Fourth Sunday of Easter Year C

   This sermon came right after the Boston Marathon bombing. I was really struggling with how to talk about the terror of the event, and the way it was hard not to want to know more. 

Readings can be found here.       

  This week I have spent a rather startling amount of time staring at screens. I am willing to bet that some of you did too. Watching the news coverage of the Boston marathon bombing, and the subsequent hunt for the suspects has been rather consuming this week. All of this with the fire and explosion in Texas along with Congresses failure to pass sensible gun legislation has left me a little scared and feeling a little alienated. It is of course helpful during a week like this to be a person of faith in a community. Knowing we are knit together and related to one another through God’s love is important in a week like this.

            One of the things I have heard over and over again this week is a question about motive: why would they do something like this? And it of course brings to mind other inexplicable tragedies like the Newtown school shooting. And it’s sort of an issue of knowledge—we want more information that might help us to know, and to understand. But on the other hand—no amount of information is going to make any of this okay, and there is no possible explanation that will really lead us to understand. And still I have found myself reading articles about how one of the brothers was a boxer and the other a wrestler, and how they seemed neither to fit into American culture nor their parent’s Chechen heritage. I want to know even though I am aware that no amount of knowing is going to help me to comprehend why this happened. This quest for knowledge this week, the way we have been following news reports on the internet, on the radio, on twitter and through conversations with friends and strangers feels like it exists in contrast to our Gospel from John this morning. Jesus tells the people who are questioning him “I know them.”

            I wonder what it really means to be known? And what do understand about God, and our relationship with God, that God knows us? Let’s look closely together at our Gospel passage to examine what it means that Jesus knows us. First it’s important to note that we have gone back in time. The last few weeks we have been hearing about Jesus’ appearances to his disciples after the resurrection. But this passage is before all that. Jesus is in the temple, the most holy place for the people of Israel, and many of these people are still not sure about who Jesus is. In John’s Gospel, Jesus and John are very clear about who Jesus is from the very beginning. This is in contrast to the Jesus in Mark’s Gospel who often tells his followers “tell no one who I am.”  No this Jesus is clear that he is the messiah. So when these people ask Jesus who he is yet again, and ask him for a clear answer, he seems frustrated, and is not inclined to give them that clear answer they ask for. He says he has already told them, but they still don’t believe. So Jesus knows something about them too—he knows that by their asking if he is the messiah that they do not believe. We might wonder why they don’t believe. After all they seem to have seen him do miracles and works in God’s name, and they have heard him explain who he is. Jesus says they don’t believe because they don’t belong to his sheep.

            Jesus here invokes the image of a shepherd that we are familiar with in scripture. It is a loving image. When we hear shepherd we think of the one who cares so deeply for each and every one of their sheep that they are willing to leave their whole flock to go after just one of them, and we think of psalm 23: The shepherd who provides for all our wants, gives us a place to graze, a place to sleep, a place to drink fresh water. God nourishes and sustains the believer with all they need, physically, but also God nourishes the soul.

            Even though we see the shepherd as comforting, they are particularly so because of some of the dangers that surround us. In Psalm 23 it is the valley of the shadow of death. And in the Gospel there is the danger of being snatched out of the hand. There is peril to being a sheep and peril to being a shepherd, but despite the awareness of that danger, God as the shepherd in the Psalm and Jesus in the Gospel assure us that we will be okay.       

     

The dangers, for us, feel particularly close this week. But the intimacy of the shepherd’s relationship with the sheep, that hearing, knowing and following assuages some of the danger with assurance. The faith the sheep have to follow comes out of that sense of assurance—which then leads to faith. This faith the sheep have to follow is more than a guess or a bet, but it comes from a place deep inside, a perception that we are in the presence of something deep that knows us.

            The nature of the shepherd’s relationship to the sheep is one of protecting—but it is also one of listening, knowing and following. Those at the three key words that describe the sheep and shepherd relationship. We, if we are the sheep this morning, we listen to Jesus’ voice. Of course, as we think of ourselves as the sheep (which I do think is an appropriate interpretation) it makes me think a little about actual sheep. As New Yorkers we don’t encounter that many in our daily life, but luckily the internet is around to give me a bunch of information about sheep. They’re not very bright, and pretty stubborn as animals. There is a reason they need shepherds and sheep heading dogs. Sheep actually seem to be terrible at following. And perhaps even worse at knowing how to get home. Even when their home is right in front of them, they can’t see where it is and get into it. This is why the need sheep dogs to nip at their ankles to get them to go into their home. Sheep eyes are such that they can see on their sides and not in front of them, which metaphorically gives them a view of their present and their surroundings, but not of their future, and practically just seems really inconvenient.

And shepherds for us are these devoted farmer-types who seem calm, and lovely in paintings—but in Jesus’ time they were low class people who could never be ritually clean because of their constant contact with animals. So to be talking about shepherds in the Temple has particular implications because shepherds would not have been allowed in to the Temple area. So Jesus comparing himself to a shepherd while also saying that he is the Son of God is a rather radical statement and would have been a provocative statement to these Jews in the Temple who likely would have been especially sensitive to the purity rules. It is radical for Jesus to liken himself to a shepherd because of purity rules, because of the class implication and because a shepherd seems very far from a king much less a part of God. Part of what Jesus is doing by using this imagery is showing those who question his divinity just how off base they are. That is, when they ask about who Jesus is he shows them in this answer just how off base they are: he is the messiah, but the messiah does not come in the form they expect, rather the messiah is like a lowly shepherd who knows their sheep. The intimacy and involvement of the shepherd in the lives of their sheep, in assuring that they are able to find their homes communicates to Jesus’ followers and to his detractors that many of their presumptions about God are wrong.

            So then let’s look at how God know us. In part it is through sending Jesus to be with us, that we know God has an intimate knowledge of humanity. And more than that, God knows us through our prayer—through our communication with God. But God also knows us by seeking us out. The Psalm might say this best, this morning. The line “Surely your goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life” is better translated as surely your goodness and mercy shall pursue me. God is coming for us. God’s goodness is going to get us. God’s mercy will be a part of our lives. God knows us by wanting to know us. Our God is a God who reaches out towards us constantly because God wants to be with us. And we can’t help it: we hear Jesus’ voice. I know we all do because we are here together this morning, gathered as the Body of Christ in the world, bound together by sharing the Bread and the Cup. We hear Jesus’ voice when we comfort one another, and offer each other community, love and compassion. And so this week as we have confronted things that are unknowable, let us also give thanks for the way in which God knows and loves us, and give thanks for this gathered community here offering strength and support for all of us.