The Good Shepherd (Part One and Part Two)

Greetings Friends. This past Sunday Rev Erin Babb, Chaplain at Children's Memorial Hospital, preached at communion. I preached after communion. So, the recap is divided into two parts below. Part One is Erin's. Part Two is my talk. If you make comments, I'll be sure to have a way for Erin to chime in. God Bless you.

Part One (Erin Babb) Psalm 23 and John 10:7-18
This week, let us take time to reflect on the character of Christ in the Gospel of John. As Jesus illumines his metaphoric identity as the Good Shepherd, we learn more about Jesus’ love for us. “Good,” in this context, isn’t meant to be the opposite of “bad.” The Good Shepherd is the best shepherd that you could imagine. He doesn’t simply do the job of tending to the sheep. This shepherd cares for the sheep and wants only the best for them. He watches over them and protects them, and would even lay down his life in their place to keep them from harm.
In the first half of 1988, Catholic theologian, Henri Nouwen penned a journal during one of the most dry times of his life. Later on he published these writings, in hopes that his pain and spiritual struggles might help others dealing with similar things. He titled the book “Inner Voice of Love.” As he worked through his struggles he found new insight into our relationship with God.
“God says to you, ‘I love you, I am with you, I want to see you come closer to me and experience the joy and peace of my presence. I want to give you a new heart and a new spirit. I want you to speak with my mouth, see with my eyes, hear with my ears, touch with my hands. All that is mine is yours. Just trust me and let me be your God’… Remember you are held safe. You are loved. You are protected. You are in communion with God and with those whom God has sent you. What is of God will last. It belongs to the eternal life. Choose it, and it will be yours.”
With the shepherd guiding us along the way, we can trust in the journey at hand. Jesus’ deepest desire for us is that we have life abundant (John 10:10). The shepherd watches over and guides the sheep, not only to protect them, but to feed and renew them along the way. This is not a job, but a relationship. Jesus wants to know us and to be known by us. He laid down his life for the sake of the sheep to have abundant life.
Questions for discussion:
•This is an intimate image of Christ’s interaction in our life. Is that intimate knowledge comforting or disturbing to you? Is there another image for Christ’s relationship to us that you prefer (a parable or other metaphor)?
•With the love of God supporting us, what is our responsibility to others, in light of that love? Does it change the way we interact with people we meet? Our families? People at church?

Part Two (Bob)John 21:1-10; 15-19

And now in this portion of John’s gospel we meet the resurrected Jesus doing what good shepherds do, caring for the sheep. This portion of John’s Gospel is sometimes referred to as a second-ending and impresses New Testament scholars as being carefully crafted in order to draw attention to what happens in the scene. As one such scholar puts it, the curtain falls and then comes back up again telling the reader to pay careful attention to what is coming next. It is as if John is saying, “I have one more thing for you to ponder and when you reflect on what you are about to hear with your ears and picture in your mind’s eye, you will come to understand the heart of what it is that Jesus wants his followers to know and do.”

Richard Hays, of Duke Divinity School, calls our attention to the charcoal fire in the scene. He points out that the word for this fire in the common Greek, in which John is writing, is used only one other time in the entire New Testament and that is when Peter warms his hands by the charcoal fire just as he has betrayed Jesus three times. Hays remarks: “Peter drags himself up shivering on the beach and finds there a ‘charcoal fire’.... We should imagine the camera zooming in and lingering... “charcoal fire”... the fire is a source of warmth in the chilly half-light but it also illumines what is dark. The fire evokes again the scene of denial, the scene where once Peter stood by the fire and said, I am not his disciple.... the past comes rushing back. Perhaps in the distance we hear a cock crowing.”

Note, however, that Jesus calls forth Peter’s past in the context of restoring him for the future. The past is not called out to paralyze Peter in shame but simply to enable him to be reconciled to Jesus and to his vocation as a shepherd of the sheep. Peter has returned to fishing, living his life as he did at the beginning of John’s gospel, as if he had never met Jesus before. Jesus, by referring to him as Simon, the name by which he was first known to Jesus before Jesus changed it to Peter, is an indication that Jesus recognized what was going on - Peter had moved backwards. He was no longer focused on fishing for men and women - just fishing for fish. But Peter’s move backwards is not allowed by the good shepherd of the sheep. As Rowan Williams puts it - Rowan Williams, formerly known as the Archbishop of Canterbury - now known as the guy in the funny hat who married Prince Wiliam to Catherine Middleton - “Thus the memory of failure is in this context the indispensable basis of a calling forward in hope. Peter, in being present to Jesus, becomes – painfully and nakedly – present to himself: but that restoration to him of an identity of failure is also the restoration of an identity of hope. The presence of Jesus, still faithful, still calling, inviting his followers to love him, opens out the past in grace.... On the far side of the resurrection, vocation and forgiveness occur together....”

I want to suggest to you that, in a sense, this is the crucial moment for the foundation of the early church because this is the moment with the leaders’ mission goes forward in the context of failures forgiven. Forever more Peter is to see himself in light of God’s grace, thus signaling to him and to us what should be the tone and content of our mission as we continue to preach and live the gospel in this broken world. The late Williams Sloane Coffin, who preached for years in New York City said this of the gospel:
"At issue is whether there is more mercy in God than sin in us. And according to... ... just as love is stronger than death, so forgiveness is stronger than sin. That may be the hardest thing in faith to believe."

Bothers and Sisters and friends: God knows this about you and me: that left to our own devices we will reduce our lives to living in the past; we will define our lives by our failures; left to our own frail capacity we will be stingy with God’s love and grace towards others as well. However, when we let Jesus speak to us in the way he spoke to Peter we are called from the past into the future of God’s love and we are then able to give that love to others.

In John 10, Jesus preaches about what a good shepherd does, he lays down his life for his sheep. In the crucifixion, Jesus portrays what a good shepherd does as he lays down his life for the sheep. In this scene with Peter and the other disciples, Jesus creates more good shepherds by giving them back the past as a foundation for God’s future work in the world and they are potent signs of God’s grace for all to see.

Questions for discussion:

1. What do you think it means that we are to show our love for Jesus by loving the sheep? Do you pray about and think about this aspect of being a disciple of Jesus as much as you should? Is it intimidating to you to think that this is a part of being a disciple of Jesus? If so, why? How can you deal with the intimidation factor?

2. Do you feel that you sometimes allow the past to define your present and speak into your future in toxic ways? Can you think of an occasion when you believed more deeply than you do now that there is more mercy in God than sin in you? What helped you to believe the Gospel more deeply on that occasion?