John
10:11-18
March
31, 2013
Easter
Sunday
William G. Carter
Jesus
says, "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down
his life for the sheep. 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. The
hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I
know my own and my own know me, just
as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the
sheep. 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. For this reason the
Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. 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.’
Today I offer a different kind of Easter sermon. We have
heard about the miracle of resurrection. Mary Magdalene went to the tomb of
Jesus and found it empty. She runs to report to the disciples, and two of them
run back to check it out for themselves. They see the stone is rolled away.
Inside, the linen wrapping is folded up. They return dazzled by the mystery,
one of them believing, the other one scratching his head.
Mary Magdalene stays behind. She weeps from shock.
Looking inside once again, she sees two angels. She doesn’t seem to care that
they are angels, and murmurs, “They took away my Jesus, and I don’t know where
they took him.” Then she turned, saw the gardener standing there. Like the
angels, he wants to know why she is crying. She says, “Sir, if you took him
away, tell me, and I will take him back.”
He calls her by name: “Mary!” With that, her dark world
is flooded with light. That’s what I want to talk about briefly today. Not
merely the report of a long-ago miracle, but that moment of knowledge when we
know Jesus is alive. He was dead, past tense; now he is alive, present tense.
That is the truth of Easter: Jesus was dead, now is alive. Easter was
not something that happened long ago. It is here, it is now.
If you listen in the communion prayer, we sneak it in.
How do we state the mystery of faith? “Christ has died, Christ is risen…” The
risen Christ is the eternal Christ. He stands outside of time, but he steps
into time – our time, others’ time – he is now longer bound to the past. Welcome
to a present-tense Easter.
This is how I suggest we think about Easter – as something
here and now. Jesus Christ is alive.
Paul, the great apostle, had his eyes opened. There he
was, maybe two or three years after the death of Jesus. His name was still
Saul. He was a pious Jew, trying to snuff out that new sect of Jesus-followers.
As he stomped along to the city of Damascus, breathing threats against the
Christians, hunting them down, a bright light knocked him off his high horse.
Then the great Voice spoke, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” That was the
moment everything changed. He knew who it was, because he was known. He was
called by name.
According to the account, Christ in his resurrection glory
is not an obvious presence. He slips in an out of crowds, he comes and goes.
His own people do not recognize him – until the disguise, or the face becomes
familiar again, or especially when the Stranger shows that he knows us.
Some sixty years after the resurrection, somebody named
John wrote what he could in a book. He had no tips on how to recognize Jesus as
he comes and goes. If there are any clues, they are in Easter stories. Mary
sees him when her name is called. Others see him when he suddenly comes to
commission them to forgive in the power of his Spirit. Even Thomas, Doubting
Thomas, the one who says, “I’m not going to believe unless I put my finger in the
nail holes,” is stunned awake when Jesus appears in a locked room and says, “Here
are my hands; you want to do that thing?” He was listening offstage the whole
time. When he chooses to appear, he makes it clear that he knows you.
The church that gathered around John, the Gospel writer,
was not particularly spooked by this. The book was written around 90 AD. They
had sixty years to get used to the absence of Jesus, which really wasn’t an
absence. Christ is usually out of sight. But how do they know he is alive? They
hear his voice.
I selected the Good Shepherd text from chapter 10 to go
along the Mary Magdalene story from chapter 20. In chapter 10, John has
collected a few short speeches about sheep and the Good Shepherd. A lot of the
early Christians were Jews; they remembered Bible passages about shepherds. “The
Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He takes me to the green pastures and
the still waters.” They knew those words from the 23rd Psalm.
They also knew the words from the prophet Ezekiel. God
says, “I will search for my sheep and seek them out. I will rescue them from
all the places where they have scattered. I will gather the lost, bring back
the strayed, bind up the injured, strengthen the weak, but the fat and strong I
will destroy. I will feed all of them with justice.” Oh, that was one of God’s
great promises from Ezekiel, chapter 34. God would be the shepherd.
Do you know how the church of St. John knew that Jesus
had been raised from the dead? Because that was their experience. God provided
for them. God cared for them. God took a stand for those who were weakest and
most vulnerable. The God who was real for them in Jesus Christ was indeed the
one who was their shepherd.
I’ve been interested in the noisy racket coming out of
Rome this week. Pope Francis, still somewhat new on the job, stopped by a
detention center on Maundy Thursday. The papal custom has been to wash the feet
of twelve people just as Jesus washed the feet of his twelve disciples. But the
“twelve people” have usually been twelve men, twelve priests – and this Pope
washed the feet of twelve prisoners. Not only that, two of them were women, and
one of the women is a Muslim.
Well, maybe you heard the racket – “What’s the world
coming to? How dare the pope, who sets his own rules, decide to wash the feet
of people like that? What’s the world coming to? Do he think this God’s Kingdom
or something?” You would think the Christians would read their own Bible – the Good
Shepherd is the one who gathers and restores, who gives strength to those who
need it, and who ignores the ones who don’t need him. This is Biblical justice.
And for what it’s worth, do you think the lives of those twelve
prisoners is ever going to be the same again, after the global leader of the
Roman church got down on his knees, washed their feet, kissed their feet, and
blessed them? I’m going to guess that Easter came early for those twelve.
What impresses me about the words of John, chapter ten, is that Jesus
speaks in the present tense. “I am the Good Shepherd. I lay down my life for my
sheep. I do this because I choose to do this. I know my own, and they know me.”
It’s all in the present tense. When the words were set to parchment, it was 90 AD,
yet he spoke to those Christians, probably living around the Asian city of
Ephesus – he spoke to them as if he was right there with them. Because he was –
and he is.
The Good Shepherd lays down his life, and he takes it up again.
Death and resurrection. This is his power: the power of self-giving love, shown
in the cross; the power of resurrection, where the life of eternity brings him
back and fills us up. This is the Father’s love, he says, shown to us, told to
us. And this is the Really Big Clue that Easter is real. It’s real where love
is stronger than whatever threatens to scatter and destroy.
At 10:00 today, we dedicate the first stained glass window in this
building that has a face on it. It’s the Good Shepherd window by our corner door,
given in memory of a shepherd named Jack who served God as a pastor, husband,
and friend. When we were talking with Baut Studios, the stained glass studio in
Swoyersville, a number of details got worked into the window. You will see a
rainbow trout jumping; that’s in honor of Jack, who loved to fish. The streams
of light from the sky come down, prompting us to look toward heaven. The sheep
are not particularly bright; that’s how sheep are, you know. The eyes of Jesus
follow you around the area; that’s intentional, too, without being spooky. It
is a wonderful design which we will enjoy for years to come.
But here is the one suggestion that I made: the hands and feet of
the Good Shepherd have nail prints on them. The Good Shepherd is the Risen
Lord. He is completely alive, and he comes in the total love of God. It’s a
glimpse in colored glass that he is with us, and we are his. When we hear his
voice, we love others as he loves all of us. And Easter keeps going on.
One of our church members is not with us today. She is one of the
volunteers people from this congregation who serve monthly meals at the St.
Francis soup kitchen in Scranton. This has become an important way for people
in our church to show Christ’s love to those who have great need for that love.
Well, anyway, she got wind that the leaders at the soup kitchen were planning
to shut down today. Most of their core of volunteers wanted to spend Easter
with their families, and in their churches.
On one level, sure, it’s Easter. Big day for families and
churches. But the more she thought about it, the more it didn’t sit right with
her. She has come to know the people who eat at that shelter, to love those
people. Finally she said, “Forgive me for skipping out of worship, but I think
I need to serve them Easter dinner. Otherwise a lot of them will find a locked
door with nothing to eat. This year, I’m going to celebrate Easter by feeding
some of the people Jesus loves.”
What do you think?
I think I can hear the Risen Lord. He says, “I know my own and my
own know me.”
©
William G. Carter. All rights reserved.