In Teaching a Stone to Talk, in one of my favorite paragraphs ever written by anybody anywhere, Annie Dillard writes,
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
It’s in that spirit, I think, that we should come before this passage, because it’s at this point in the Gospel of John that things really start getting bumpy. The gospels tell a story of increasing division between Jesus and the religious folk as they move from skeptical curiosity through entrenched opposition to murderous fury—a division that Jesus doesn’t desire but also doesn’t try to prevent. In John, the major shift happens in chapters 9 through 11. The healing of the blind man in chapter 9, as Deborah showed us two weeks ago, ups the ante for the Pharisees, making him a much more alarming threat to them than he had been. The raising of Lazarus in chapter 11, which Tom will talk about in two weeks, brings the chief priests fully on board with the conviction that Jesus must be killed. And in between? In our passage this morning, we see Jesus put a wedge in the crack between himself and the Jewish leadership and bring the splitting maul down hard.
It’s important to be clear about something here: there’s a difference between being a divisive figure and being a divider. For dividers, turning people against each other is the point—it’s a means to an end, a tactic or strategy in the service of their agenda. Think Lee Atwater, James Carville, Karl Rove. Jesus didn’t desire division; he wasn’t dividing people in order to conquer them. But anyone who stands strongly for truth will be a divisive figure, both loved and hated—and sometimes by the same people at the same time. Dr. King was a divisive figure, because—like Jesus—he spoke truths that many people didn’t want to hear. Great unifiers are great compromisers; and sometimes, as with the Constitution, they compromise not only their principles but their integrity for the sake of unity.
Jesus is the light of the world, and—as John makes very clear—light divides the world into those who love the light and those who love the darkness, just by existing. Never forget that light brings pain. It reveals those things in our lives that we strive to hide from others, and even from ourselves. It reveals things that we value greatly to be fraudulent and worthless. It reveals things that feel like life to us to be ways that lead only to death; it shows us that the road through the valley of the shadow of death is the only path to real life. In all these revelations, there is pain, and regret, and grief, and loss. When the light shines, it shows us who believes that light is worth the pain, and who doesn’t.
In that way, light gives us a binary set of options: in a windowless room, the light is either on or off. Calling gives us a binary set of options: when you’re called, either you respond or you don’t. The calling of the shepherd divides the sheep in the fold between those who stay and those who follow. You can’t have it both ways by refusing to decide—as I’ve been told many times in many different settings, choosing not to decide is itself a decision. You can delay, but only so long, because it’s a choice between life and death, and death will eventually come for you whether you’re ready for it or not.
To fully understand the choice as Jesus is presenting it, we need to be aware of a couple things. First, the setting. Jesus is envisioning a typical village sheepfold, a walled enclosure with one opening. Every family that was well-off enough to have its own flock would use it, so the various different flocks would all be mingled together. Each family had its own shepherd for its flock, but they would also chip in together to hire a watchman for the sheep. He would sleep across the entrance to the fold, blocking it off. He was there to keep the sheep in and robbers out. In the morning, he would get up, the shepherds would come, and each of them would call their flock in turn; each flock would follow its shepherd because that’s what sheep do.
We also need to be aware of Ezekiel 34, which after Psalm 23 is the most important Old Testament text lying behind John 10. This is a prophecy of judgment on Israel, and particularly on its leaders. It’s long, because Ezekiel is always long, but let me give you some of it: “Thus says the Lord God: Ah, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep. The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, and with force and harshness you have ruled them. So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd, and they became food for all the wild beasts.”
God goes on to declare that he will be his people’s shepherd to rescue them, bring them home, and do everything the false shepherds aren’t doing. Then he turns to judge the flock, addressing the fat sheep who have exploited the weak; he promises his judgment on them, and then he says this: “I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd. And I, the Lord, will be their God, and my servant David shall be prince among them.” By “David” he means the promised Messiah: Jesus.
Jesus begins by applying this to the leaders of his people who were standing before him—the leaders who had just kicked one sheep out of the enclosure for refusing to bleat as commanded. He calls them thieves and robbers who are more interested in fleecing the sheep than caring for them, and he calls them false shepherds. He declares that those in the fold who are his sheep know his voice—as the healed man in chapter 9 did, literally—and will flee from the false shepherds, “for they do not know the voice of strangers.”
The Pharisees don’t understand what Jesus is saying. Subconsciously, at least, they don’t want to understand, which is no doubt part of it. Jesus responds by developing his imagery, but he doesn’t explain what he said—he goes in a couple different directions. In verses 7-10 he says, “I am the gate of the sheep,” and here he seems to be comparing himself to all the other would-be saviors Israel had known. Sheep in that place had to go out into the dangers of the world to find food and water to sustain life, and they had to leave food and water behind to find safety and security for the sleep needed to sustain life; to do either, they had to go through the gate.
Metaphorically, the gate is the way to life, and thus the path of salvation. The world keeps generating people who promise us salvation on some basis other than the one God provided, but in the end, whether religious or political, they all turn out to be thieves who steal and kill and destroy. Some are that way from the beginning, such as Adolf Hitler. Some are corrupted by the pleasures of power; Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is a good example. Some are corrupted by their own self-righteousness, like Vladimir Lenin. All end up there in the end. As the New Testament scholar D. A. Carson says, “there is only one means of receiving eternal life . . . only one source of knowledge of God, only one fount of spiritual nourishment, only one basis for spiritual security—Jesus alone.”
In verse 11 Jesus turns his imagery in different directions, declaring, “I am the good shepherd.” We might say he’s just been comparing himself to people who overpromise; here he contrasts himself with those who underdeliver. Shepherding was hard, skilled physical labor. When sheep wandered off (there’s no “if” about it), the shepherd would have to find them and bring them back to the flock—quickly, because there were predators about. If a sheep was injured, the shepherd had to care for it. And if one of those predators attacked, the shepherd had to do whatever it took to defend the flock, putting his own life on the line for his sheep.
The good shepherd isn’t doing it for what he can get out of it, he’s doing it for the sake of the sheep, because he’s invested in them, because they belong to him. The leaders of this world are all hired hands, when it comes down to it. Even the best of them will eventually break, because their investment in those who follow them, however great it may be, is not limitless. They may run, they may hide, they may join forces with the wolves—which sort of connects back to verse 10—or they may get eaten themselves, but one way or another, even the best will fail.
There is only one gate who is the way to life, and only one good shepherd who will lead anyone to life, and that’s Jesus. All of us who lead his flock in his name are really just sheep with bells around our necks: we do our best, but only as long as our eyes and our minds are focused on following him ourselves. Any time I think I can lead out of my own wisdom and understanding, my soul is in peril. Anytime you or I or any of us get focused on following another sheep to the point that we stop looking to see if they’re still following Jesus, we’re in trouble.
That’s especially true if they’re leading us the way we want to go. I’m not going to say Jesus never leads us the way we want to go, and I’m not going to say he never tells us what we want to hear; but Francis Bacon was right, we prefer to believe what we prefer to be true, and so we tend to see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear. We need to be actively open to hearing Jesus say what we don’t want to hear and seeing him lead us where we don’t want to go, if we want to be confident we’re hearing and seeing him rather than our projection of him—what Sara once dubbed his fictional essence.
There are a great many reasons why God chose shepherding language to describe himself, but one at least is this: it gives us a very humble view of our role as his followers. Jesus calls us his friends, but he doesn’t call us his advisors, and we don’t follow him as his staff. We follow him as sheep. Sheep are radical followers. They don’t try to navigate, or ask to take side trips; they don’t complain about what pasture they’re led to, or what water source; they don’t argue about what qualifies as food. Sheep trust the shepherd that where he leads them and how he leads them is what’s best for them, even when that means going through narrow canyons black with shade. They trust the shepherd to want what’s best for them and to know what that is better than they do, and they act on that trust: they follow wherever he leads.
That last is the root of it, I think; that’s where sheep, foolish woolies though they be, are still smarter than us. We don’t trust the shepherd to know and do what’s best for us. At least, maybe you’re much holier than me, but I don’t, and anyone I’ve ever talked with about this has said the same. I’ve been working on this in myself for a long time now, and still, viscerally, I fight myself to believe it. That’s because, as Calvin says, “the human heart is a factory of idols.” My heart keeps finding things it wants to love more than God, and so I struggle to believe that he knows better than I do because, subconsciously, I don’t want to believe it. I know God says that this behavior or that thing is not good for me, and I understand why—but down here, I don’t want that to be true, and so my sinful nature rejects it. I want to believe that what feels like life to me in the moment is in fact life-giving. I don’t want to give up whatever gives me pleasure and satisfaction without effort, and I don’t want to admit I’m wrong.
Sometimes, of course, it’s not just subconscious; sometimes we insist we do know what’s best for us, or for others, and if God disagrees, he’s wrong. A Presbyterian colleague of mine said once that if Jesus himself came down and told him that homosexual sex was a sin, he would reject Christianity. Regardless of your take on sexual morality, I think we can all agree that is idolatry. (As far as I know, it wasn’t personal for him, it was ideological.) On the other side of the teeter-totter, I had people at a previous congregation who were deeply offended when I took the Pledge of Allegiance out of the worship service, and really didn’t like it when I explained that our allegiance to God must come before our allegiance to the United States.
Our hearts are continually being led astray by our desire to believe what we want to be true; we’re constantly affected by the temptation to conform our faith to our comfort zone. That’s why in so many places, as Annie Dillard put it, “people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute,” and it’s why her invocation of the peril of our faith is so urgent and important. If you really get serious about following this Jesus character, you’re just liable to end up crucified—and whether it’s the religious folk or the powers that be who do it to you is ultimately immaterial. As I’ve said before, Jesus is unreasonable, and what he asks of us who follow him is unreasonable—by our standards, anyway.
That’s the dividing line, I think, in our day and age. Whether it’s unique to modern Western societies, I don’t know, but at least since Schleiermacher published his book On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers in 1799, Western culture has increasingly insisted that Christianity must be reasonable on society’s terms. On that basis, Jesus is offensive to our culture in at least two ways. One, he claims to be the gate, not a gate, and the good shepherd, not a good shepherd. He says only his sheep will ever find true life, because he’s the only way to God. He insists that God sets the terms of our reconciliation with him, rather than letting us set whatever terms we like. It’s not about us and what we think is appropriate, because it’s not about us making a way to God. We can’t make a way to God; it’s impossible for us. Instead, he made a way to us—indeed, he became the way to us, and thus our way to him.
Second, the deepest commitment of our elite and popular cultures alike is the belief that individuals are defined by our desires—we are what we desire—and thus that we have the basic right to do whatever we desire as long as everyone’s good with it and no one gets hurt unless they want to. To the world we live in, it’s unreasonable to tell anyone that their desires could be inherently wrong. “God couldn’t possibly want me to give that up—it’s who I am,” we say. I do mean we, because this covers the waterfront. We tend to focus on sex because that’s what sparks the nastiest arguments, and our culture does privilege sexual desire in a particular way, but this is as much about me and my desire to serve as a pastor again as it is about anything or anyone else. I’ve had my nose rubbed in this—that desire doesn’t define me, and God owes me nothing.
We say, “God couldn’t possibly want me to give this up—it’s too much to ask,” but if we look at Jesus, we realize: he gave up everything—for us. “Being in his essential nature God, he did not regard equality with God as something to cling to, but made himself nothing,” Paul tells us. He traded infinite pleasure and the full experience of the presence of the Father for sorrow, grief, pain, and a long-distance connection. More than that, “he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death”—death by torture on a cross. This is the road he walked for us; this is the one who asks us to follow him, not as his equals, but as his sheep. Crash helmets and signal flares, indeed.
Following the good shepherd doesn’t guarantee us anything we want out of this life; instead, it puts all worldly pleasures at risk. It doesn’t even guarantee us the spiritual satisfaction we might think it should; Mother Theresa spent most of her life in ministry with no sense that God was with her, and struggled greatly with that. That’s an extreme case—I’ve never heard of anyone else whom he tested to that degree—but it illustrates the point: following Jesus isn’t a bargain we make that we’ll follow him if (fill in the blank). He calls us to follow him regardless, like sheep. In this life, he promises us two things. He promises us himself—and though she could not feel his presence, Mother Theresa still knew he was with her, because she saw him in the faces of the beggars of Calcutta—and he promises us his life.
Eternal life, the life of the kingdom of God, the true life of Christ, isn’t just something we’ll have after death, it’s something he gives us now. It isn’t what the world thinks is life. It’s better than anything this world can give us—his life offers joy in the midst of sorrow and peace in the center of the storm—but we can’t know that from the outside. We can only step into it by faith, put him to the test, and find him faithful. We don’t have to follow him perfectly—sheep wander off without even trying to, and he knows that; bringing us back over and over and over again is just part of his work with us. We don’t have to be better than sheep. We just have to be his sheep, and let him do what he will and lead us where we will. Radical followers. As C. S. Lewis said, “Christ plus nothing equals everything. Christ plus anything equals nothing.”
Photo © 2016 Nicolas Daskalakis. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
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