Jesus offers a different vision for us
Easter 4B | John 10:11-18
The good shepherd is a popular image for Jesus. It is the inspiration for one of our most prominent windows. Take a look. Jesus is holding the tiniest little sheep.
What does it inspire? Comfort? Support. Love.
The image of Jesus as the good shepherd has been an inspiring one for centuries.
If you were to take out your pew Bible and look up this passage—from John 10—I’d encourage you to scan everything around it.
In chapter eight, Jesus intervenes at the attempted stoning of a woman. He foretells his death and confronts many of his own followers. Because they are committed to the way things are.
Then in chapter nine, Jesus gives sight to a young man who was born blind. And those zealous supporters of power interrogate the young man and his parents. They think he’s a liar, demonic. They poison the proverbial well and isolate the young man from his own home—and into the arms of Jesus.
And then Jesus speaks to the contrast between good and bad. Calling himself the gate and those other teachers, thieves who try to break in and steal. When this image doesn’t take with the disciples he tries another. The good shepherd.
Why a good shepherd?
I bring this other stuff up to remind us of what this image is comforting from and why he needs to share it with his disciples. And if we keep going, the second half of this chapter leads to Jesus’s rejection. And after raising Lazarus from the dead in chapter eleven, those who reject him will plot to literally kill Jesus’s message by killing Lazarus.
We get this image in the middle of terrifying threats of violence. Threats made by people of deep faith who are seeking to protect their power. Political power, not just religious power.
This comfort Jesus offers in our passage—protection, support, hope, love—is an oasis in a desert of violence and disempowerment. It is food, not just to the hungry, but to those starved by a modern economy. It is also hope, not just to the hopeless, but to those imprisoned by a culture with no mobility.
We shouldn’t see this as merely a balm to a weary soul. It is the promise of a better world. A promise that the powerful people in the world find incredibly threatening. And ultimately worth killing to silence.
Do we ever talk about this on Good Shepherd Sunday?
That Jesus isn’t just comfort for our afflictions, but a promise of an entirely different way of life? That he gives us access to that greater existence through love—and that so many (including those who follow him!) would rather sneak in and take what they want rather than to love their way in?
Or that so much of our world runs on hired hands that we treat like good shepherds? That we turn to influencers for guidance, our social media “hive minds” to tell us if we are the jerks in a situation, or politicians preaching morality for votes.
Jesus mentions the self-sacrifice of the good shepherd three times—that he would die for his sheep. Not just because he is that dedicated to the cause, but because nobody else is.
Even us.
Jesus is the savior.
And he tells us this in alluding to the book of Ezekiel, chapter 34—where the prophet speaks of God’s promise to shepherd the people. Because the hired hands do such a poor job of it.
And I think many of us tend to endorse a kind of nihilism toward one another. That we all will fail and only God is good, which, as a mostly true statement is fine—but we use it to excuse the injustice in our community and our own hired hand attitude. Because we say none of us is ever truly good, we can cover up our participation in bad behavior.
We make cover for the thieves trying to break in just as much as we endorse Jesus as the gate and the good shepherd.
This was a big part of what we talked about in our last gathering of Pot Luck and Apocalypse last week. John of Patmos invites us to see our very life in Christ as necessarily participatory. Because the way of The Lamb demands a rejection of evil behaviors. Principally exploitation, subjugation, domination, stealing, deceiving, and corrupting.
Things our world identifies with strength, success, and power. It is the bread and butter of the stock market.
We must be other.
Other than the way of evil.
And this is why the image of the hired hand is useful—because being a hired hand isn’t evil. It isn’t bad. The work itself is not bad nor will it lead us to evil.
But…
The hired hand has a disincentive to care. It has reason to not do good or be good.
There is no profit in it. And when profit is the motive, exploitation is always on the table. And becomes infinitely more likely.
Nobody is hired to be a good person. We hire each other for jobs. And most of the time, when we do them well, it means we made somebody more money. Through more sales, increased productivity, or workforce retention.
The measurement is gain—not goodness. We can’t expect the hired hand to be good precisely because the market solves for growth through exploitation. In everything.
This is the contrast for Jesus.
From the perspective of those trying to break him, Jesus is a threat to the system, which makes him bad.
But for Jesus, the system itself is bad because it doesn’t grow goodness. It grows exploitation—one of the Ten Commandments we are not to do.
The Good Shepherd, then, isn’t just about our personal comfort. It isn’t an icon of compassion for us to gaze on to feel better.
It is the fulfillment of God’s promise. To be there when the system fails us. When governments and the church refuse to care for us. To leave us at the mercy of people who would exploit us.
Which means it isn’t just an antidote to the evil in the world. It is a positive vision of what the whole world can be when we choose to be good.
Choose good.
Rather than orient our thinking around our being hired, we can be good shepherds. Which is not only not common, but actively discouraged by our culture.
In a gig economy, the good shepherd has no income. But they have love. Compassion. Community. Hope. They have the Way of Jesus. And they have anyone who is following that same path beside them. We have each other.
When we orient ourselves to the motivations of Christ, The Lamb, Jesus, the true Good Shepherd, we become less worried about the status of self—and our place in the culture’s hierarchy—and more satisfied with the generosity of the flock. We become people of the Kin-dom.
This is what choosing good means. It means actively participating in a different pattern than the culture’s priorities of enrichment, evaluation, cunning, and gain. One of faith, hope, and love.
As generous and welcoming as the true shepherd. And this, my friends, is good.