.
When Jesus began talking about shepherd and sheep, he was tapping into a powerful cultural image; an image that his listeners would have understood well. We on the other hand need a little help. So as we move through our text, I want to share with you some things that I have learned about shepherds and sheep that I hope will illumine this text for you.
Sheep are not bright animals and need protection – which is why when evening came sheep were often penned up in a sheep fold. A sheep fold was an enclosure which typically had walls constructed of field stone. Sometimes shepherds would stack stones across the entrance of a cave or overhang in the hills, but regardless of how the walls were constructed, they only had one gate – one way in and one way out.
In the evening, the shepherd led his sheep into the fold then he would either gate the entrance or sleep in the entrance himself, knowing that the sheep would not step over him to get out and any predator would have to step over him to get in. Often times, more than one shepherd would use the fold at the same time. In such cases, a gate watch was set – someone familiar with all the shepherds whose sheep were held in the fold; maybe even one of the shepherds themselves.
Now you’d think this would present a problem when it came time to lead the sheep out – I mean, all the sheep just mixed into together. How could you tell which sheep belonged to which shepherd?
Here’s where we get a sense of what God is talking about when he compares his relationship to us with the relationship between the sheep and the shepherd. You see, there is an intimacy between shepherd and sheep that goes beyond just man and beast. A trust develops – a trust so deep that crowds it out all others. The shepherd inspects his flock every morning and comes to know every spot, every tangle of wool on the sheep – he knows each sheep individually, can pick it out in a crowd.
And the sheep learn to trust the shepherd. They trust him because he defends them against the wild animals that would devour them. They trust him because he walks before them, leading them to green pasture and quiet waters. They learn the shepherd’s ways and they come to know his voice. So well, in fact, that if another shepherd comes to call them out of the fold, the sheep won’t budge. They will only leave the fold if they hear their shepherd’s voice and see him leading them out of the gate.
Now, bearing that in mind, let’s go back and look again at what Jesus says about being the Good Shepherd in comparison to the bad shepherds. Here’s what I find interesting about the whole discussion. By using this analogy of shepherd and sheep and proclaiming himself the Good Shepherd, Jesus leaves the religious leaders only one conclusion that they can draw – they are the bad shepherds; the one’s who plunder their own flocks who use the trust bestowed them by the sheep to their own advantage. They are the hirelings, the ones who run away when danger calls or more coin beckons. They are the ones who scale the walls to enter the fold secretly to steal, kill and destroy.
Jesus also says emphatically, several times – my sheep hear my voice. Yet, the Pharisees seem to be having a hard time understanding what Jesus is talking about – as if… they can’t hear his … voice. Now remember, Jesus is invoking the prophet Ezekiel and essentially declaring that he is the Shepherd who will gather God’s people from where they have been scattered, to fulfill the promise made through Ezekiel long ago. If they don’t hear his voice, then they must not be his sheep. And if they are not his sheep, then they will not be gathered and if they are not gathered in as God’s sheep, then whose sheep are they?
I wonder how they felt about that. In vv. 19-21 John tells us that once again the religious leaders are divided on Jesus – some said he was crazy. Others wondered how a lunatic shepherd could heal the blind.
Here’s the question – what’s the major difference between the true, the Good Shepherd and the false shepherds and hired hands?
“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand is not the shepherd who owns 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….”
The Good Shepherd is willing to die for us – that’s how much he loves us.
You see, the reality is when Adam sinned and so all mankind with him God could have justifiably destroyed creation, speaking it out of existence as easily as he spoke it into existence. God is not dependent upon the creation for his existence or his contentment. God could have chosen to simply move on and found within himself all that he needed to be fulfilled and happy. He need not have suffered.
But he knew that we needed him – our existence, our every breath was and is contingent upon his continuing grace and love toward us. God knew that if he did not suffer, we would not, could not survive. So rather than enjoy an eternity stripped of suffering – rather than do the thing that would remove all possibility of suffering, God chose to do the one thing that would absolutely guarantee he would suffer. He chose to love us. He chose to lay down his life for us.
