Fourth Sunday of Easter Sermon
By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D ’13
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, April 26, 2026)
May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us this day and always. Amen. So today is Good Shepherd Sunday. This fourth Sunday of Easter is called Good Shepherd Sunday because on this Sunday, we always read about 10 verses from the 10th chapter of the Gospel of John. And in the 10th chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus talks about being a shepherd for basically the whole chapter. So we call it Good Shepherd Sunday. We have the 23rd Psalm chanted and the prayers, remember the good shepherd. I like to call it good listening Sunday because actually throughout the 10th chapter, Jesus talks about being a shepherd and talks about his sheep, but the thing that he keeps coming back to is that his sheep listened to him.
I want to say more about both things, but first, I want to tell you a little story about listening. This happened about 10 years ago when my kids were seven, five, and three. They're about 10 years older than that now, and they're not here at school vacations, so I can talk about them. So Colette, my wife, is an incredibly patient person, far more patient than me and a very patient parent. She also is not here, so I want to make sure I don't get in trouble later. And this is at our old house, and I happened to walk into the kitchen, and there was a little breakfast nook in the kitchen, and the three kids were seated around the breakfast nook. And Colette, who was a very patient parent, these things happen when you have three children. Sometimes there's a little bit of correction required.
And Colette was out of patience a little bit. And so she was talking with some firmness to our children. She was speaking to them with some firmness. And I remember exactly what she was saying. She was saying... I walked into this, and she was saying, "You don't listen. I need you to listen. Please listen. I need you to listen." And I'm the dad walking in, so I just sort of stand behind her and nod disapprovingly, grateful that I'm not the one not listening.
And so with three kids, Cami's the oldest and like the oldest, Cami's a rule follower. And when she finds herself a follow the rules, she really internalizes it. So Colette was saying, "I need you to listen," talking to all three. "I need you to listen." And Cami, I could see, was wounded. She was like, "Oh, what am I going to do? I have to follow the rules. I have to get these two to follow the rules." She's taking responsibility. That's the way she internalizes this thing. Sam, our middle child, their relationship to rules is more of a relationship to loopholes. And when Sam is reprimanded, the great injustice is not that they did something wrong, it is that they are being reprimanded.
So Colette said, "I need you to listen. You need to listen." And Sam, I could see just the defiance in their face. "How dare you speak to me this way?" "I need you to listen," Colette is saying. Danny, our youngest, leans back, picks up a smoothie, takes a sip and says, "Hey mom, are you talking to us?" It's good listening Sunday. It's about listening. It's also a good shepherd, Good Shepherd Sunday. We have these images of Jesus as a shepherd and images of Jesus as a shepherd are actually the oldest images we have of Jesus. Centuries before Jesus was depicted on a cross, or Jesus was depicted as a king, or Jesus was depicted rising from the dead. Jesus was depicted as a shepherd in the catacombs. The oldest images we have of Jesus are of Jesus as a shepherd. And we can understand why. It's a comforting image.
The cross, however much a comfort we will take in it, that image itself is not super comforting, especially if Jesus was someone you knew. That's probably not how you want to remember him. And comfort's something we need. The 23rd Psalm, "I walk through the valley of the shadow of death," that often sounds true. It sounds true in our world. When there's war and persecution, like many of you, I woke up this morning to news of the violence, the potential or attempted political violence in Washington. Many of us are walking through a valley of the shadow of death or feel as if we are. So Jesus offers us this image of himself as a shepherd, but it's messy in the 10th chapter of the Gospel of John. Actually, he starts this passage talking about himself as the gate, and then the gatekeeper, and then also the shepherd. And then as the passage moves on, he gets even more complicated, mixing more metaphors.
But as I said, the one thing that's consistent throughout the chapter is, "My sheep hear me. My sheep recognized my voice. My sheep listen to me." So why is Jesus talking about listening? The shepherd image, the comfort of the shepherd image, I think, stands out to us, and it should because we're in an uncomfortable world, a world full of threats and discomforts. But what Jesus is saying is, "My sheep listen to me." Why is he interested in listening in this 10th chapter? So the 10th chapter of John is not just Jesus teaching. Jesus doesn't just stand up and start talking about being a shepherd and start talking about listening. This is actually the continuation of an ongoing conversation.
It sounds obvious to say that chapter 10 follows chapter nine, but what's going on in chapter nine immediately follows in chapter 10. So let me remind you what goes on in chapter nine. About six weeks ago, we had the lesson that immediately preceded this, and Alana preached on it. Jesus healed the blind man. In chapter nine, Jesus heals a blind man, but the circumstances that healing are important. This man was blind from birth, and the Pharisees asked Jesus a question. "Who sinned?" They thought a disability of this sort was a punishment. That's what their theology said. And so they asked Jesus, "So, who sinned?" He was born blind. Did he sin inside the womb, or is he being punished for his parents' sin? What's your answer, Jesus?"
And Jesus answers, "Neither. Neither sinned." And then you might remember, he rubs spit into the dirt and puts the mud on the blind man's eyes. Alana gave a wonderful sermon where she told us that the word for beggar in Greek meant 'the spat upon one' and the man's healed, and then the Pharisees get very upset, and they call the man a sinner, and they call Jesus a sinner, and they throw them out. And then Jesus says to the man he has healed, he says, "Do you believe in the Messiah?" And the man says, "Tell me, tell me who he is so that I may believe." And the Pharisees get even more upset.
Jesus makes a comment about those who have sin and they say, "We don't have sin. You're not talking about us. You can't be talking about us. We are not sinners. Who are you talking about?" And then Jesus says this very weird thing at the very end of chapter nine. Jesus says, "Because you say we see, your sin remains. If you are blind, you would have no sin." This is actually a flip on the way it starts. The Pharisees see the blind man and say, "Oh, he must be a sinner. Who sinned?" By the end of the lesson, Jesus flips it. He says, "Because you say you see, you are full of sin. If you are blind, you'd have none." And then immediately from the end of that sentence to the beginning of chapter 10, "I am the shepherd. Listen to me. They hear my voice." These are connected. All this stuff about blindness and sight in chapter nine, who sees and who sins, feeds directly into Jesus changing the terms and starting to talk about listening and hearing.
The metaphor of sight happens all throughout the Gospel of John. To see, to recognize through sight, is something that just plays an important role throughout the Gospel of John. You might remember two weeks ago after the resurrection. Thomas says, "Until I see, I'm not going to believe." And then Jesus shows up and says, "Blessed are to those who believe without seeing." Even the beginning of the Gospel of John, when Jesus is just beginning his ministry, Philip tells Nathaniel, "If you want to know who this Jesus is, come and see. You got to see it to believe it."
It's this recurring trope, this recurring image, this recurring metaphor in John, and it carries important weight, especially in the Greek language that this gospel was originally written in. Because in Greek, there's a pun on the word see. Sort of like in English to say you see means to say you understand. Someone's trying to teach me something and I say, "Oh, I see. I see." That means I understand in English, right? That's true in Greek, but even to a greater degree. The customary way to say that you understood something or someone understands something would be to say they see.
Now, who are the Pharisees? The Pharisees are the masters of understanding. They're the ones who know. They're the know-it-alls. They study this stuff. They know who God is and what God wants. The interpretation of the Pharisees in the gospels has been used to antisemitic ends by Christians, but that's not what's at stake with the Pharisees here. It's not about their ethnicity or their nation. It's about what they claim to know, what they claim to understand. Indeed, the closest analog to a Pharisee in contemporary culture today, I'll just pick a random title out of the air, would be something like a professor of Christian morals or the minister of a university church. Seriously. The folks who make their living standing up in front of people, telling them who God is and what God wants of them.
They think they understand God's plan, but because they have become so certain of what they understand, they've lost the ability to see, to be surprised by the strangeness of God's holiness, to be surprised by what they encounter. The son of God himself could walk up to them, say hello, and they might fail to recognize him because they know too much. They know what he looks like, and so they know what he doesn't look like too.
This blind beggar is not a scholar. He's not a professor. He's just ready to listen and ready to follow. Jesus says to him, "Do you believe in the Messiah?" And the man says, "Show me who he is, and I'll believe." The word believe there, it's also important, and the word believe, we tend to think about belief in this context as sharing an idea or agreeing that an idea is true. Belief actually here has more of a sense of trust. "Show me who he is. I trust you. I trust you. I don't need to understand. I trust you."
When he meets Thomas, as we heard a couple of weeks ago, Jesus says, "Blessed are those who believe without seeing." If in the Gospel of John sight means understanding and belief means trust, then what this blessing actually means is something more like, "Blessed are those who trust, even when they don't quite understand." What Jesus is actually saying is that faith is less about finding certainty when you don't have visual proof. It's more like trusting the Holy when it shows up, even if it doesn't make sense, even if it doesn't look the way you thought it would.
About a month ago in the middle of Lent, I was at a communion service in Boston. It was a lovely little service. It was for people without housing or with unstable housing, and they rewrote the communion prayer. It was a beautiful prayer. And through the service, I was reading along the prayer, and I'm a church nerd. So I was like, "Oh, look, this is interesting how they did this with the prayer. And they brought... Oh, they sourced this other thing, and this comes from that gospel passage, and this comes from this other place." And then at the fraction when the priest holds up the bread and breaks it, there's a woman down a few seats away from me, a woman, does not have housing, disabled in a few ways, and I heard her whisper under her breath with utter urgency and deep sincerity. "He's here."
It was not an assertion, it was an observation, and I wondered what she had seen while I was looking at those words on the page. More than that, I longed for what she had seen. We human beings are thinking creatures. We like to understand things, at Harvard, maybe more than anywhere else. We covet, we value understanding and learning, and I'm not bashing knowledge production here. I want to be clear. I am not counseling ignorance. This university, this place of deep learning and knowledge does incredible and groundbreaking work and may that groundbreaking and lifesaving work that's been going for 400 years, may it go for 400 years and more.
Christian life demands prudence and wisdom, and that means Christian life demands learning and understanding. But Christian life and Christian discipleship also demands trust, maybe especially when things don't make sense, especially when we don't understand, especially when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Because we who are Christians, especially know-it-all Christians, we have to wrestle with the basic fact that much of what we are told by Jesus makes little to no sense at all. And I don't mean doctrine, I don't mean the Trinity or that other stuff, that's added later by scholars. I mean the really hard stuff. I mean the well-nigh impossible stuff. Those commandments. Love your enemy. Bless those that curse you. Forgive and forgive and forgive. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Visit the prisoner. Sell everything you own. Give it to the poor. Get up and walk. Put down your sword. Take up your cross. Follow me. At first glance and in most contexts, all of those things seem nonsensical. Maybe they are. But what if we listened? What if we believed Jesus was talking to us? We might be surprised what we see.