Article
- Date:
- Sunday 8th May 2022
Year C, The Forth Sunday of Easter - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
- Service:
- Parish Eucharist
- Readings:
- Acts 9.36-43
John 10.22-30
Alleluia! Christ is Risen!
One of the benefits of reading books is that it extends our sphere of imagination and speculation outside our own direct experience. We learn about lands, habits of mind, ways of cooking and looking, different from those we are used to; we learn that ideas have histories; and if we are perceptive these new ways of seeing can influence the way we see ourselves, jolting our habits of mind.
Such a habit of mind has developed in Christian tradition in respect of sheep in spite of their differing status in Scripture. We think of that passage in Handel's Messiah "... we like sheep have gone astray" and immediately down-grade ourselves to rather helpless, vulnerable beings, totally dependent spiritually in the way that ewes are dependent on their shepherds for giving birth. We think of the terrible catastrophe of bad shepherds reported in Jeremiah 23 and Ezekiel 34 and we have never quite got ourselves to understand the importance of shepherds as the first recipients, outside the Holy Family, of the good news. And of course we think of the "Good Shepherd" earlier in Chapter 10 of John from which our reading is taken; and, indeed, our Reading mentions that the characteristic of the sheep of Jesus is that they recognise his voice.
But the important question for us is raised at the end of Saint John's Gospel which we heard last week when Jesus tells Saint Peter to feed his lambs and his sheep. And the question is whether we are the successors of Peter who do the feeding or whether we are the sheep that get fed. As always in the Gospels, in such parables as the Good Samaritan and the traveller, the Father and the Prodigal Son, the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, we have to ask ourselves which we are; and, more often than not, we tend to choose to be the weaker party, the dependent person, to be respectively the traveller, the son, and the tax collector which is all very well but that rather gets us off the hook when we are called upon to bear the responsibility of the Samaritan, the Father and the Pharisee.
So, it seems to me, the same kind of analysis applies to the sheep of Jesus. Because of what Jesus said to Peter, I believe that as his Easter people, as his successors and followers, we, the community of Christ, are shepherds in the world who are called upon to care for the countless sheep who are wretched and lost without a shepherd.
The idea of our mission is horribly complicated and indeed scarred by our Christian tradition of clerical hierarchy. Every time I read about the "Royal Priesthood" in the First Letter of Peter I can't help grimacing, wondering how long it will be before the expression has real meaning. And I suspect that the unhappy answer is that it will not be Scripture, theology, ecclesiology or even ethics that forces the change but pure economics. But, again, as shepherds we can't hang back and hope that somebody else will fix the problem
Setting aside, then, these legitimate internal concerns, these responsibilities we have to face within our own Church structure, this is really a time for worrying about those countless sheep without a shepherd; for I firmly believe that we are part of Peter's Royal Priesthood which confers upon us immense responsibility. We simply can't go round identifying ourselves as helpless, we can't keep telling ourselves that doubt is the obverse on the coin of faith; if we think that then we'll convince nobody. There is a lot wrong with this age, more than I can encompass in a sermon, but one thing that can be said for it is that it recognises authenticity when it sees it and, conversely, it recognises superficiality. We will convince nobody if we say that what we want people to believe in is a God that we don't, well, quite believe in ourselves. As I wrote in the Newsletter last week, I don't know how electricity works but I know what happens when I switch the light on; and I don't know how aeroplanes get off the ground but every time I climb into one, I have absolute faith that it will. We have become too intellectual, too abstract, too worried about exactly how things work; we've become religious mechanics instead of being religious dancers; we've become analysts instead of celebrators; we've become theorists of salvation mechanics, anxious to know the meaning of what we rather oddly call Jesus' "work on the cross" instead of falling in love with him at the Resurrection, for surely the nearest experience we have to the apostles' experience of Resurrection is falling in love, when everything changes, when things go out of focus or refuse to take on a constant shape, when we are almost ill with anxiety, when we want to do everything right but don't know how, when we are frightened almost to death of doing something that will alienate the beloved.
That's why the annual celebration of Easter is so important; it reminds us when the Disciples were almost sick with love, it reminds us that as Easter People we may have evolved from falling in love to being in love; but to love is to share. How can we love Jesus so much and yet want to keep this a secret?
I say all this at a time when we are considering how we build on our recent achievements, poised to be more open in our love of Jesus to the wider community. This is no time to be reticent but equally we need to be careful to bear in mind the model we have been given. What people, what sheep, want as they roam about aimlessly is to be fed in all kinds of ways, not to be chided, not to be judged, not even to be preached at, but simply to be fed, to be smiled upon, to be encouraged, to be regarded with respect and to be treated lovingly; and, for the rest, as our Gospel reading says, these sheep will recognise the voice of Jesus, the voice of Jesus in us.
Alleluia! Christ is risen