Homilies for the 2nd - 4th Sundays in Easter

2nd Sunday of Easter

15 April 2007

Church of the Savior

Orange City, Iowa

John 20.19-31

“If you forgive the sins of any they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” John 20.23

Bad Dogs in the Kingdom of Heaven

Some of you will recognize the allusion in the title, which is to a tradition of our mother church, St. George’s in Le Mars: Bad Dog Sunday, the Sunday after Easter. Bad Dog Sunday got its name because one of the parishioners had an adult son, a young man not entirely enthusiastic about attending church. He said he would come only if he could bring his large, obstreperous dog, assuming that would put an end to invitations. Instead, everyone said, “Sure, bring your dog. In fact, everyone will bring their delinquent dogs, criminal cats, and other problem pets, the animals too unreliable for church on other Sundays. Everyone is welcome. This is church. It’s not just for those who are clean, quiet, and well-behaved.” The Le Martians were blessedly unconcerned about the messes that might ensue from unleashing the bad dogs on their little kingdom.

A few weeks ago I attended a diocesan meeting in Des Moines. Some clergy were describing a retreat they had recently held for young people. At one point, someone had asked the teenagers what they like about Jesus. Their answer was that what they like about Jesus is that he lets them do whatever they want. The conscientious clerics were concerned; they felt the inmates of the youth group had gotten things seriously wrong. Who knows what messes they could get themselves into if they thought God lets them do as they please! These kids were sure to run amok if not properly restrained.

These are the two incidents that came to mind as I was thinking about today’s lesson, particularly Jesus’ words about sins forgiven and sins retained. Probably, the connection came to mind by way of the parallel pre-resurrection text, Matthew 16.19, where Jesus says pretty much the same thing, but the words are not forgiven and retained, but bound and loosened, terms taken from a rabbinic juridical context. Thus my image of bad dogs literally, and wayward young people metaphorically, tied up, or let loose, by their handlers.

In John’s narrative, it’s Sunday evening. Only Mary Magdalene has seen the resurrected Jesus, though Peter and the ‘unnamed disciple’—presumably John himself—have seen the tomb he has left empty. They are frightened and confused, laying low behind locked doors. Suddenly, Jesus is there with them. He says, “Peace be with you,” shows them the nail wounds in his hands and where the spear pierced his side, and says, “Peace be with you,” a second time. He then proceeds to commission them, saying, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you,” and breathes the Holy Spirit upon them.

It’s what comes next that’s puzzling: “If you forgive the sins of any they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” Why does Jesus start talking about forgiving and refusing to forgive? It seems out of place, at least arbitrary…until we notice the 800-pound gorilla in the room, which is the matter of Jesus forgiving them. After all, these are the fair-weather friends who, after boasting about their loyalty to Jesus, their readiness to die for him, denied him, and abandoned him to humiliation and death. With the fickle crowds, the Sanhedrin, and the Roman executioners, they are complicit in his murder.

Yet before their shame and guilt in the presence of Jesus can even be mentioned, Jesus speaks his word of peace. All is forgiven, no questions asked. All is well between him and them. John says the disciples rejoiced, but this comes only after Jesus says, “Peace be with you,” and after he has shown them his wounds, that is, after he has proved he is no vengeful apparition come to haunt them for their crimes but Jesus himself, the man they knew, the friend they saw led off to be condemned and killed. It’s bad enough to see what you think is a ghost, let alone the ghost of someone you ignominiously forsook in his time of need. We can imagine their first thoughts, that moment of terrified shame before Jesus speaks peace, before he speaks the word of forgiveness, and the sudden joy washes over them.

Jesus passes over the matter of their cowardly betrayal, showing that he forgives of them, and gets right to the question of who they are going to forgive. There’s no chance that Jesus is granting them the authority to decide who is worthy of being forgiven and the right to withhold forgiveness from those who do not deserve it, and by implication giving them the power to keep humankind under their control. This is the Jesus who taught them to pray: Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And it’s the same Jesus who, when asked, “So, how often do we have to forgive one another?” \answered: “Not seven times, but seventy times seven times, that is, there’s no limit; we can’t reach a point beyond forgiveness.” I don’t think the resurrected Jesus can have forgotten all that. Instead, I think he means something like this: I have forgiven you, now you must go into the world forgiving; if you don’t, my work stops right there. If the disciples—and by extension you and I—fail to forgive someone his sins, then his sins are retained.

Why retained? Why not “not forgiven?” Because it’s not about withholding forgiveness, as though God doesn’t forgive because we won’t, but about the power of sin, judgment, condemnation and death still being—absurdly—active, even after Jesus has in his own death taken away the sins of the world. Sin and guilt dead, put to death with Jesus on the cross and left buried when he was resurrected, yet still flailing about and doing mischief, a zombie, the ridiculous and pathetic undead. Given a shadowy half life by our stubborn belief in it, our unwillingness to be forgiven, and to forgive. If we do not transmit the forgiveness the God who was in Jesus began that first Easter, we are letting people stay bound, unaware that they are freed, cut loose from the power of death, sin and judgment. “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” He’s telling them, “I was sent into the world for the forgiveness of sins. I’m sending you for the same thing.” Retain someone’s sins, and for them, it’s like I’m still in the grave. So get on with it. Go out there and preach and practice the forgiveness of sins.

So Jesus is not setting up an earthly franchise to dispense forgiveness to some and deny it to others. He commands us to forgive just as we are forgiven, that is, indiscriminately, without heed to costs or consequences. It just falls in their laps before they know what’s happening. And Jesus insists that they hand it on.

Yet, it’s a command with a sharp edge. For now that they see that, despite their failure, they are not on the outs with Jesus, and that his claim to be Israel’s messiah has been emphatically vindicated by God, they must be thinking now it’s time at last to summon those avenging legions of angels, to slay those gentile dogs, extirpate those corrupt know-it-alls in Jerusalem, to have at those who put Jesus to death, and bring on the kingdom of God. It’s time to set things right. Sweet justice. It’s time for heads to roll. Instead of this, all they get is Jesus’ command to forgive. They want revenge, but Jesus lets them know that his forgiveness of them is of a piece with their forgiveness of others. Jesus’ words bring them up short. They are forgiven, and they are commanded to forgive too. There will be no accounting. Those who need to be forgiven are enlisted in, of all things, the task of forgiving.

There’s an exquisitely beautiful film made by the Korean director Ki-duk Kim called Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring. An old Buddhist monk lives with a young boy on a hermitage floating on a lake. The boy in thoughtless play comes up with the idea of tying a stone with a piece of string to a fish, to a frog, and then to a snake. With childish cruelty he watches with delight as each tethered creature struggles to move, pulling the stone that weighs as much as it does. That night, while the boy sleeps, the monk ties a much larger stone to the boy’s leg. When he awakes, the old man sends him out to find the animals he has molested, warning him that if any of them has died, “You’ll carry a stone of guilt in your heart all your life.” The boy goes out, now pulling his own burden, and finds that his prank has killed the snake. So he does carry his stone of guilt in his heart for years, working out the consequences of his sin, his suffering slowly righting the moral balance in an exacting economy, until, at last an old man himself, he can make expiation. In the world of this story, the accounting is infinitely fine-grained and it is inexorable. Justice must be done; nothing else repairs the moral harmony of the universe. There is forgiveness, but only for those whose purity of heart has earned it.

We have to respect this. In the face of this high moral seriousness, against this ancient human wisdom, the preaching of the all-forgiving unjustly crucified God seems foolish, if not dangerous and bad. Evolution has hard-wired us to demand justice, to forgive only those who make restitution and credibly undertake to mend their ways. We should stop each Sunday morning to think about what we’re getting into if we believe. If we cast our lot with Jesus we deny the reality of that stone of guilt carried in the heart, and see only the stone rolled away from that empty grave from which forgiveness and new life spreads without limit or conditions. There’s a vast distance between a serious life dedicated to keeping the accounts balanced and one given over to the appalling forgiveness Jesus demands. We should make no mistake. What we have here is no serene heavenly decree from somewhere far above the fray, “Let’s let bygones be bygones!” but an implacable summons to get down and dirty with the work of reconciliation. It means giving up on the interior assurances of justification with which the human ego fortifies itself. It means foregoing the deep, seductive pleasure of seeing myself the innocent victim, and acknowledging the one who did me wrong as a lot like me, not some alien monster but, like me, cherished by God. It means holding the door open to a shared future I can neither imagine nor want. Forgive him? For what he did?! It seems possible only if we don’t take it seriously. This is the deconstructive grace that hurts like hell and feels like death.

That first Easter the disciples hoped they were safe behind locked doors, but Jesus breaks in and informs them that they must open the doors, let others in, and seek an unimaginable communion with those they fear most, with those for whom they have nothing but contempt. Such is the logic of the kingdom of heaven: we know ourselves as utterly loved, forgiven and accepted by God only as we love, forgive, and accept one another. William Countryman says this better than I can; he writes:

God said in Jesus, “You are forgiven.” God might have said it more simply: “You are loved, I love you.” This message is true, but it would have been ambiguous. It might have meant, “I love you because you’re good.” It might have meant, “I love the nice bits of you, but I really wish you’d clean up your act.” It might have meant, “I still love you and would like to go on loving you, but I won’t tolerate your behavior much longer.” Instead, God says something quite unambiguous: “You are forgiven.” What this means is, “I love you anyway, no matter what. I love you not because you are particularly good nor because you are particularly repentant nor because I’m trying to bribe you or threaten you into changing. I love you because I love you.” (The Good News of Jesus, p. 5)

The kids at the youth retreat were right. They liked Jesus for the right reason. All kinds of other things depend on what they do and don’t do, but not this—not God’s love for them. What was true at St. George’s on the second Sunday in Eastertide is the everlasting truth of the kingdom of heaven: the doors are open to welcome one and all, even the bad dogs.

Amen

Second Sunday in Easter

30 March 2008

Church of the Savior

Orange City, Iowa

John 20.19-31

Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe! John 20.25

Yes, But Is It True?

Theodore Nicolet, young minister and hero of Frederick Buechner’s early novel, The Final Beast, pays a pastoral call on one of his parishioners, Rooney Vail. After some pleasantries, Rooney admits that the hymns are too high for her and she’s no good at praying and that she can never remember what his sermons are about. She explains that she gets through the service by adding up the hymn numbers: “Somebody’s got to do it. And if they come out even, that’s good.” But Rooney finally confesses, “There’s just one reason, you know, why I come dragging in there every Sunday. I want to find out if the whole thing’s true. Just true. That’s all.”

I want to say, “Good for you, Rooney!” Just as I want to say, “Good for you, Thomas! You’ve got to have better reasons for believing Christ is truly risen than these crazy stories you’ve heard from Peter and the other disciples. Don’t believe it unless you’ve seen it!” I hope all of us are here, one way or another, for the same reason: to find out if it’s all true, to see and touch the risen Christ.

John’s narrative begins on Sunday evening, the day of the resurrection. Only Mary Magdalene has seen the resurrected Jesus, though Peter and the “unnamed disciple”—presumably John himself—have seen the tomb he has left empty. But whatever they saw or heard that morning, they are still confused and afraid. They are laying low behind locked doors, wondering when the “Jews,” that is, the Judean authorities who did away with Jesus, will get around to tying up loose ends and round up his disciples. Suddenly, here’s Jesus with them. He says, “Peace be with you,” shows them the nail wounds in his hands and where the spear pierced his side. He says, “Peace be with you,” a second time. He immediately commissions them: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you,” and breathes the Holy Spirit upon them.

What comes next is puzzling: “If you forgive the sins of any they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” Why is Jesus talking about forgiving and refusing to forgive? It seems to come out of left field …until we glimpse the huge but unspoken issue in the room, which is the matter of Jesus forgiving them. After all, these are the fair-weather friends who, after boasting about their loyalty to Jesus, their readiness to die for him, denied him, and abandoned him to humiliation and death. With the volatile crowds, the Sanhedrin, and the Roman executioners, they are complicit in his murder.

Yet before all this can even be mentioned, before they can think of excuses or plea for mercy, Jesus speaks his word of peace. All is forgiven, no questions asked. “Peace be with you.” All is well between him and them. John says the disciples rejoiced, but this comes only after Jesus says, “Peace be with you,” and after he has shown them his wounds, that is, after he has proved he is no vengeful apparition come to haunt them for their crimes but Jesus himself, the man they knew, the friend they let be led off to be condemned and killed. It’s bad enough to see what you think is a ghost, let alone the ghost of someone you abandoned to a nightmarish death. We can imagine their first thoughts, that moment of shame and terror before Jesus speaks peace, before he speaks the word of forgiveness, and the sudden shock of joy washes over them.

Jesus passes over their cowardly betrayal, showing that he forgives them, and goes right to the question of who they are going to forgive. We must be absolutely clear: there’s no chance that Jesus is granting them the authority to decide who is worthy of being forgiven and the right to withhold forgiveness from those who do not deserve it, and by implication giving them the power to keep humankind under their control. Instead, I think he means something like: I have forgiven you, now you must go into the world forgiving; if you don’t, my work stops right there. If the disciples—and by implication you and I—fail to forgive someone his sins, then his sins are retained.

Why retained? Why not “not forgiven?” Because it’s not about withholding forgiveness, as though God doesn’t forgive because we won’t, but about the power of sin, judgment, condemnation and death still being—absurdly—active, even after Jesus has in his own death taken away the sins of the world. Sin and guilt dead, put to death with Jesus on the cross and left buried when he was resurrected, yet still tottering around and making mischief, a zombie, the ridiculous and pathetic undead. Given a shadowy half life by our stubborn belief in it, our proud unwillingness to be forgiven, and to forgive. If we do not transmit the forgiveness the God who was in Jesus began that first Easter, we are letting people stay bound, unaware that they are freed, cut loose from the power of death, sin and judgment. “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” He’s telling them, “I was sent into the world for the forgiveness of sins. I’m sending you for the same thing.” Retain someone’s sins, and for them, it’s like I’m still in the grave. So get on with it. Go out there and preach and practice the forgiveness of sins.

Jesus breathes upon them. Now he and his disciples breath the same air; his breath, his Spirit, is now theirs. They share one life. When Jesus says forgive, he’s not just talking about foregoing vengeance, letting someone off the hook so he doesn’t get what’s coming to him. When Jesus forgives—when God forgives us—he loves, he embraces us and takes our lives into his. Only then have we seen the risen Christ.

We believe that Christ lives because we find ourselves cherished, approved and beyond all propriety and plausibility invited to share in the very life of God. The life reflected, however dimly, in the community that gathers to share this bread and this wine. Only this can finally answer the question: “But it true?”

Yes, we can sift the historical evidence, we can defend belief in the historical, bodily resurrection. In all likelihood the tomb really was empty. Very soon after his crucifixion people were boldly proclaiming Jesus’ resurrection. Something extraordinary happened. There’s no known better explanation. It is not unreasonable to believe. The evidence is—just—good enough, though not as good as we’d naturally like it to be. Consideration of these matters has its place. But at the end of the day this cannot answer Rooney Vail’s question. It cannot resolve Thomas’ doubts. It cannot transform guilt-ridden, cowering disciples into bold proclaimers of the resurrected Christ. It cannot save us. Only hearing for oneself Jesus’ “Peace be with you” can do that.

We are forgiven and called to forgive, loved and commanded to love. We are called to share the life of the God who bears in his own body the world’s wounds. Unless we are always learning, and re-learning this, all we’re doing here is adding up the hymn numbers.

You might want to say you’re not here to find out if it’s true, because you already believe it’s true. You’ve believed it for years. But it’s not like that. It’s not the kind of truth that we can nail down once and keep in a safe place, from which we can pull it out on demand. The Lord is risen! God gives us his life! Death is defeated! All is forgiven! Christ is risen indeed! In the past tense, the credibility of this knowledge decays. We know Christ lives only as we once again come to know that God loves, that God forgives, and as we again attempt, however haltingly, to do so too.

Someone once suggested that while we rightfully come to church burdened with our questions, asking whether it’s all true, it is not answers to our questions that we should expect to get. What we get instead are responses, ways for us to answer the questions God and the world pose to us:

Will we persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever we fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?

Will we proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?

Will we seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves?

Will we strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

Will we be sent as God sent Jesus?

Will we forgive as he has forgiven us?

Will we love as he has loved us?

It is no paradox but the plain truth that the only route to knowing whether it’s all true lies not, finally, in the questions we ask, but the questions we answer, as we hear God’s word of peace to us.

Amen.

Third Sunday of Easter

29 April 2001

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

John 21.1-14

Fish Naked!

There’s a town not far north of here -- some of you may know it -- where cleanliness and propriety are considered close to godliness, indeed the truth might be that, all things considered, these are held in somewhat higher esteem than godliness. Yet not everyone there upholds the standards of decorum. One of this town’s less reputable characters is a fellow who, to local consternation, brazenly displays on the rear of his car a bumper sticker: Fish Naked! Those who see this take offense, apparently oblivious to the bumper sticker’s clear allusion to today’s gospel, unheeding its admonition to follow the example of St. Peter, who found that fishing naked was the only way to await the resurrected Lord.

The story opens with the disciples at loose ends. Jesus has appeared to them twice but these encounters have been inconclusive. It is clear that Jesus, apparently humiliated and defeated by being crucified by the Romans, has been vindicated by being raised from the dead. But the days are passing and things are not coming to the expected conclusion. Jesus appears in the locked room where they are hiding out, but he does not summon them to lead an army of zealots to cleanse the Temple and cast out Jerusalem’s rich, corrupt priests. No angelic host with Jesus the Messiah at its head has swarmed down from Heaven to destroy the accursed Romans. Something miraculous has happened, but nothing is happening; the disciples must be ready to explode with anticipation, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Jesus commissions them: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” But they seem befuddled, paralyzed. Jesus breathes the Spirit upon them but it doesn’t seem to take. They have no idea what Jesus wants them to do. Surely, it can’t be that they’re to return to life as usual, can it? But what are they to do? Where is the victory of God?

Impetuous Peter can’t stand it any more. The waiting is making him crazy. He’s got to do something. “I’m going fishing.” Better a weary night out in the boat, even when there are no fish to be caught, than sitting around waiting for something to happen, waiting for the next enigmatic appearance that might – or might not – ever happen. Maybe Jesus will return with clear instructions; if not, this is the way back to the sad, old life, the life they lived before those few crowded years when they went about with Jesus, proclaiming the kingdom of God.

Then, a hundred yards out, as the day is breaking, they hear a voice from the shore.

It’s hard to imagine the disciples hearing Jesus calling from the beach without recalling something that happened on that same lakeshore a couple of years earlier. Here, where John records Jesus’ last encounter with his disciples, we hear the story that in Luke’s Gospel coincides with the first meeting of Jesus and the disciples. Early in Luke Jesus finds some fishermen washing their nets on the shore after a night of unsuccessful fishing. He tells them to go back out and put the nets down again. They do, and catch a gigantic load of fish. Peter, James and John, drop everything to become Jesus’ first disciples. (Mark and Matthew, the other synoptic gospels, leave out the story of the big catch of fish, but they do say Jesus calls these disciples as they are at work as fishermen.)

John’s gospel portrays the conclusion of the disciples’ careers as the mirror image of its beginning. Everything is the same, yet everything is changed. They go fishing and, like that night years before, come up empty. Then there he is on the shore, telling them to put the nets down again, just like the first time they saw him. This time, without question, they do and once again they pull up the nets almost bursting with fish. How could they not have had Jesus’ words from the first time ringing in their ears: “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people!” Now I think they at last begin to understand: it is with their hands – and the hands of those who will come after them -- that God will reach down into the depths, into the cold and the dark, to find and save each lost human being. They realize why Jesus enlisted them from the beginning: not for their glory or Israel’s but for the glory of God, the God who rules by serving, whose glory lies not in breaking the legions of the powerful with greater power, but by breaking bread and giving it away.

There’s another thing Jesus surely reminded them of as they came ashore and saw him cooking them breakfast. It was on the side of this lake that Jesus fed the 5000. Starting with just five barley loaves and two fish, Jesus fed that huge crowd. This was an event of great symbolic significance. Jesus came proclaiming – in word and action – the kingdom of God, announcing – and demonstrating – that at long last God was finally acting to deliver Israel from its sins, to return it from the “exile” of foreign rule, to defeat the forces of evil that oppress human beings, and establish Israel forever as a kingdom of priests that would reveal the one true God to all the people of the world. Jesus came, not like John the Baptist, predicting that this kingdom of God was coming, but showing that in his life and work it was already coming into being, right before the eyes of his disciples. The lepers healed, the blind given their sight, the lame walk, the sick made whole, sinners forgiven, the hungry fed. The eager crowd follows Jesus; it’s late; they have nothing to eat. Jesus feeds them. They are sated; there is a superabundance of the provision God supplies in Jesus. There are twelve baskets of bread left over, symbolizing the resurrection and restoration of Israel, ten of whose tribes had by then long disappeared into exile. The excited crowd, experiencing all this, is more than ready to start the revolution, to thrust Jesus into the role of king and savior. They are expecting God, as he did in the good old days, to raise up a warrior king, a Messiah to destroy Israel’s enemies. Yet Jesus does not cooperate. Here, at what seemed the great juncture of Israel’s – and the world’s – history, Jesus, John tells us, withdraws to the mountain by himself. Surely this must have been a confusing and frustrating moment for the disciples, who like the eager crowds, anticipate righteous vindication of Israel, and of those within her loyal to her God, in a stunning display of divine power.

They must be reliving all this now, as Jesus turns the breakfast fish over the little charcoal fire and hands them the bread. And perhaps the truth is breaking at last: in the end God’s rule, God’s victory, God’s kingdom, does not come by means of earthly power, however exalted. It comes by the love of God that saves oppressed and oppressor alike, that does not kill his enemies but dies for them. . It took the disciples so long to understand. Recall that as late as the night of Jesus’ arrest Peter still carries a sword, and uses it. I wonder if only now, at long last, the disciples finally understand, if they finally see that it is the way of the cross, the way of self-giving love, not the way of triumphant power, that is the way of the God who comes to us in Jesus.

What does it mean for us to be following Jesus, to be setting out onto the unknown waters in search of those who need God’s healing love and forgiveness? Not to be clothed with the respectable robes of certainty, power and righteousness but like Peter naked and vulnerable. Not to be advancing a triumphant religion that accuses the world and demands it get right with God -- or else, but a faith ready to love and proclaim God’s forgiveness in the name of the crucified Galilean? I want to conclude with an old Yiddish story. This is a version that Alan Jones relates in his book Living the Truth:

Once upon a time there was a holy rabbi who was granted a vision of the last judgment, when the human race was on trial. He found himself in a courtroom in which there was a table, and on it were the scales of justice. There were two doors, both of them open. Through one he could see the light of Paradise, through the other the darkness of Hell. The defense counsel entered the courtroom carrying only a small bundle of good deeds under his arm – it had not been a great year for good deeds. Next, the chief prosecutor came in with two assistants, each carrying an enormous sack of sins. Dropping their sacks before the scales of justice, they took a deep breath, and went back for more. “This isn’t even a tenth of it,” they said, as they dragged in more sacks. The defense counsel, whose tiny bundle of good deeds looked pathetic indeed next to the great pile of sins sitting on the floor, buried his head in his hands and sighed.

Just outside the door to Paradise someone was listening. It was Levi Yitzhak of blessed memory, the rabbi of Beritshev. When he was on earth, this rabbi had sworn that not even in death would he forget the plight of struggling humanity. When he heard the sigh of the defense counsel, he decided to slip into the courtroom. Seeing the tiny bundle of good deeds next to the huge sack of sins, Levi Yitzhak didn’t take long to size up the situation. Waiting until there was a recess, and the courtroom was empty, he began to drag the sacks of sins one at a time to the door leading to Hell. It took all his strength and a great deal of time to throw them in one by one. He was almost finished – in fact he was holding the very last sack – when the prosecutors and the defense counsel returned. Rabbi Yitzhak was caught red-handed. He did not deny what he had done. How could he? He had thrown away the sins so that the good deeds would outweigh the bad. Since the court was bound to uphold the law, the chef prosecutor demanded justice. “It is written that a thief shall be sold for his theft. Let Levi Yitzhak be sold at auction right now in this courtroom! Let’s see if anyone will bid for him.”

By now the demons from Hell and the angels from Heaven had heard all the commotion in the courtroom and they came to watch the two parties lined up beside the scales of justice. The bidding began. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob threw their good deeds onto the scales and the matriarchs added theirs. All of the righteous contributed what they could, but the dark forces were able to gather up numberless sins stored in the deep places of the earth. The scale on their side went down and down. Rabbi Yitzhak was doomed. His crime had been to throw away the sins of the world so that we could be forgiven. “I buy him!” said the chief prosecutor, and dragged him to the door leading into the great darkness.

Just then, above the court room, from the Throne of Glory itself, came a voice. “I buy him!” There was a great silence. And God spoke, “I buy him: Heaven and Earth are mine, and I give them all for Levi Yitzhak, who would have me forgive my children.”

Amen.

Fourth Sunday in Easter

7 May 2006

The Chaplaincy of St. George’s

Orange City, Iowa

John 10.11-16

The Good Shepherd

Karen and I are hiking in the Big Horn range in northern Wyoming. In the distance, there’s a noise like thunder, but the sky is blue and clear. The sound gets louder. Ominous. It’s something on the ground, getting closer and closer. The ground shakes. A galloping herd, a stampede, an animal avalanche bearing down on us. Suddenly, there they are…sheep, streaming down the side of the mountain. Hundreds and hundreds of sheep, in a hurry, marching in unison among the trees, on their own—no Basque shepherd in sight—purposeful; they seemed positively belligerent. I think they’d have trampled us if we hadn’t scrambled out of their way. It was like we had climbed into a Far Side cartoon. So much for cute fluffy lambs gamboling among the daisies. So much for sheep as mild and meek. Easily led? No way. Anyone who tried to deflect this onrushing flock from its course would have been run over. I’ve never heard this biblical talk of sheep and shepherds the same way. Sheep—at least in Wyoming—are not placid; they’re stubborn, pugnacious creatures, and getting them to do what’s for their own good must be hard, frustrating work.

Now, for the fourth Sunday in Eastertide, the Lectionary calls us back before the Resurrection, to hear Jesus, as he faces growing rejection, and approaches condemnation, describe himself as the good shepherd who dies for his sheep. Jesus speaks, not out of the blue, but in response to the Pharisees, and their reaction to his having healed a man who was born blind.

Walking down the road, Jesus sees the blind man. “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” the disciples ask. They take it for granted: someone is blind, so someone sinned. The only question is about the accounting: who is to blame? They take it for granted that God’s concern is seeing to the proper distribution of rewards and punishments, so that the righteous and the wicked, the pure and the impure, are properly sorted. But Jesus dismisses all this: “Neither,” he answers, “he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him,” and proceeds to heal him. Jesus does not, of course, invite us to envision a world in which God behind the scenes arranges things, causing someone to be born blind so that years later he would have someone to heal. Instead, he invites us to see the world as one in which whatever happens to us, and whatever we do, can be drawn into the sphere of God’s saving plans and purposes, and in that retrospective light given its meaning. It is not just Jesus’ words that are deliberately provocative. It’s the Sabbath yet, instead of simply giving the man his sight, he spits in the dirt, mixes up mud, applies it to the man’s eyes, and sends him off to wash. Everyone would have seen this man stumbling into the public bath, his eyes covered with mud. He goes, he washes, and he sees.

The newly sighted man soon winds up being questioned by the Pharisees, who are investigating the alleged healing. Blind in the ways that matter most, the Pharisees cannot see beyond the fact that Jesus worked on the Sabbath. For them, the blind man was born a sinner and outcast, a beggar on the roadside, excluded and condemned. Jesus opens his eyes, makes him whole and restores him to the people of God, but they will have none of it. After interrogating him and his parents, they drive him out. A sinner he was and a sinner he must be. Jesus acts as though God accepts everyone, good and bad alike, and demonstrates it, eating and drinking with sinners, forgiving and healing left and right. But they’re not going to let a little thing like a miraculous healing stand in the way of God’s justice. Their world makes sense only if God properly favors the righteous and punishes the Godless. They have no intention of letting this impure, lawless Jesus throw into disarray the economy of divine condemnation and control. They’ll see him crucified before they’ll have this blasphemous talk of anarchic grace, of a God who can’t tell the difference between sheep and goats.

These are the self-appointed shepherds of Israel Jesus confronts. He compares them to the hired hands who have no real concern for the flock, but run away, when the sheep are at risk, when the wolf attacks. Jesus is angry. He sees that, good and pious though they might be, they simply don’t care about this poor guy who has spent his life as a blind beggar and now can see. They act just as every religious community of every persuasion inevitably acts, securing its identity and its worthiness in God’s eyes by throwing the unworthy to the wolves, sacrificing mercy to law, love to sanctity.

Jesus describes himself as the good shepherd. The term is fraught with significance. It connotes divinely ordained kingship and messianic deliverance. In the chapter of Ezekiel from which this morning’s alternate reading is taken, God denounces Israel’s leaders as bad shepherds, and vows that he will care for his people personally, setting over them one shepherd, David. The outrageousness of Jesus’ calling himself the good shepherd, and the challenge to the Pharisees’ religious authority, would have been all too clear.

What’s clear too is that in claiming to be the good shepherd, Jesus is not proposing himself as an honest, competent religious leader, over against the corrupt and hypocritical Pharisees. Jesus is not God’s reform party candidate for leadership in Israel. We have no reason to doubt that the Pharisees were by and large honest and upright, sincerely believing they were doing God’s will in the world, working toward the kingdom where the righteous are rewarded, the wicked punished, and justice finally done. That, of course, is precisely what it takes for good people to do great evil.

Jesus is offering himself for the life of Israel and the life of the world: “other sheep who do not belong to this fold.” Offering his life on behalf of the hapless and hopeless sheep, he offers God himself. He is the good shepherd who says, “I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.” To be one of Jesus’ own is to be related to Jesus in the same way that Jesus is related to his Father. It is to be brought into the inner life of God, not because we are pure, or good, or wise, or religiously correct, but only because of the unstinting grace of God.

In his first epistle, John tells us that when Christ is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. John there looks ahead to the eschatological revealing of Christ to all. But I think John would agree that knowing Jesus crucified and resurrected is—already—to know him as he is. And that this knowledge calls us to share in the life of the shepherd who gives himself for his sheep. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from his cell the summer before he was hanged by the Nazis, wrote, “The Church is the Church only when it exists for others.” We take up the work of the resurrected Christ not when we scold, judge and condemn the world, not when we try to get it to shape up, not when we promote a new religion, a new system of accounting, one that at last draws the line between the worthy and the unworthy in the right place. We share in the life and death of the good shepherd when in act and word we proclaim the outlandish mercy, the indiscriminate grace of the crucified God.

Here, between Easter and Pentecost, after the ambiguous triumph of the empty tomb and before the coming of the Spirit in power, we rightly reflect on how vain Jesus’ claims must have sounded to the Pharisees, who knew it was only a matter of time before the Jerusalem authorities and their Roman masters would crush this Galilean troublemaker.

Sometimes the blind see; sometimes it is the work of Christ to be with them in the darkness. At times the Spirit moves and the world changes, but at times our call is to stand watch in silent, seemingly ineffectual testimony to the love of God for the lost, his presence with the hopeless. I recall a story Solzhenitsyn tells, about his trip eastward to the Gulag on a crowded prison-train:

At a quiet station called Torbeyevo…he caught sight of a small peasant woman in the usual shabby clothing…Suddenly the prisoners, who were lying on the top bunks sat up at attention: large tears were streaming from the woman’s eyes. Having made out our silhouette…she lofted a small, work-calloused hand and blessed us with the sign of the cross, again and again. Her diminutive face was wet with tears. As the train started to move again, she still went on making the sign of the cross, until she was lost to view.

Christ the Lord, who lay down his life for his sheep, is risen indeed. Because he lives, we all stand under the sign of the cross, the good and the bad, the faithful and the faithless, the obedient and the stubborn, all under the abiding care of the good shepherd.

Amen