Reflection

Thinking About the Gospel
 4^th Sunday in Ordinary Time
April 21, 2024
John 10:11-18

Jesus said: “I am the good shepherd.  A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.  A hired man, who is not a shepherd and whose sheep are not his own, sees a wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away, and the wolf catches and scatters them.  This is because he works for pay and has no concern for the sheep.  I am the good shepherd, and I know mine and mine know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I will lay down my life for the sheep.  I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold.  These also I must lead, and they will hear my voice, and there will be one flock, one shepherd.  This is why the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.  No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own.  I have power to lay it down, and power to take it up again.  This command I have received from my Father.”

When we were children there was a print of The Good Shepherd hanging in our living room.  Jesus, the shepherd, was all neat and clean with a serene expression on his face.  Around his shoulders Jesus carried a pure white lamb which looked like it could have lived in a children’s petting zoo. The picture always reassured me that Jesus would be there to help me out of any trouble that I would get into – and there was a lot.  I recall it as a comforting image. 

Later in school I learned that the shepherd had long been a traditional Israelite image for their king.  Over time it had become an image for the Messiah.  Jesus was always reluctant to apply the term to himself because so many who anticipated The Messiah’s arrival assumed that he would use violence to transform the world.  Jesus absolutely rejected violence because It contradicted God’s love and turned problem into tragedies that festered in memories for generations. 

There were two well-known scenes in the days before his execution that made his attitude towards violence clear.  The first occurred when he arrived in Jerusalem for Passover to  crowds acclaiming him as their hero.  Faced with that adulation, he chose to enter the city on an ass, the foal of a donkey.  He appeared before the crowd riding the humble transportation of a peaceful traveler rather than on a horse, the threatening symbol of war’s ferocity.  The second event occurred when Peter drew his sword and attacked a soldier’s servant during Jesus’ arrest.  Jesus told him to put his sword away and rebuked him. Then Jesus healed the servant and the arrest preceded without further incident.

Jesus revealed God.  He demonstrated God’s intimate and continual involvement in transforming creation and humanity into a community of love within the life of its Creator.  God’s involvement, however, unfailingly respects human freedom.  God does not manipulate, let alone force us into loving concern for one another.  Within the context of our freedom God urges us forward by the example of his own loving-service and radical forgiveness in the person of Jesus, God-with-us. God does that even though it involves his sweat, exhaustion, frustration and, ultimately his death. With God there is no I-will-go-this-far-for-you-but-no-further.  Jesus’ life revealed that.  

John’s gospel tells of a moment during the Last Supper when Jesus was explaining that he was about to return to the Father.  Phillip asked if he was finally going to reveal the Faither.  Jesus replied, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”  

The Good Shepherd is a political image.  It’s not political in the sense of elections or parties or a particular forms of government.  It’s political because it is concerned with relationships.  It is political because it offers a vision of how to live harmoniously in community.  John wrote in the prologue to his gospel that the Word was with God and was God and through him all things were made.  God’s Word became flesh in the person of Jesus to bring truth and life to the world.  He wrote this to tell us that knowing Jesus we understand not only humanity’s destiny but the life we have to live together to arrive at that destiny.  Jesus is not somebody’s good idea; Jesus lays God’s mind and heart out before us.

Jesus was the most concrete, practical gift that our Creator could possibly have given humanity.  In simple language, God revealed how he is building our world with us.  He showed us how to love, how to forgive, how to dream and plan, how to identify with one another, how to share, how to risk ourselves for our common future, how to keep going when nothing seems to make sense and how to trust that God never abandons us.  It’s like having a teacher standing beside us at a workbench saying, “Let me show you. Now, no matter how long it takes, I’ll stand beside you while you do it.  We are going to build something beautiful together.“

The good shepherd means so much more to us as adult Christians than it did when we were kids.  The clean, serene Jesus in that picture is now the exhausted Jesus walking miles on hot, dusty roads wrestling with misunderstanding and hostility.  It’s Jesus, having to explain himself over and over even to those closest to him.  It’s Jesus knowing that growing crowds didn’t mean a deepening understanding let alone acceptance of his message.  It’s Jesus realizing that his life wasn’t going to end on clean sheets with his family and friends surrounding him.  It’s Jesus refusing to abandon his life of loving-care even when the cross loomed as its inevitable result.  It’s Jesus risking everything for the future of the world he loved. 

Jesus truly was the good shepherd of that painting from our childhoods, but he wasn’t the neat, clean, unruffled reality portrayed there.  Loving-care and forgiveness are never neat, clean realities.  Nonetheless, they’re the only path to the future both God and we long for.  

That’s why God has chosen it.  Why Jesus walked it.  Why we search for and travel it together.