4 Easter B April 21, 2024
Acts 4:5-12 Psalm 23
1 John 3:1-8 John 10:11-16
Today is Good Shepherd Sunday and as I often do, I would problematize this topic for our times and perhaps see through some of the romantic haze that arises around reading the Gospels with profound naiveté.
I would submit to you that the Good Shepherd appointed Gospel as well as the New Testament was written for and by people who lived as an oppressed or suppressed minorities within various locations within the Roman Empire.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, shepherds were metaphors for the community leaders. The train of such leaders were patriarchs, judges, priests, prophets, teachers, and kings. Kings were regarded to be shepherds even though the great judge Samuel warned the people that if they wanted a king, he would in effect be a great kleptocrat. He would be expensive to maintain and he would take the young men for his armies. But as a reward there could be protection and some sense of law and order, and the environment to support the worship centering around the shrines and Temple. The accounts of Hebrew Scriptures indicate that the shepherds of all sorts in Israel succeeded and failed and by the time of Jesus, the leaders or shepherds of Israel had been reduced to the council of the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem who negotiated the limitations on lifestyle and worship freedoms for the Jews who lived in Palestine. The Jews of the Diaspora had also to find a way to exist as minorities communities within the cities of the Roman Empire.
The Roman Emperor was a leader, a shepherd of sorts, whom Jews and followers of Jesus had to acknowledge as a significant determining reality of their social lives. The way in which followers of Jesus chose to survive was to subscribe to the strong but servile life of the beatitudes. The beatitudes proposed a Christly martial arts lifestyle meant to be winsome to the persecutors, like turning the other cheek, blessing those who cursed you, and carrying the burden of the bullying soldier an extra mile. Such seeming heroic humble behaviors were for survival, but also to impress the persecutors with the performance of a spiritual strength that could be winsome.
Early followers of Jesus had to live with the Caesar as the shepherd and leader of the world whose power had local franchise power expressions in petty kings, governors, and centurions and soldiers. St. Paul asked his readers to pray for the leaders and to pay taxes. He said they had an ordained status for creating the kind of order which allowed for the survival of even the minority communities of church and synagogue. St. Paul was admitting that even Roman leaders could be good in shepherding society if conditions of peace allowed people to get on with their lives, even the life of following the Risen Christ.
So what is the Good Shepherd of John's Gospel all about? Jesus was not the Good Shepherd of Rome and the Roman Empire? Who was Jesus Good Shepherd for? The New Testament writings were essentially private writings for very limited communities within the Roman Empire. It was an insider's literature, meaning that Jesus was the Good Shepherd model for the mystical relationship of the Risen Christ for members of the Jesus Movement. The Good Shepherd was the model for how Christian leaders were to treat each other and it pertained particularly for the care and mentoring of those who were most vulnerable, marginalized, and without significant community identity or power. We have to acknowledge that the Good Shepherd model was mainly for in-house behaviors, meaning that if persons had significant power, wealth, and knowledge, the blessing of such could only be known in using it to empower others, enrich others, and teach others.
Historically, we can note that the good shepherd living lifestyle of the people of home churches became winsome within the Roman Empire. A discerning emperor like Constantine noted how the collateral effects of the once small Jesus Movement had become winsomely popular within his empire, to the point of it becoming politically astute to adopt this life style as the preferred life style for the empire.
How does one change charismatic mystical Christianity into legislative, social, and political Christianity?
It probably cannot be done. How does one legislate the sublime effects? How does one use the hammer and anvil of church law and order to convert serendipitous mystical experience into the passive assimilation of infants into the church through infant baptism? An entire incredible alchemical theology had to arise to address the success of the Jesus Movement and reconfigure the crucified Jesus who had been hidden in the lives of mystics as the Risen Christ into Jesus as the King of history and the Empire. Priests and bishops had to take on more public roles of authority, even to become the earthly visible vicars of Christ the King and High Priest.
We might observe that Christianity cannot be an Empire religion without losing the roots of its origin as a way of life which arose for those who were oppressed but who were animated by the inner life of having significant mystical experience to be the compensating factor in their otherwise outwardly non-ostentatious existence.
You and I who have been living mostly as heirs of the political powers who made Christianity the preferred religion, have had to live as people with power and privilege while professing a lifestyle Christian faith that was written by and for oppressed people. What we do know is that colonial Christians of power forced many people of color, and often times, women and others with less privilege in our societies, to live the life of the beatitudes. The life of the beatitudes is indeed an attractive lifestyle because it is driven by a sublime inner strength that baffles those who hold to the belief that the strong take what they want. The power of the strength of the living the beatitudes is such a contradiction to the logic of the power to control through physical strength, economic strength, the strength of armies and weaponry.
How can we as people trying to live New Testament Christianity adopt the founding Spirit of our movement to our times when we find ourselves in positions of power, wealth, and education?
We can assess with charity when Christly values have inspired governments to promote and practice universal suffrage. We can understand the victory of Christly values when governments support laws of equal justice for all, and when justice authorities understand that all are equal even when all are different. When our governments and society bring the dignity of justice to the many kinds of different people who are in our society today, then we can say we have begin to make the values of Christ the Good Shepherd the public values of our societies.
We as Christians need to be good shepherds to the many different people within our congregations who are seeking community and families of affirming acceptance. Without ever uniting church and state, we can model the values of the Good Shepherd as we are dismissed from our Christian gatherings to go forth in the name of Christ, to exhibit in our lives Christly values, which are good shepherd values. Where we have power, wealth, and education, we are to use these states to continually lift the levels of each for the greatest number of persons within our society. Power, wealth, and education are manifest in continuously reciprocal ways. Each of us at time are in need of shepherdly care of all sorts at many times in our lives. The strongest and seeming most self sufficient person will at times be dependent upon the care of others for something that he or she is bereft of in a time of weakness or vulnerability.
Let us today learn to live by the values of the Good Shepherd. It is perhaps the only way to convert empire and societies of people who have inherited the conditions of privilege, wealth, power, and education to the values of Christ.
Let us today be honest enough to admit that many times we are very needy and vulnerable sheep who need the help, care, and expertise of others. And let us not forget our times of need when shepherdly care has come to us. Let us also be shepherds of care to those who need the equalization ministries of healing, food for the hungry, provision for the poor, education for those needing to actualize their potential, and indeed the gift of the good news of Jesus the Good Shepherd, who calls each of us to do good shepherding with the gifts of our life.
May God save our societies by being good shepherding societies today. Amen.
