The Shepherd’s Promise
Fourth Sunday of Easter Scripture Readings
By going back to the tenth chapter of John’s Gospel for this Fourth Sunday of Easter, the Church is providing us with, as it were, a footnote on last Sunday’s gospel reading where Jesus charged Peter with the mission of feeding and caring for his lambs and his sheep. It brings a certain clarity to the questions raised in that reading: who are the sheep, and what is the relationship between the sheep and Jesus?
Who are they? Jesus tells us immediately. They are those who “hear my voice.” That takes us back to the first chapter of John’s Gospel, the Prologue, which tells us that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. John is telling us in no uncertain terms that God’s creative and life-giving Word is expressed throughout all of creation, and also in the life and ministry of Jesus, as well as in the gospels. They aren’t different words, but one Word through which God, the unseen and unknowable, communicates himself to us and to all that is. There is only one Word and that Word is God—not “god” as an expression of human language, but God who is that divine Reality itself. Jesus himself says as much in our gospel passage a few sentences later.
Those who hear—that is, who receive—the Word of God expressed in the voice of Jesus are the ones who recognize in him the voice of the Father, as one voice. These are the ones Jesus calls his “sheep.” “I know them,” he says. Those who recognize in Jesus’s voice the Word of the Father are thereby invited into intimacy with him. How sad for those who can acknowledge only some kind of impersonal god—as though life and consciousness and personhood could be foreign to their Creator. Those with an impersonal deity can never experience the comfort of being known by the creative power of the universe. They don’t experience in the depths of their hearts the words of the Prophet Isaiah [43:1], “Do not fear for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are mine.” Or, as Jesus says about those who hear him, “I know them, and they follow me.”
What does it mean, then, to follow the Good Shepherd? It means many things to many people, but the meanings can all be distilled down into one. It means trust. It means the recognition not just in theory but in daily practice that, left to my own devices, there is nothing I can do on my own. There is a Power in the universe who is far greater than I, and who can free me from my bondage to self and accomplish everything I cannot. All that is necessary is for me to let go of the illusion of control and allow that all-powerful God to care for me. That’s what it means to follow the Shepherd, to allow the One who cares for us to work in and for us without our muddling it up. It means surrendering what isn’t—what never was and never will be—to the One who is all in all.
If we have the courage to let go of our way of doing things—a way marked by doubts and fears—and trust our lives into the care of the One who loves us more than we’re capable of loving ourselves—we have his promise, where he says, “I give them eternal life and they shall never perish.” That’s really the crux of all of our fears, you know: the fear that if I let go of control, I’ll perish. Death is not so much our ultimate fear. It’s rather the fear of non-being. It’s the fear of slipping away back into that “formless void,” that תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ (tohu wa bohu) [Genesis 1:2] out of which creation came. So, the Word of God confronts our greatest fear and tells us we “shall never perish.”
“No one can take them out of my hand,” he tells us. No one and, as Saint Paul wrote, no thing. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? … No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord.” [Romans 8:35,37-39] For he tells us, “My father, who has given [these sheep] to me is greater than all and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand.”
Our gospel passage ends with more than a profession of faith. It’s a profession of experience that, “Whoever sees [Jesus] sees the Father.” [John 14:9] In seeing Jesus, in encountering the “imago Dei,” the image of God, we become the lambs he cares for, and for whom he gave his life, and we enter into an intimate and unbreakable relationship with the Father. “The Father and I are one.” But it doesn’t end there. What good would knowing that be to us if it were not that Jesus prayed for us to take part in his unity with the Father. At the Last Supper, Jesus prayed, “I pray not only for [my disciples], but also for those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be one, as you, Father are in me and I in you, that they also may be one in us, that the world may believe that you sent me.” [John 17:20-21]
We shouldn’t ever forget that the gospels weren’t written for and about Jesus and his disciples alone. We are implicated in every gospel passage including this one. John shows us that Jesus and the Father are one, the Word and the Speaker are the same in being. We, however, are one with them by invitation. When we hear their voice, when we follow Jesus, surrender our willful pride and trust God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, we’ve accepted their invitation, left our fears behind, and become heirs of Christ’s promise that we shall never perish because we are one with the Father and with him. To him be glory with the Father and the Holy Spirit forever. Amen.
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