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	The Good Shepherd

	Rev.  Edmund Robinson 
	Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield 
	Palm Sunday, April 16, 2000

Palm Sunday is traditionally the time to commemorate the event
attested in three of the four canonical Gospels, when Jesus rode into
Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, while the crowds who had come into
Jerusalem to celebrate Passover lined up on both sides of the street
and gave him the ancient equivalent of a ticker-tape parade, waving
palm branches.  This was the high point of Jesus' public ministry as
the Gospels tell it; he was the darling of the crowds then.  In John's
telling, he had just raised Lazarus from the dead, so it's easy to see
how he would be something of a hero.  Yet within a week he would be
betrayed, arrested, tried, convicted, and executed.  Quite a trip down
in fortune.

This morning I want to focus on another aspect of Jesus, which I think
represents his high point in the later Universalist tradition as
exemplified by the only image of Jesus to be displayed in this church,
the stained-glass window behind me depicting Jesus as the Good
Shepherd.  I want to show how the idea of the Good Shepherd proceeds
from core values of Universalism, and is still very close to the heart
of our movement as expressed in our first principle, the respect for
the inherent worth and dignity of the individual person, whether or
not we want to keep Jesus in the picture today.  I don't think I'm
going to place the same interpretation on this window as my Methodist
predecessor did in 1940, but maybe I'll give us some contemporary
insight on how we can look at it today.

First, though, a little context.  The ancient near east, from which
both Hebrew Bible and the New Testament originate, was a mixed
agricultural and pastoral society.  In evolutionary perspective, all
creatures have to figure out how to eat or they quickly become
extinct.  Where human society subsisted in the hunter-gatherer phase,
humans got the plants and animals they consumed for food about the
same way that other animals did, by finding them in the wild and
killing them.  The first step away from hunter-gatherers was the
pastoral society, when humans first started domesticating animals to
use for food, clothing and other needs.  A pastoral society does not
need a permanent relationship with a particular piece of land, but is
quite content with a nomadic existence.  In human economic
organization, the step from hunter/gatherer to pastoral is not nearly
as large as the next step, from pastoral to agricultural.  When humans
begin cultivating crops, they have to have different relations to the
land and this implies a very different social organization, one which
can give rise to hierarchies.  I have spoken before about the tensions
between pastoralists and farmers, which are mythologized in Genesis in
the story of Cain and Abel, sons of Adam and Eve.  Cain was a farmer
and Abel was a herdsman.  Both brought to God the first products of
their labor, but Abel's offering of the fat of his lambs was more
acceptable to God than Cain's offering of the first fruits of his
land.  So Cain becomes jealous and kills Abel.  The story goes on to
tell about how God asks Cain where Abel is, and Abel replies with the
question that echoes down through the ages:  how should I know, am I
my brother's keeper?  This myth reflects profound tensions between
pastoral and agricultural ways of life in the ancient near east.

Now when I look at a story about Jesus or attributed to Jesus, I try
to look at what the context was in which the writer of the story is
writing.  So when we look at the image of the Good Shepherd in the New
Testament, we read it against the backdrop of two famous passages from
the Hebrew Bible that would have been familiar to the readers of
Matthew, and to Jesus' original audience.  One is the 23rd Psalm, of
which we heard two choral settings today.

Next to the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm is probably the
most-memorized passage in the Bible.  In the two rotations I have done
as a hospital chaplain, I have found that this passage is the one that
people ask for when they are in need of comfort.  If you are gathered
around the bedside of a dying patient with the family present, and you
start the 23rd Psalm, most of the people in the room will join in from
memory, regardless of their present religious affiliation.

And it is easy to see why.  The image of the Lord as a shepherd is one
of protection and comfort.  This is really the origin of the image
behind me.  Who among us does not need this kind of comfort at some
point in our lives?  When things have broken down for us, when the
people we thought we could trust have turned against us, when we're
not sure we can find the strength to go on, don't we want someone to
guide us, to make us lie down in green pastures, to lead us beside the
still waters, to restore our souls?

The language is beautiful and poetic, in part because it is so
reassuring.  I think this language would certainly have been familiar
to the people for whom Matthew wrote.

The second passage in the Hebrew Bible that forms a context for the
shepherd story is the bit from Ezekiel we read today.  In it, the
prophet says he was told by God to prophesy against the shepherds of
Israel.  The problem with the shepherds, it seems, is that they are
selfish.  They put their own welfare ahead of those of the sheep.
God, speaking through Ezekiel, gives this indictment:

"You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter
the fatling, but you do not feed the sheep.  You have not strengthened
the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the
injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought
the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them."  [Ezek.
34:3-4]

What is going on here?  This is clearly not a critique of shepherding
practices, but a political and moral statement.  It is thought that
this part of Ezekiel was written after Jerusalem fell to the
Babylonians in 587 B.C.E.  It is part of a larger catalogue of the way
that Israel fell away from God and thus brought calamity on itself.

For our purposes, the interesting thing is that Ezekiel sets up the
idea of the Good Shepherd versus the Bad Shepherd.  The Good Shepherd
puts the welfare of the herd ahead of his own.  The Bad Shepherd lets
the herd scatter and get eaten by wolves.

Later in the passage, God says that if the shepherds of Israel won't
do their job properly, God will take over.

"For thus says the Lord God, I myself will search for my sheep, and
will seek them out...I will rescue them from all the places to which
they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness."
[Ezek.  34:11-12]

This sets up the image of God as being a better shepherd than the
human shepherds, looking after the sheep in any place they may have
scattered.

It was against the context of these passages that Jesus spoke and the
New Testament Gospel writers wrote.  Now I make the distinction
between what Jesus said and what the writers wrote very deliberately.
As I said in discussing the Gospel of Q, we don't have a tape recorder
to play back as to what Jesus said, and so we are forced to
interpolate among the various texts we are left.

When I asked my Christian colleagues at the clergy association meeting
last week about this subject, they steered me both to the Ezekiel
passage but also to the Gospel of John.  In the 10th chapter of that
Gospel, Jesus has an extended metaphor where he says that he is that
he is the gate to the sheepfold.  He also says explicitly, "I am the
Good Shepherd."

10:1 "Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold
by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit.
10:2 The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep.
10:3 The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his
voice.  He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.  10:4 When
he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep
follow him because they know his voice.  10:5 They will not follow a
stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the
voice of strangers."  10:6 Jesus used this figure of speech with them,
but they did not understand what he was saying to them.  10:7 So again
Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the
sheep.  10:8 All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the
sheep did not listen to them.  10:9 I am the gate.  Whoever enters by
me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.  10:10
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.  I came that they
may have life, and have it abundantly.  10:11 "I am the good shepherd.
The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.  10:12 The hired
hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the
wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away--and the wolf snatches
them and scatters them.  10:13 The hired hand runs away because a
hired hand does not care for the sheep.  10:14 I am the good shepherd.
I know my own and my own know me, 10:15 Just as the Father knows me
and I know the Father.  And I lay down my life for the sheep.  10:16 I
have other sheep that do not belong to this fold.  I must bring them
also, and they will listen to my voice.  So there will be one flock,
one shepherd.  10:17 For this reason the Father loves me, because I
lay down my life in order to take it up again.  10:18 No one takes it
from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.  I have power to lay it
down, and I have power to take it up again.  I have received this
command from my Father."

In this passage, the writer of John is, to my mind, clearly trying to
link Jesus to the Hebrew Bible passages we have been considering, but
he does it in a heavy-handed and supercessionist way which does not
sit well with me.  When I say supercessionist, I am referring to the
claim that the new covenant between God and humanity presented by
Christ supercedes the old covenant between God and the children of
Israel.  Now I think the supercessionist claim is a big place where
orthodox Christianity went off the teachings of Jesus, and I think
that a part of orthodox Christianity in the last few years is
beginning to recognize this.  Universalists in particular, with our
off-center cross, aren't going to be too enthusiastic about an
interpretation of Jesus which says that he is the sole path to
salvation, and these words are put in Jesus' mouth here in John.

So I go prefer to go back to the parable of the ninety-nine sheep from
Matthew which we read this morning, for it also has echoes of the
Ezekiel and of the 23rd Psalm, but does not have the supercessionist
overtones.  The passage also appears in Luke in a different setting,
but it has no parallel in Mark.  That means that it was probably part
of what?  (the answer is the Gospel of Q)

Let's look at the language:

"What do you think?  If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of
them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the
mountains and go in search of the one that is astray?"

The shepherd in this passage is not identified with Jesus or with God.
It is simply a shepherd, and finding the lost sheep is simply what a
good shepherd does.  It is presented not as a commandment from on
high, but as a thought exercise:  What doe you think?  What Jesus is
saying is, isn't this just common sense?  Wouldn't any shepherd do the
same?

Maybe this idea wasn't in the minds of those who installed the window
in 1940, but it might work for us today.  Yes, the window depicts
Jesus, but any one of us can be Jesus.  Any one of us can be the Good
Shepherd.

And I think this idea is inherent in Ezekiel, too.  God is saying you
haven't been good shepherds, and I'm going to have to step in and take
over.  But God definitely allows that the humans can be good
shepherds, if they only will.  In other words, I think Jesus in the
parable of the lost sheep is putting forth principles that are
essentially Jewish.

For that is one of the most promising ways to look at Jesus, as a
great rabbi.  We know that the Golden Rule, which is attributed to
Jesus by the gospels and by popular opinion, was actually devised by
Rabbi Hillel some eighty years previously.

But this is not only Jesus at his most Jewish, it is also Jesus at his
most Universalist as well.  For Universalism's bedrock idea is
universal salvation.  None of its sheep are lost.  No matter how far
they stray from what we may regard as correct belief, or proper
behavior, they will nevertheless be saved in the end.  That is a
powerful and a radical idea, and it is not dependent on thinking of
God or Jesus as in charge or in thinking of ourselves as sheep.

This is why the Universalists have historically been interested in
prison reform and have been adamantly opposed to the death penalty
from the earliest times.  Here, for example is Dr.  Benjamin Rush
writing in 1791:

"A belief in God's universal love to all is creatures, and that he
will finally restore all of them that are miserable to happiness, is a
polar truth.  It leads to truths upon all subjects, more especially
upon the subject of government.  It establishes the equality of
mankind - it abolishes the punishment of death for any crime - and
converts jails into houses of repentance and reformation."  [quoted in
George Hunston Williams American Universalism (Boston:  Skinner House
1976) p.59.

At the present time more than two million of our fellow human beings
are incarcerated in jails and prisons that are little more than cattle
barns.  This is almost one percent of the population, one out of every
hundred of us.  While we the ninety-nine sit back in unconcern.  Are
we being good shepherds, or are we so busy fleecing each other we
don't have the time or will to think of the ones who have gone astray?

Looking at our lives today at the end of the 20th Century or beginning
of the 21st, we can see that the parable of the lost sheep amounts to
nothing less than the First Principle of our association, by which we
covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every
human being.  We are all tempted at times to try to make exceptions in
the absoluteness of this value.  We are tempted to float theories such
as this:  when a person does so-and-so, he forfeits his right to have
me promote his inherent worth and dignity.  No, then the worth and
dignity is not inherent.  If we can strip it from him by an act of
thought or will, it is not inherent.

So this warm and fuzzy image, Jesus holding the little lamb, if it is
based on the parable of the lost sheep, sets out an ethic for us that
is anything but warm and fuzzy:  it is quite tough.  It answers the
question Cain posed to God:  yes, we are our brother's keeper.  And
our sister's as well.  We are the sheep and we are the shepherds.
When one of us in is trouble we all are in trouble.  Can we live this
standard in our lives.  Can we be responsible for each other?

Does this mean we have to abolish all prisons?  Does this mean I have
to give money to every panhandler, turn over my house to every
homeless person, accept every person into every organization in which
I have a voice regardless of suitability?  Maybe yes and maybe no - I
can't draw the lines for you, I can only point out that this is where
this image points to me.

In addition, I think the image of the good shepherd works on another
level, one that may be even less comfortable for us.  Stop and think
for a second.  We wonder about the purpose of our lives - it is one of
the most important religious questions, if not the most important.
And we don't just wonder about why we are here, we also wonder about
the purpose of almost everything else -- the flowers and the frogs and
the birds and the lions, why they are here.

But not sheep.  Sheep are different.  Sheep have a clear purpose.
That purpose is to clothe and feed human beings.  Sheep are not
directly created by humans, but they are bred and kept by humans, for
humans, as is true of all other domestic animals.

So if the 23rd Psalm and the other biblical passages and this window
behind me are making the analogy that we are sheep and God or Jesus is
the shepherd, it is saying that we indeed have a purpose, and that
purpose is to serve God.  The purpose may not be known to us, it may
be known only to God.  But there is a purpose, and it is not our
purpose, but God's.

There is something profound in this, and I think it is part of the
resonance of the image.  However, if we follow this line of analogy
just a little further, we would reach the conclusion that God is
keeping us in this world so that he can slaughter us and eat us.
That's not a very comfortable thought; it's actually the converse of
the orthodox Christian notion that Jesus is the sacrificial lamb.  In
the sacrifice, God consumes the animal which is offered up.  This
notion of Jesus as the successor to animal sacrifice finds expression
in the liturgy of the Eucharist.

Now I expect that most of us come-outers from orthodox Protestant or
Catholic backgrounds who learned about all these ideas in catechism
class are pretty grossed out by the idea of eating Jesus' body and
blood in the communion service.  The taboo against cannibalism is
pretty strong in most of us.  Even in extreme conditions such as a
shipwreck or plane crash, most of us would starve to death before
consuming human flesh.  And we would even feel queasy about eating
meat from an animal if we had known or even seen the animal before.

But from another perspective, eating an animal is a very intimate
interaction with it, perhaps the most intimate we can have.  I had a
Navajo friend in law school who told me that his religion required him
to eat meat, but always to talk to the spirit of the dead animal as he
ate.

Even if the purpose of a sheep is to be eaten, can we see ourselves as
God's sheep?  Maybe it isn't such a bad thing to be eaten in the end,
if it is God that is doing the eating.  Maybe that's all we can desire
in life:  being fed, kept safe from wolves, made to lie down in green
pastures, being led beside the still waters, having our souls
restored, and then ending up on a serving platter on God's banquet
table.  As Mary Oliver wrote,

"Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?"

To be in the end consumed by God may be the whole point of life.  And
it's all there in this window, if we can see it.

Amen.