Pursued by Love
Sometimes it matters where and when Jesus gives a speech. We often hear his sayings about the Good Shepherd and see paintings of him in a pastoral setting with a sheep draped around his neck, the sheep we identify with when we sing “and on his shoulder gently laid, and home, rejoicing brought me.” But the setting of today’s reading about sheep and shepherds is the temple on the Feast of the Dedication. Early hearers of this gospel would immediately know this setting is significant.
The Feast of the Dedication of the temple actually marked the re-dedication of the temple at the end of the very bloody conflict between the Judeans and Antiochus Epiphanies of the Macedonian Royal Family that conquered Israel and ruled over it from 175BC-164BC. (This feast has come down to our world as Hannukah, the miraculous preservation of the temple light during a time of violent oppression.) Imagine that this morning’s gospel began: Jesus was walking around the Gettysburg memorial... The Civil War is about the same distance away from us in history as the bloody oppression of the Jews by Antiochus was. We would know something was up. When I talk about conflict between Empire and the Kingdom of God, I truly am talking about a constant tension throughout history, with many pointers along the way to specific moments, such as the Feast of the Dedication pointing to the conflict between the Jews and the Macedonians. There are some who say our own period in history feels like the worst of times. Others are hopeful and thing we live in a wonderful time in history. Unless we are God and can see all of time at once, we cannot know that. What matters is following Jesus.
Our passage points to the distinctiveness of following Jesus as shepherd: we listen to his voice, we are known by him, we are protected by him, and we belong to him. We often focus on the shepherd part of that phrase, but I think scripture points us to the good part. Throughout scripture, every human ruler who is likened to a shepherd has been likened to a bad shepherd.
The best, and perhaps most familiar description of the good shepherd is from Psalm 23. We hear Psalm 23 every year on this fourth Sunday of Easter, and we also hear it at funerals more often than not. Next to the Lord’s Prayer, it may be one of the most often memorized pieces of scripture. We say it nearly every week at Hope & Bread church in the park. For us it is always a psalm of comfort, a psalm of God’s abundance, a psalm of God’s love. It is a different way of talking about these things than Jesus chooses in today’s gospel verses, but it is the same God, the same love.
The Lord is our shepherd, our leader, our guide, and our provider. The Lord sets a table of abundance and provision. Enemies are there as well; “in the presence of my enemies” could be read in several different ways. I like to think it means that all are at the table; God safeguards us even in our differences.
People who heard Psalm 23 in the early history of the church would have heard it not as a pastoral psalm but as a political one. This shepherd, not that one. A shepherd who reigns over the Kingdom of God, not a ruler of Empire. Who reigns over the Empire is irrelevant except insofar as God calls us to support or protect anyone made vulnerable by that reign. Our citizenship is the Kingdom of God and our shepherd does not change.
Goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, prays the psalmist. The word that is translated “Follow” from the Hebrew is more accurately pursue. Goodness and mercy shall pursue me all the days of my life. The psalm turns that language of hostility and warfare on its head. Our God pursues us with goodness and mercy. Mercy is the translation of the Hebrew word hesed, which means God’s unfailing, steadfast love. It also can mean God’s justice, God’s righteousness. We can all go astray like sheep, and God will pursue us with unfailing love and with justice.
These verses from the Book of Revelation are the literary glue that links the gospel and the psalm together:
The Lamb at the center of the throne will be the shepherd, and he will guide us to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear.
These words speak to Jesus’ own life as the lamb who was slain, the sacrifice that we remember at this altar every Sunday. They also speak to Jesus as shepherd, and finally, to springs of the water of life is an echo of the psalm. Jesus has become, as our fraction anthem proclaims, both food and shepherd to the sheep.
So, we are pursued by love and fed by love. What do we do with this? Where do we run when we are pursued by love? We come to this altar, where the sweet and sacred feast we will share strengthens us, also, to be food and shepherd to those whom we serve. We go from this altar out into the world strengthened by the knowledge that we belong to the kingdom of God, and that our king is the king of love.