Grace Presbyterian Church
April 26, 2015, Easter 4B
Psalm 23; John 10:11-18; Acts 4:5-12
A Time For Sheep and a Time For Goats
It’s beautiful
stuff, to be sure.
If John 3:16 is
the most memorized and most immediately familiar individual verse in the whole
Bible, I’d guess that Psalm 23 is the most immediately familiar longer passage.
It’s almost impossible not to know if you’ve spent even a small part of your life
in the church. You can go in your average “Christian” bookstore and be
bombarded with books about this one psalm. If you were to thumb through your
hymnal you’d notice that the hymn we sang a few minutes ago is far from the
only version of this psalm in the hymnal; in fact there are six different
versions, total, and they are hardly exhaustive of the number of settings of
this psalm that have been made. I’ll bet that a lot of you had trouble with the
responsive reading earlier in the service, not because the psalm wasn’t
familiar enough, but because it was too familiar – it was hard not to slip into
the old King James Version of the psalm, with all the “thy”s and “thou”s,
wasn’t it?
Just as the
lectionary for the second Sunday of Easter always points us towards the story
of Thomas, this fourth Sunday of Easter always features Psalm 23, and always
pairs it with some portion of the tenth chapter of John’s gospel; this year, as
you have heard, the passage that begins with Jesus’s “I am the good shepherd”
declaration is featured. So sometimes this Sunday gets called “Shepherd
Sunday,” and sermons and songs about the shepherd-ness of Jesus are preached.
This is of course highly appropriate; the care Jesus shows to his “flock” –
comfort in time of fear, laying down his life for his sheep – are the stuff of
faith, and should be preached and taught.
But, as is almost
always true with these extremely familiar verses or passages of scripture, the
scripture – or more accurately, our treatment of that scripture – can become a
problem.
In this case, we
get caught reading these passages about Jesus,
full of attributes of Jesus, as if they are somehow about us. John’s passage really doesn’t address us at all. There is some
contrast with the “hired hand,” one who is not the true shepherd and does not
know the sheep, who cuts and runs when the wolves show up. Aside from a brief “I know my own and my own know me,”
there really isn’t much in this passage about us, the presumed sheep under the
care of the shepherd.
Psalm 23 is not
quite as focused, but even there the way we respond to the shepherd is framed
in response to the shepherd’s care for us. We fear no evil because the shepherd
is with us. We will dwell in the house of the Lord forever because the Lord is
our shepherd. What the psalmist sings is the goodness of the shepherd.
Where we get
confused is in the unspoken, yet no less powerful, assumption that if our Lord
is the shepherd, then we’re supposed to be sheep. Other psalms are complicit
here; Psalm 100:3 goes there explicitly, saying “we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture,” and other verses
from other psalms make similar claims.
Christians have naturally taken such a leap of logic and run with it.
How many of you
know, for example, the children’s song called “I Just Wanna Be a Sheep”? That’s
the title, for real. Anybody? [sing] “I
just wanna be a sheep….I just wanna be a sheep…” And if you really want to
do it right, you “baa” like a sheep between those phrases: “I just wanna be a sheep (baa baa-baaaaaa
baa!) I just wanna be a sheep (baa baa-baaaaa baa!)…”
Our two scriptures
for today, though, don’t particularly direct us to go there. Even that passage
from Psalm 100 is pretty clearly an isolated reference, not even part of an
extended metaphor like Psalm 23 or John 10. Our first warning, you might say, is not to read into
scripture what isn’t actually there.
This is probably a
good idea in this case, because sheep are not really very good role
models. I don’t know how many of
you, if any, have much background with livestock. I certainly don’t, but you
don’t have to be an expert to know that sheep aren’t something you want to
emulate. Perhaps the best way to
say it is that sheep are very problematic animals. They aren’t necessarily
stupid – for one thing, they’re actually incredibly good at recognizing and
distinguishing faces – but they are possessed of so strong a herd instinct that
whatever capacity for judgment they have is overwhelmed.
They go astray.
Remember the parable about the man with a hundred sheep, and one of them gets
lost, and the man leaves the ninety-nine to find the one? Well, the man would
be lucky if only one got lost. All it takes is a good-looking clump of grass
ready for munching, and if you aren’t keeping the herd together well it’s gone.
On the other hand,
if not distracted by all that grass, a sheep will follow whatever’s in front of
it, no matter what, even if it leads it right off a cliff.
Sheep literally
have to be made to lie down for their own good. As long as the grass is
available they’ll keep munching away even when the weight of all that grass
threatens to hurt them.
They are largely
helpless against any kind of predator. No real defenses.
They are largely helpless
if they get into water, particularly running water. That wool picks up a lot of
water, and sheep can’t swim. If that sheep isn’t rescued it will drown.
When you get right
down to it, it seems like the reason that the shepherd metaphor works so well
is that we humans are a little too much like sheep for our own good. We go
astray—boy, do we go astray. We’re not above excessive physical indulgence. And
we are prone to follow bad leaders, right off a metaphorical cliff sometimes.
Being sheep is not an aspiration; it’s the problem with us, one it takes a Good
Shepherd to solve.
Now all of that is
one potential problem with being careless with such popular passages as these.
Here’s another; if you spend much time at all in the Bible, you end up running
into a lot of examples in which Christ’s followers, when at their best, are
anything but sheep-like.
Our passage from
Acts today is a pretty good example of this. You might remember from last
week’s scripture that Peter and John had drawn a crowd after healing a man who
had been paralyzed from birth, and that Peter had launched into a restatement
of his Pentecost sermon. This was happening in one of the porticoes of the
Temple, and it did not escape the notice of the Temple authorities. The authorities showed up and actually
had the two arrested and held overnight! The next day the two were brought
before the council, with all the big names present – not just the current high
priest, but the whole high priestly family – and interrogated as to how this
healing had happened: “By what power or
by what name did you do this?”
Peter and John
stick to their story – this man was healed in the name of Jesus, whom these
same Temple authorities had induced the Romans to crucify. No backing down.
Not very sheeplike,
is it?
Not only is Peter
preaching the very same sermon that had gotten him and John arrested, he’s
doubling down; not only was the man healed in the name of Jesus (verse 9),
there is no other name besides the name of Jesus by which such healing can
happen (verse 12). Peter, “filled with
the Holy Spirit,” is being bold and headstrong in the face of the very
authorities of his religion. The religious authorities tried to intimidate
Peter into backing down, but Peter and John were having none of it.
Not very sheeplike
at all. If anything, Peter and John are acting a lot more like goats than sheep
here. Where sheep are regarded as docile and easily led about, goats are
anything but. Headstrong, rebellious, difficult…that’s a goat for you.
Are they following
Christ in obedience to the Holy Spirit? You bet. But doing so in this case is
anything but sheeplike behavior.
Biblical scholar
Walter Wink makes this point;
Christians have
been instilled with a sheepish docility that has played into the hands of the
Powers for centuries. Obedience has been made the highest Christian virtue,
obedience that was to be paid to Christ's representatives on earth, the rulers
and the clergy. As a result, Christians have colluded in their own injury. They
have accepted without resistance totalitarian rulers. They have been submissive
in the face of tyrannous hierarchies in church and state, corporations and
schools. Women have submitted to battering, economic exploitation and wage
inequality. Men have been led off to war like sheep, flocking to their doom
without resistance, as if to do so were the height of glory.
Sheep. Bah![i]
Wink goes on to
observe that not only were Peter and John being anything but sheeplike in their
behavior, but that this behavior was actually pretty characteristic of both
Jesus and those who had been his followers. Verse 13 adds the observation that
the Temple authorities saw the two as “uneducated
and ordinary” men – in fact, the Greek word here translated “ordinary” is
the word from which we get our modern insult “idiot” – and yet were being
extremely bold before people of whom they were supposed to be afraid. And that,
they had already seen, was characteristic of these followers of this crucified
Jesus.
They weren’t
living fearfully – these disciples were a long way from the people who had been
hiding back on the day of the Resurrection. They weren’t being intimidated.
They were speaking boldly, proclaiming the name of this crucified Jesus. They
weren’t sheep. They knew their scripture, and didn’t let the authorities
intimidate them into accepting their “authoritative” interpretation.
And remember: they
were showing this boldness, this “goat-like” stubbornness, to their own
co-religionists. We Presbyterians can be a little bit intimidated sometimes in
the face of a larger church that has some of its authorities who are really
highly willing to tell the word that they are the only ones who Really Know
Their Scripture. We have it, and we’re
going to tell you how you have to read it. We’re going to tell you what you
have to believe about it. Listen, folks: I am really, truly NOT INTERESTED
in you “believing in the Bible.” I’m really not. I’d much rather you grab your
Bible and read it. Read it whole, and when those authorities start to sell you
some soap about what this verse says, you be ready to throw a whole bunch of
other scripture at them.
Boldness, not sheeplike
docility. Following the prodding of the Spirit, not the orders of the
authorities. Being faithful to the life and teaching of Jesus, no matter how
much others might distort his witness.
When it’s time to call out whoever – be it the world at large or our
fellow Christians, when it’s time to be led by the Spirit, let us never be
anything less than bold. But let us know that we are being led by the Spirit.
For the ability to
be a goat instead of a sheep when the Spirit calls, Thanks be to God. Amen.
Hymns (PH 90): “I Greet Thee, Who My Sure Redeemer Art”
(457); “My Shepherd Will Supply My Need” (192); “Great Is Thy Faithfulness”
(276)
[i] Walter Wink,
“Those obstreperous idiots: Acts 4:5-12,” Christian
Century (April 13, 1994), 381
Credit: bradwhitt.com
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