Mother's Day Sunday

Theo likes to read our lessons in the King James version. And I like when Theo reads our lessons in the King James version, but translation is tricky. And if you were listening to this translation, listening to this reading, we have this conflict, this argument, this encounter, this conflictual encounter between Jesus and the Jews. And indeed, we as Christians have to take seriously the long-standing use of the Gospel of John to justify Christian antisemitism. This text, as a ground for violence against Jews, reading conflict between Jesus and the quote-unquote Jews, the Gospel of John has been used to justify that, and we Christians need to take that seriously, but taking that seriously means taking this conflict seriously, seeing, reading what's going on. And so I want to do that for a minute as a way of leading into talking about shepherds and shepherd love.
So, the Gospel of John is built around these Jewish festivals, and then there's a Jewish festival, and then Jesus talks about himself, and a Jewish festival, and Jesus talks about himself. It's structured around, there's a holiday, and then Jesus says this thing. So, early in the Gospel, in chapter six, it's the Feast of Passover, and then Jesus gives a lengthy discourse about how He's the bread of life. And then later on in John, it's the Festival of Booths, or Sukkot, and Jesus talks about he's the light of the world. And now in chapter 10, it's the Festival of the Dedication, Hanukkah. It's Hanukkah, and Jesus talks about himself as a shepherd.

So, there's this pattern in John where there's a festival, and then Jesus says, "This is who I am." A festival, and Jesus says, "This is who I am." And this time is the most political of his analogies. Light of the world, okay. Bread of life, okay. What do those things mean? "I am the good shepherd, and my father and I are one." That's saying he's the Messiah. This is what he's claiming to them in these moments, because the echo of that meaning of Messiah as shepherd, claiming identity with God in heaven, this is an outright political claim of who he is and who he is going to lead. And indeed, at the end of this chapter, at the end of this lesson, right after Theo stepped down from the lectern, they tried to kill Jesus for saying this.
So, there is this conflict. What is the conflict? All of you already know that location is everything. This conflict happens in a particular place, and this is crucial to the way that they're having this argument. It happens in the temple. It's at the Feast of the Dedication of the temple, and Jesus is in the temple. And the people he is arguing with, the people who are translation calls the Jews, are the temple priests, the leaders of the temple.

The word that we translate as “Jews” in Greek is “Judaean,” and Judaean had a couple of meanings. For people who are not Jewish, it referred to anybody who is Jewish. For people who were Jewish, it referred not only to their Judaism, but also where they were from, which is Judaea, which was the seat of power, which is where the elites were. Jesus is a Galilean. Jewish also, of course, but he's from Galilee. When Jesus is talking about the Judaeans, he's talking about those folks who run the temple, those priests. They're all Jewish, but these ones, the ones who Jesus is arguing with, are the elites. The ones who control the temple, the temple which is run by Herod the king. Herod, who is a puppet of Rome, the empire.
The word we translate clumsily but necessarily as Jews conveys so much more about status than ethnicity in the argument Jesus is having. It's not an attack against the Jews broadly. Jesus himself, of course, is Jewish. One of his closest allies in the Gospel of John is Nicodemus, a Pharisee. It's something about these priests. It's more about people like me than it is about his fellow descendants of the Israelites.

And yet, this argument generates this conflict, a violent conflict. It's a political statement, a political act. So, what are its politics? What are the politics of Jesus saying, "I am the good shepherd and my sheep know me, they recognize my voice?" When I say it's political, I want to be clear that it's not partisan. That would be to try to map the narrow definitions of our own party politics upon a deeper set and more long-standing set of values of commandments from God. When I say that there are politics to Jesus saying that he is the shepherd, I mean that there are public and social implications to what Jesus says when he claims to be the Messiah, when he claims to be the good shepherd of his sheep.
So, what might those public and social implications be? Well, one version of this would be to say that the shepherd leads his sheep through this dangerous wilderness. The world is a dangerous place, full of threat and risk. That might be what Jesus is saying. I think Jesus is saying that. And one way to respond to that would be with force, to prioritize security above all other things, because the world is dangerous. This is typically the way we structure things. Because the world is dangerous, we prioritize security. That's what international relations does. That's what immigration does. This is typical. We see this in our world.

We see this in the temple priesthood, too. The world is a dangerous place. Rome is powerful and violent. Herod is powerful and violent. So, if you are a temple priest, the wisest, safest thing to do is to put in with Herod and to put in with Rome, even if doing this is at the expense of the poor and the oppressed, even if it is at the expense of the message of the Jewish prophets. This is what they're doing. The world is dangerous. We know it's dangerous, so let's keep ourselves as safe as we can be. That's one way to think about the good shepherd analogy.

But I think Jesus is asking us to do something else. The analogy of God or Jesus as a good shepherd does remind us that the world is dangerous, but protecting us, leading us through that danger, is the shepherd's job, not the sheep’s. The sheep aren't expected to rise up and fight off the wolves. In this lesson that Theo read, the sheep only need to do one thing. The sheep have one job: it's to recognize the shepherd's voice. When he speaks, to hear him.

One of the commentators I was reading when I studied these lessons noted that this follows in the Gospel of John. At the resurrection, when Mary goes to the tomb, a stranger is standing there and she doesn't recognize him, and she asks him, "Can you tell me where they have taken this body?" She doesn't know who he is. And when he speaks, when he says her name, when he says Mary, she recognizes his voice and knows that it is Jesus. Other disciples too. In other gospels, a stranger arrives, a stranger that they don't recognize, but when the stranger speaks, they hear the voice of Jesus, and they do what sheep do when the shepherd comes. They follow.

The world is a dangerous place, we know it's a dangerous place, but the sheep have one job: to listen to the shepherd, to hear him when he speaks to us. And more than that, the gospel gives us a clue where and among whom we will hear that voice, who will speak for Jesus. It's in the voice of the stranger. This is the politics of love. This is the politics of Jesus. The politics of the good shepherd is not about prioritizing a particular vision of security over and above our values. It's not about self-preservation outweighing all the commandments of law and of God and all the law and prophets. It's about risking what seems safe. The politics of Jesus are about risking what seems safe and certain for the sake of someone we don't recognize, for someone we might find alien or offensive or strange.

And it happens again and again and again in the gospels, not just when Jesus is talking now. The Parable of the Good Samaritan, the stranger is the one. The Road to Emmaus, the stranger is the one. Philip meeting the eunuch on the road, the stranger is the one, the one who is outside, the one we don't recognize, the one who is strange to us in whatever way. This is the one who speaks to us again and again and again. And when we listen, we hear the words of Christ.

You who have been coming to this church for a while know I say this kind of thing a lot. Basically, most weeks I've preached since January. And I'm going to keep saying it, although some have said I should stop. But I've also heard, apart from the people who say I should stop speaking about this stuff generally, I've also heard some folks say, and this is multiple folks, so if you hear yourself in this comment, it's not just you, who have said, "We want to love the stranger already. You're preaching to the choir. Tell me how to love my loved one who hates the stranger. How do I love my uncle or my sister or my mother, with whom I disagree so deeply about these things I care about so much? How do I love them?" I don't know, but I think at least the beginning of an answer is in this lesson as well.

The hard thing about the gospel is there are several hard things about the gospels, but Jesus gives us a limited handbook for how to deal with these issues in the world, and Jesus doesn't tell us how to change other people's minds. He doesn't give us tips for persuasion. I wish he did, but he actually says, "I'm not going to tell you what to say. You don't get to know that beforehand." He actually says, "When you go someplace and a person disagrees with you that much, shake the dust off your feet and keep going." Jesus doesn't ask us to go and try and persuade those who cannot hear him among the people where we hear his voice.

We should love them. We must love them. He tells us we have to do that, and we do love them. That's why these estrangements and these conflicts are so hard, but he never asks us, never commands us to go and win the argument. In fact, he himself doesn't argue. When they provoke him, as they do in this lesson, he doesn't engage. He just says, "My sheep, you don't know. My sheep know." When they try to trap him and say, "Why are you healing this person? You shouldn't be healing this person," he says, "Why are we talking about healing this person instead of just healing this person?"

Jesus doesn't ask us to persuade those whom we love but who hear his words so differently than we hear him. He only asks us to do one thing: to listen and follow. It is painful to be at odds with those we love around these most basic questions of value. And I'm not trivializing, I hope I'm not trivializing that pain. I don't mean to. And I'm also not saying that we shouldn't stand up in public places as we do and say what matters, and say among whom we hear the Lord's voice. Of course we should. But when those whom we love don't hear the voice of Jesus where we hear the voice of Jesus, maybe the best response is just to follow him. Not to turn away from those we disagree with, but to turn towards, to turn our lives toward those whom we know we've been called to follow after and serve, to bear witness to their sacredness and holiness with our lives, because maybe that's just the more persuasive thing.

I can tell you, I can tell a person that something or someone is sacred all I want. I'm not sure how much a person will be convinced by that. But if I show that they are sacred, if I risk something of myself as testimony to how much they matter, maybe that will make a difference. Maybe they will hear how loudly Christ speaks in the lives we hope to serve. Maybe they won't. But we can't control what others hear. Ours is just to go where we are led.

So many in this world, so many in our nation today, in our community, are so ready to harm Jesus, where he hides in plain sight among strangers and aliens and outcasts. So many deny hearing him speak in the voice that we so clearly and loudly hear. Perhaps our best testimony, our most persuasive one, might be in not speaking at all, but rather in listening for our good shepherd's voice and then going where we have been called and doing what we have been called to do, come what may.

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