Jeremiah 23: 1-6. Psalm 23
Ephesians 2:11-22 Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
One of the best known metaphors for God is the found in Psalm 23 where the Psalmist declares, "The Lord is my Shepherd."
To know that one is cared for by God is the ideal spiritual state of humanity.
The attributes of God as a good Shepherd can also be seen in the presentations of the healing ministry of Jesus as these stories are used to illustrate that Jesus, like God his Father, was a Good Shepherd.
And we in the metaphor, are represented by the sheep as those who can have "sheep-like" behaviors. What do sheep do? They wander from the herd, going it alone in search of experiences beyond the heard. But sheep get lost and alienated from the herd and the shepherd. People live in states of alienation and separation from God and from each other. Sin is being alienated from God and from each other, even to the point of hurting each other or exploiting each other.
Sheep also get sick; they have birthing events. Sheep can get attacked, get hungry and be in need of water. The shepherd has to be also a lay veterinarian in applying oil and medicine to the wounds and tend to the illnesses of the sheep.
The Shepherd has to be a protector and rescuer for the sheep because there are predators and thieves. A Good Shepherd is also an animal psychologists and attends to the moods of the sheep to cheer them up and keep them playfully involved.
One of the chief presentations of Jesus by the Gospels of the early Christ-based communities in the ten decades after Jesus left this earth, is Jesus as a healing shepherd.
We sometimes get hung up on the scientific efficacy of the healing miracles of Christ. We forget that health and healing and medicine is different in each society at different times. We should be understanding medical anthropologists as we regard the healings of Christ in the salvation message of the Christ-based communities. We might get trapped into worry about healing. Why did Jesus just heal a few people and not everyone? Why doesn't everyone get healed who is sick today? Doesn't Jesus and the Risen Christ want everyone to be completely healthy all of the time? Because these questions are troublesome to us regarding who gets healed and who does not, it is better to ponder the message of healing Salvation which the Christ-based Gospel communities presented to their members. The long and short of it is that the Risen Christ is present in sickness and in health, in all life situations and at our deaths and beyond. If the Risen Christ is present in all life situations, then we can bear the fact that some people get healed and some don't, simply because of the free conditions of the world.
In the healing stories of Jesus we can find some crucial features of Jesus as the Good Shepherd offering the healthful salvation to our world. Many of the healing stories of Jesus are associated with the forgiveness of sin. This does not mean that a person's sin necessarily causes sickness. Sin is the general condition of alienation from God. When Jesus declares forgiveness of sin, Jesus is trying to say "little lamb, do not run away from God's fold, you belong to God the shepherd." Forgiveness is the declarative knowledge to a person that he or she belongs to God's fold and is included in the family of God.
The second aspect of health and salvation in the healing ministry of Jesus, is the declaration that because each person is created by God, they are not "dirty, impure, defiled, or mistakes" and thus to be shunned and separated from the community; rather they are declared clean, pure, and righteous as people with clean hearts and right spirits renewed within them. Many of the healing stories of Jesus involve getting rid of the notion of person being one with an unclean spirit and being put into a right spirit. The healing of Jesus is deep and it is spiritual because the Indwelling Holy Spirit is the clean heart and right spirit renewed within us.
The third aspect of health and salvation in the healing ministry of Jesus, is distinctly social and communal. Jesus restores wandering and shunned sheep to the herd, the community of faith. Religious communities often shun and segregate for very biased reasons. Sick persons, declared as such by the religious public health authorities, were quarantined and shunned. Health is always communal and social. You might say that a person who dies in the loving embrace of family, church and friend is sickness, but it is not; it is the holy health of dying because being loved and accepted by a community of people within all of the conditions of life that any of us must face, is the greatest expression of the salvation and health of Christ. Jesus did not come to stop time and aging; otherwise no one would ever get sick and die. The health of Jesus is the salvation of people knowing they are God's children, knowing that God declares them clean and righteous, and knowing that God's people fully include them within the love fellowship of the community.
My cup flows over; surely your goodness will follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
This is the Eucharistic church, at banquet, feasting on the salvation of Christ, together, in communion and fellowship and knowing that we belong to God forever. Amen.
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