Good morning, friends. Good Shepherd Sunday.
Here is something I find striking. The earliest Christians — those hiding in the catacombs beneath Rome, meeting in secret, facing real persecution — when they painted pictures of Jesus on the walls down there, they did not paint the crucifixion. That came later. What they painted was a young man with a lamb across his shoulders. The Good Shepherd. That was the first Christian portrait of our Lord. Before the cross, the shepherd carrying the sheep home.
I think that tells us something about how those early believers heard this Gospel. They did not hear it as a nice pastoral metaphor, the way we sometimes do. They heard it as the whole story.
A word about the Greek, because it matters. When Jesus says “I am the good shepherd,” the word He uses for “good” is not the word you would expect. It is not agathos — which would mean morally good, dutiful, doing the right thing. The word He uses is kalos, which means good but also beautiful. The beautiful shepherd. The shepherd you cannot help but want to follow once you have really seen Him.
That is different, is it not? There is a kind of goodness that feels like duty — you ought to follow it, you should follow it, but you would really rather not. And then there is the goodness that draws you. The goodness so beautiful that you find yourself following before you have even decided to. That is what Jesus is claiming about Himself here. Not you should follow me. Rather, once you see me clearly, you will want to.
Peter picks this up in his First Epistle — our Epistle for today — and he says something lovely. You were as sheep going astray, but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls. Shepherd and Bishop. Same person. Same office. The Greek word for bishop is episkopos, which simply means “the one who watches over.” Peter is telling us that shepherding and overseeing are the same thing. The bishop is a shepherd first, and if he ever forgets that, he has forgotten what the office is.
I want to stay on that a moment longer, because I know it matters to you. Our own Prayer Book — the 1928 American Book of Common Prayer — carries this forward in the most striking way. When a bishop is consecrated, at the very moment the Bible is delivered into his hands, the Presiding Bishop says these words to him:
Be to the flock of Christ a shepherd, not a wolf; feed them, devour them not. Hold up the weak, heal the sick, bind up the broken, bring again the outcasts, seek the lost.
— The Form of Ordaining or Consecrating a Bishop, 1928 BCP
That is from our own Ordinal. Those are the actual words said over every bishop in the Anglican tradition at his consecration. A shepherd, not a wolf. It is a charge that presupposes the terrible possibility that a man placed in the office might become the very thing he was meant to guard against — and it holds him to account under the most solemn circumstances his Church can muster.
We have to be honest about this, because the laity have seen it. We have all seen it — in the Roman communion and in the Anglican and in the Protestant — priests and bishops who became wolves. Men who abused children placed in their care. Men who used the authority of the collar to cover their own corruption. Men who devoured the flock they were ordained to feed. That is a real grief, and it is a real scandal, and the Church has not always reckoned with it honestly. I will not pretend otherwise from this pulpit. When a shepherd becomes a wolf, it is one of the most terrible things that can happen in the visible Church, because it drives away the very sheep the Shepherd died to save.
But I also want to say this, because you deserve to hear it. The priest is charged at his ordination — and every ordained man in this tradition has had these words spoken over him:
Be a messenger, and watchman, and steward of the Lord; to teach and to premonish, to feed and provide for the Lord’s family; to seek for Christ’s sheep that are dispersed abroad, and for his children who are in the midst of this naughty world, that they may be saved through Christ for ever.
Have always therefore printed in your remembrance, how great a treasure is committed to your charge. For they are the sheep of Christ, which he bought with his death, and for whom he shed his blood.
— The Form and Manner of Ordering Priests, 1928 BCP
Printed in your remembrance. That phrase has never left me. It means the charge is supposed to be stamped on the priest’s conscience, so that he cannot go a day without thinking of it. And I can tell you, speaking for myself and for the men I know who wear this collar honestly, that this is not a pious fiction. We do hear these words. Every day. In the Morning Office, in the Evening Office, in the preparation before the altar, in the confession we make as often as the rest of you do — more often, I hope. The flock is always before us, because the Master who bought it with His blood is always before us. We fail, as all men fail. But we have not forgotten the charge, and the charge has not forgotten us.
Let me mention the deacons as well, because the threefold ministry of our Church is a single fabric, and every order has its shepherd-work. The deacon at his ordination is charged “to search for the sick, poor, and impotent people of the Parish … that they may be relieved.” Think about that verb — search. The deacon is sent out to go looking. To find the sheep that no one else has noticed, the ones at the edges of the fold, the ones whose need would otherwise pass unseen. It is the same work the Shepherd does — going out after the lost — only delegated, in a small way, to the youngest order of the clergy, so that even the newest man in holy orders begins his ministry doing what the Good Shepherd Himself does.
So when you see the failures in the wider Church — and you will see them, because a fallen world produces fallen shepherds — I ask you not to conclude that the office itself is corrupt. The office is the Shepherd’s. The men who occupy it are sinners, and some of them dreadfully so. But the charge remains what it always was, at every order of ministry: a shepherd, not a wolf; feed them, devour them not; search for the lost. And the moment any of us forgets that, the whole weight of the rite that ordained us rises up to convict us.
Now here is the part of this Gospel I want to sit with for a moment. Jesus draws a distinction between the shepherd and the hireling, and it is not the distinction you would expect. It is not that the shepherd is skilled and the hireling is incompetent. It is not that the shepherd is gentle and the hireling is rough. It is ownership. The shepherd will die for the sheep because the sheep are his. The hireling runs because they are not.
And then comes the astonishing part. How did the sheep become His own? Not because He bought them. Not because He made them, though He did. But because He laid down His life for them. Think about that for a moment. Usually you have to own something before you would die for it. Here, the dying is what makes the ownership. He owns us because He died for us. It is backwards from how the world works, and it is the whole Gospel in one sentence.
We are hearing this in Easter season, and I do not want us to miss why that matters. The Shepherd who was killed has been raised. The Shepherd we thought we had lost has been given back to us forever. That is what the Collect this morning is doing, by the way — notice it calls Jesus both a sacrifice and an example. Both. Not one or the other. A shepherd who only died would leave us without anyone to follow. A shepherd who only lived would leave us without anyone to save us. But Christ is both, and He can be both because He is risen.
So there is no hour of our lives now when He is not our Shepherd. Not in the good times. Not in the hard times. Not even at the end. St. John tells us the shepherd goes before the sheep — and Christ, having walked through death Himself, has gone ahead of us even there. Wherever we find ourselves, He has already been.
One verse I want to touch on briefly, because it gets misread sometimes. Jesus says “other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.” Some people take that to mean any fold is fine, differences do not matter, it is all the same in the end. But He actually says the opposite. One fold and one shepherd. The promise is that He is going to gather everyone who hears His voice into one flock — His own. That is His work, not ours. Our job is to listen for His voice in the tradition we have been given and to follow where it leads. The gathering in is His business.
There is a lovely observation from Sabine Baring-Gould — the Victorian country parson who wrote Onward, Christian Soldiers and knew a great deal about actual sheep from his years in rural Devon — about how sheep get lost in the first place. In the old Palestinian sheepfold, the flock was kept inside a low stone wall, and the sheep would leap over — hurdle, he calls it — when something caught their eye outside. Some tuft of sweeter-looking grass. Some tempting pasture just beyond the wall. And what Baring-Gould noticed is that this is exactly what happens to us when we break one of the commandments. We hurdle out of the fold. We see something beyond the wall that looks better than what we have been given, and over we go, and suddenly we are out in country we do not know, and it is getting dark, and the wolf is not far away.
That is how we get lost. Not usually by some dramatic rebellion. Usually by a small leap over a low wall toward something we thought we wanted more than we wanted the fold.
And here is the thing — and this is why Baring-Gould loved this image — the shepherd does not shrug and say well, they chose to jump, it is on them. The shepherd goes out after them. Into the dark. Into the rough country on the far side of the wall. To find the sheep that hurdled out and is now frightened and tangled and ashamed. That is the Gospel. We chose the forbidden pasture. He came looking anyway.
There is one thing we have to be willing to accept if we are going to hear this Gospel at all, and it is that we are sheep. Not shepherds. Sheep. Sheep do not plot their own course. They follow. They do not defend themselves. They trust. They do not find their own pasture. They are led. And honestly, I think a lot of our spiritual exhaustion comes from forgetting that and trying to be our own shepherds.
You do not have to. You were never supposed to. There is a Shepherd.
And here is what I want you to take home with you today. St. John tells us, earlier in this same passage — just a few verses before the ones we read — that the shepherd calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out. By name. Not by headcount. Not by category. By name.
Think about what that means. Jesus does not know us the way a stadium announcer knows a crowd. He does not know us the way a bureaucrat knows a file number. He knows us the way a shepherd knows each particular sheep — this one who is always wandering, that one who is skittish of water, the one who lags behind, the one who got caught in the briars last spring. Your life is not generic to Him. Your name is not interchangeable. He knows you — the specific you, with the specific story, with the specific struggles you have not told anyone, with the specific hopes you are almost afraid to name even to yourself. All of it. He knows it, and He has still laid down His life for you. Not for humanity in the abstract. For you.
And if you are out this morning past some low wall you should not have gone over — He is coming for you. He already is. That is what the Shepherd does.
That is why this Gospel is not finally about theology, though the theology matters. It is about a voice. The voice of someone who knows you by name. And the promise is that if you listen for that voice — in the prayers, in the Scriptures, in the quiet moments, in the breaking of the bread — you will hear it. You already have. That is how you got here this morning.
So hear His voice this week. He is calling you by name. And follow. That is all. Follow.