April 13, 2008
Dr. Joel Marcus
Click here to hear this sermon Church of the Holy Family
Chapel Hill

John 10:1-10

JESUS AND OTHER SHEPHERDS
Our Gospel lesson today from John is the famous one in which Jesus compares himself to a good shepherd. He says that the sheep hear the shepherd’s voice, when he calls them by their name, because they know that voice, and therefore they follow him. They will not follow anyone else, since they don’t know anyone else’s voice. And they are right to do so, since anyone who tries to get the sheep to follow him who is not the shepherd is probably nothing other than what the Westerns call a goll-durned sheep-rustler.

This is not the only passage in John’s Gospel that illustrates the power of calling someone by their name. Near the end of the Gospel, when Marg Magdalene comes to Jesus’ tomb on Easter monring, she doesn’t recognize him at first, mistaking him for a gardener. It’s only when he says her name--“Mary!”--that she suddenly realizes who he is. So this story at the end of the Gospel is almost a dramatization of the theology in our passage. Jesus calls Mary by her name, and she recognizes his voice, and she is ready to follow. And the first step in this following is to announce to others that she has seen the risen Lord.

. A voice has this special quality. It expresses the essential character of a person, and it establishes a connection between people. Of course, not all voices are equal. Some people have rasping, grating voices, voices that affect us like a fingernail scraping on a blackboard. (Do people understand that image anymore? Does anyway scrape a fingernail on a blackboard these days? Aren’t they all whiteboards now, which you mark with a marker?) Anyway, some voices are raspy. And some voices are just funny, they just make you want to laugh. Stanley Hauerwas’s voice, for example.

But then there are these other voices. Voices that do something deep to you. I think Garrison Keillor has one of those voices, and the Dutch soprano Elly Ameling. Elly Ameling’s voice has a kind of healing quality; in fact, I know someone who gave birth listening to her singing, and she said it really helped. She went backstage and told Ms. Ameling about it years later, and she said that Ms. Ameling was delighted with her story.

Before we moved here, when we lived in Boston, I was in a church choir that contained a number of really good singers. Some of them were professionals or semi-professionals. But this was Boston, so most of the singers weren’t just singers. They were all witty, and sophisticated, and bright, and some of them were making lots of money, and/or doing fascinating and significant things. And in such a situation, where you have a lot of talented, smart, successful people coming together, there can be a kind of snobbery that emerges, and a certain spirit of competition and judgment. You are just operating at such a high level that you don’t have much patience for people who are not at that level. And this spirit can extend beyond matters of music. If somebody gave a stupid sermon--it did happen sometimes at that church--the guy sitting next to me in the choir would say cutting things about the preacher under his breath, and I would respond in kind. We had lots of fun in that choir! (I’m sure none of this ever goes on in our choir.)

But I remember one rehearsal, at the end of which we all started to pack up our bags and go home. But one of our number, a soprano named Jessica, stayed to practice an upcoming solo with the choirmaster. She was trying to make it as a singer, and she had a beautiful voice (she wasn’t bad-looking either). And she began to sing this solo--I wish I could remember what it was--and we all just stopped in our tracks. The cynicism, the jadedness, just lifted away from us. Her voice was doing some strange and wonderful work in us. It was like we were children again, or in love for the first time.We were where we wanted to be, and we just didn’t want to leave, and it didn’t matter who was smarter or who was making more money or who had a job as a pundit on National Public Radio. In the fire of that lovely voice all our self-doubt and self-assertion melted away for a moment and we just stopped, overwhelmed by a power and beauty that shoved us against the wall and wouldn’t let us go, a power even sharper and more penetrating than our cynicism. I wish I could always live in that moment. Maybe someday we will all be able to live in a moment like that.

In our passage from John, Jesus is the good shepherd, who knows the sheep and calls them by name, and he contrasts himself with other would-be shepherds who try to get the sheep to follow them. Jesus describes the characteristics of these would-be shepherds, these so-called leaders, who actually are thieves and brigands. They come only to steal, and kill, and destroy. And aren’t shepherds like that still out there today? They entice us with all sorts of promises, but if we listen carefully we can hear that their bottom line is destruction. They need to do somebody else in, in order that they may be exalted. For them, life is a zero-sum game. You can only gain at someone else’s expense. You have to destroy the competition before they destroy you. You can’t search for common ground; rather, you have to discover the other guy’s weaknesses, so that you can exploit them and get rid of the threat that the other guy represents.

Jesus, by contrast, does not treat life as a zero-sum game. In fact, he is so far from doing so that he says that the way to find life is voluntarily to die on behalf of others. In our passage, he expresses this strange truth by speaking of himself as the Good Shepherd who gives up his own life on behalf of the sheep.

I’d never thought about this before I was preparing for this sermon, but isn’t that a strange image? Would a shepherd really give his own life to defend his flock from a wolf? Well, maybe--but then, wouldn’t he kind of be a stupid shepherd? What sane shepherd would care as much about the lives of the sheep as he did about his own life? After all, they’re just sheep, and he’s a human being! He’s supposed to die for the sheep? And what about Mrs. Shepherd, and Baby Shepherd? Are they going to be happy that the old man bit the dust nobly defending little Lamb Chop from the wolf?

No, it seems to me that this is one of those deliberately strange and shocking images in the New Testament--like comparing God to a dishonest foreman, or a housebreaker, or a negligent vineyard-owner who lets his son be killed by wicked tenant-farmers. In the present case, perhaps, the image of the foolishly brave shepherd is meant to convey the incomprehensible, contrary-to-reason extravagence of God’s love for us. He’s as different from us as the shepherd is different from the sheep he guards and nourishes. Yet, despite that infinite difference, he strangely chooses to sacrifice himself on our behalf. It’s kind of the reverse of all those scary science-fiction movies in which infinitely advanced beings come down to earth, beings who are as far above us as we are above the ants. Because they are so far advanced, they think no more about snuffing out the life of a human being than we think about squashing an ant. Our passage is the reverse of that. It’s about an infinitely superior being who gives his life for the ants.

There was a Twilight Zone episode along these lines, and it still haunts me 45 years after I saw it. It was called “To Serve Man,” and it had to do with this incredibly intelligent race of aliens who landed and seemed to be bringing the greatest of benefits to the human race. They made the earth bloom, they ended hunger and warfare. People began traveling to their planet, and wrote back ecstatic postcards about how wonderful things were there. Things were so wonderful that no one who went there ever came back. But the aliens had left a book on earth, which they said enshrined their plans for the human race. After months of research, some crack human linguists finally managed to translate its title, which seemed to be comforting and to confirm the benevolence of the aliens. The title was: To Serve Man. In the end, however, To Serve Man turned out to be...a cookbook! Aargh!

The thief comes to steal, and kill, and destroy. The good shepherd comes to lay down his life for the sheep, an incomprehensible act of love that no one can explain and no one can deserve. But in our rare moments of grace, when a voice comes to us as if from elsewhere and strips our lives bare, we realize that this act of self-sacrificial love has shown us the true shape of the universe and has prophesied our own fate. Isn’t this what the baptism we are about to celebrate is all about? The voice that calls us is one that we cannot understand, but it shows us the shape of our future and the secret fate of the whole world. And when we hear that strange and yet deeply familiar voice, there is no alternative but to follow it, kicking and screaming, into the kingdom of God. Amen.

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