In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
I was born in 1980, and have never known a world without a telephone. I have never known a life without TV and newspapers, magazines, radio. And when I was around 16, we got our first computer, and the Internet and since then my life has been replete with immediate communication, as I’m sure has been the case for many of you. Images suddenly appear when requested. Stories immediately surface.
Of course, many of you remember a time before this was so, when stories took time to read and the imagination was engaged to flesh that story out. And the time which encompasses our living memory is only a minor part of the Church’s history, and for the majority of that history, stories were communicated differently than we now experience a story’s transmittal. Stained glass windows, statues, murals and frescoes communicated stories. Instead of newspapers and books, TV and Google, the stories which filled our lives entered through more physical and more human means. There was another very popular way, as well, that the Church employed to relay the Gospel story: the Passion Play.
In some places still today, Passion Plays are still enacted, depicting the end of Christ’s life. But their place in the medieval Church’s life was drastically different than the role Passion Plays have in our world. Passion Plays were a true making real again the story and experience of Christ’s Passion. Over time, Passion Plays lost their importance in our tradition, but this evening let’s enact our own Passion Play, recreating here at St Simon’s this great medieval act. But, let’s do so here in the depths of our minds, within our own hearts, in that place where we encounter Christ in prayer, where we have met him since we were small children. If it helps you to close your eyes in order to concentrate and to enter into that room in your mind, please do so.
We’ve heard John’s telling of the Passion, so let’s be each player who interacts with Christ on His last day. The first person we meet is Judas: Judas who had earlier that night shared a meal with Christ and the disciples, and now betrays Christ over to the hands of sinners, and betrays Him…with a kiss. Judas is worried, Judas is threatened or fearful or angry. But, no matter what Judas felt, his concerns for those feelings overcame his love for Christ. We are Judas when we allow our concern for our own comforts and ease to overcome our love. We are Judas when we betray Christ in the poor, in the sick. We are Judas when we love imperfectly because we hold back out of fear, out of vulnerability, and out of anger.
Next appears Peter. Peter first reacts to Christ’s arrest that cool night in the garden with violence and denial, lashing out in anger. And when he next surfaces in John’s Gospel, we are faced with Peter’s three denials. Peter had left his home and his work to follow Christ, and surely was committed to Christ and had cleaved tightly to him. But he flees from the scene of the arrest, abandoning his Lord, and when his name is linked with Christ, Peter vehemently rejects Christ, three times. We are Peter in this Passion Play when we do not cling to Christ even in difficult times. We are Peter when fear of recrimination stops us from doing what’s right, from speaking out against racism and the crushing weight placed on the working poor, from protesting the inequality in our society. We are Peter when the consequences of our actions are too hard to deal with, so we sell ourselves short rather than choosing glory. We are Peter when mere difficulties separate us from the love of Christ.
After his arrest, Jesus is sent by Annas the High Priest to the house of Pilate, Roman governor of Palestine. Pilate judges Jesus and finds him innocent. But Pilate listens to the cries of the crowd, and sentences Jesus to death, though he had been judged guilty of no crime. In order to disassociate himself from his actions, Pilate symbolically washes his hands, declaring that he is not responsible for his behavior, that his choices are not tied to him. We are Pilate when we refuse to acknowledge the consequences of our actions. We are Pilate when we see no need in being responsible and owning up to our part of the violence and evil done on our behalf and because of our choices. We are Pilate when we turn a blind eye to the suffering borne by others, by those in developing nations and within our own cities, in order to support our lifestyle and habits. We are Pilate when we wash our hands of our part in the destruction of our planet, blind to our collusion in it.
Not all our Passion Play, though, is betrayal, weakness, and treason. Now, we behold John, the beloved disciple, and the faithful women. Of all those who lived and ministered with Jesus, only John and a few women accompany him to his death. Of the great crowds who hung on every word of Jesus’ preaching, the dozens of disciples and the 12 apostles, only John and a few women cling fast to Christ in his suffering and death. Those faithful who accompany Jesus witness his destruction and behold a great wonder: Jesus reigning from the cross and changing from life into death. We are the women and John when we choose to love God above our own fears and worries. We are John when we accept love though it is unpopular, dangerous, and even threatens our lives. We are the faithful women when shame, embarrassment, and horror cannot stop up from fidelity to Christ. When we are confronted by the sublime, we are John and the faithful women when we remain and hold steady, trusting that this trial, like all things, shall pass, and that Christ, though destroyed, continues to reign.
Even after Christ’s death, our Passion Play continues, and we play the parts of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. They request the body of Christ and prepare it for burial. They secure a place for entombment, and complete the ritual of sealing and burial. They served Christ as they were able, even in his death. We are Joseph and Nicodemus when we believe that even the smallest and sometimes seemingly most insignificant acts are truly means of grace. It is not the size of the love we have, but its intensity of that love which shines through. We are Joseph and Nicodemus when we hold in faith that small acts of charity to the sick, to those in prison, to the ill, the dying, the naked, the hungry, that these small acts are where God encounters a broken humanity and begins to heal. We are Joseph and Nicodemus when we plant a seed and hope for its springing forth, for no greater seed was ever laid in the ground than the anointed, spiced, and wrapped body of the Lord, and no greater tree with no sweeter blossom, with no more glorious fruit would ever burst forth than at the opening of the tomb on Easter morning.
Amen.
And Easter 4:
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
The Fourth Sunday of Easter is well-known as Good Shepherd Sunday, aptly named for the reading from the 10th chapter of John’s Gospel, in which Christ refers to himself as the Good Shepherd, the shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep. Mental images may subconsciously float up: a gently smiling Jesus with a shepherd’s crook in his hand and a wooly lamb over his shoulder; or a third-century mosaic of Christ amidst a large flock of snowy sheep. The image of Christ as shepherd was one of the first to be depicted in Christian art, and began as a covert way to tell the story of the Gospel using images during a time of persecution and secrecy in the Church’s history. The story and motif of Jesus as shepherd is an ancient one, and one which still speaks to us now.
But, like many ideas in our minds, particularly those associated with our faith, it’s always a good think to explore if how Scripture reads is the same as how we interpret. For example, we imagine the Christmas scene at the stable as having oxen and sheep and donkeys, but nowhere in the Gospel does it mention animals being there. It has passed into our collective reckoning of the Christmas panorama, though. Same with the Good Shepherd: we conjure up pastoral images of a kind Jesus with meek sheep when we hear today’s Gospel. But are we wrong? Is that truly the context of the good shepherd?
Together, let’s flesh this story out a bit more. First, we need to remind ourselves to whom Jesus is addressing the story of the good shepherd. We may assume that Jesus is offering this story to his disciples, giving them a message of hope and tender love. But the people to whom Jesus is speaking in this part of John’s Gospel are not his followers: they’re his opponents. The Pharisees are testing Jesus, challenging Jesus, threatening Jesus. Previous to his description of himself as the good shepherd, Jesus had healed a man born blind and had been challenged and denounced by the Pharisees for it. He had manifested his ability to heal miraculously, and had been hunted by the Pharisees on account of it. When the Pharisees catch up to him, the story which Jesus offers them is the good shepherd. But why?
In this parable, Jesus is comparing his leadership of Israel to the leadership offered by the current religious authorities, including the Pharisees. He condemns their leadership and refers to them in the verse immediately before the one we read to today, as “thieves and robbers” and then as cowards who “flee from the sheep when the wolf approaches”. This is not a meekly smiling Jesus petting little lambs. This is Jesus directly confronting and denouncing his accusers as false teachers, as those who lead Israel astray.
Of course, this is not the best way to make friends. It’s unlikely Jesus was too concerned about making friends with the Pharisees, however. Another layer of this story shows pretty clearly that Jesus was not there to make friends. He was there to show what holiness and the love of God meant, what it looked like to love as God intended. The story of the good shepherd, like the miraculous healing of the man born blind, was a way that Christ would show his divinity. The Pharisees listening to Jesus rebuking them would know immediately the use of the image of the good shepherd from their own scriptural tradition. It was not our own image of adorable mewing lambs and a fatherly Jesus. It was one which was long-entrenched. We read Psalm 23 today, and that part of their tradition would have come to mind. But another image, one deeply explosive would have been what surfaced in the minds of the Pharisees when they heard Jesus talking about being the good shepherd: an image that would transfix them, sear their minds, and horrify them. Just like the good shepherd makes us think of a pastelly and white-robed Jesus in a clutch of lambs in a verdant field, the title of good shepherd would bring to the first-century Pharisees’ minds a very different tradition. In the writings of the prophet Ezekiel, God himself rebukes the leaders of Israel, calls them false teachers, and says that he will remove all of them. God calls them false shepherds and claims that they will be swept aside and that God himself will shepherd Israel. He says in Ezekiel: I myself will tend my sheep. When the Pharisees heard Jesus call himself by the title of the good shepherd, they knew that he was publicly declaring that the prophecy of Ezekiel was being realized in himself. He was naming himself as the God of Israel, coming now to sweep aside the nation’s religious establishment, and lead himself. In the verses which follow the good shepherd portion we heard, some people assume Jesus is insane, and others will want to stone him for blasphemy. The intended meaning of his message of calling himself the good shepherd was quite clear to his listeners.
So what is this message to us, then, if the good shepherd might not be what we had always thought it was? What in the gospel of the good shepherd is explosive to us, as the declaration of his divinity was so explosive to Christ’s hearers two millennia ago? The best place to start answering that might be to explore why this Gospel shows up in Easter. What is so Easterish about this gospel?
The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again.
Something may strike you as odd about that first passage I just reread from today’s Gospel: a good shepherd doesn’t lay down his life for his sheep. A very bad shepherd does. A shepherd who has confused life and livelihood lays down his life for his sheep. A person is a shepherd because the sheep are a commercial interest from which he gains profit, off of which he makes a living. A shepherd laying down his life for his sheep is like a fisherman laying down his life for cod. But Christ claims himself as the good shepherd, and says that he lays down his life for his sheep. And, he continues, this is the very reason why his father loves him: that he lays down his life. And then something else odd: he lays down his life for his sheep only to take it up again.
This is the core of the Easter message in this gospel: out of love Christ laid down his life for us, only to take it up again. The theme of laying down a life in order to take it back up is a repeated one in scripture, and, I would argue, in my life and in your lives. One of the well-known stories of laying down a life in order to pick it up again is the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham in Genesis. Abraham had accepted that God asked him to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. Abraham walked with his son up Mt Horeb, accepting that his son would die that day. When, at the moment of sacrifice, God intervened and saved Isaac, Abraham received him back as someone who had returned from the dead. For Isaac’s life had truly been laid down, only to be taken up again. In his anger over the darkness and sin of his creation, God sent the flood, and destroyed the world’s life, he took it up again through Noah and the remnant safely guarded in the ark. In the Gospel, Christ called the rich young man who seeks perfection to lay everything down, to give it to the poor and to follow him. Though the rich young man didn’t know it, had he laid down everything and followed Jesus, he would have gained it all back.
And in my life and your lives? Have we never experienced this laying down in order to take it back up again? Hopefully, my sermon today is a small example: we laid down our comfortable and scripturally-incomplete picture of the good shepherd, only to take it up again in a broader context. But we do this in large things, too: when a loved one is struggling with an addiction and our actions enable that addiction to continue, we may need to sacrifice that relationship in order to start to bring about healing. After healing has begun, we take that relationship back up, renewed and strengthened. The process of mourning the loss of a job , the death of a friend, the ending of a marriage, a child moving from home to go to college: these can feel like you lay down your life, and when you cross over from mourning, you find a newer life, and take it up again. Laying aside your prejudices and old ways of understanding only to take up a new way can help you to constantly transform yourself into the person Christ knows you can be.
It is unlikely that we will be called to literally lay down our lives. I think one reason why the martyrs fascinate us and why we celebrate them so gloriously in our church’s tradition is because we almost envy the frankness of their sacrifice. It was clearer for those who suffered and died for their faith to relate their lives to Christ who laid down his life in order to take it up again. The martyrs trusted that their suffering and death and the laying down of their lives would bring them after death to a place where they would take their lives back up. But we too, are called to imitate Christ, just like the martyrs are. We probably won’t be fed to lions or roasted on a grill, or executed by arrows, or have our eyes plucked out, or be crucified upside down or boiled alive, or beheaded. By the way, those are each ways that some very important saints were martyred. We won’t likely be called on to witness to Christ in any of those ways, and to then experience Christ’s resurrection ourselves as we take back up the life we had laid down in witness. But when we live knowing that the things we lay down in this life are transformative and lead us to taking up a greater Easter life, we live as Christ desires us to live: joyfully, in imitation of him as good shepherd.
