How many people do you know who are everything you want them to be? If you could, would you make some changes in your boss or your employees? Would you change a characteristic or two of your fellow workers, some of the people here at church, the rector? While you’re at it, there may be a change or two you could make in your children or your spouse. By the way, if you happen to discuss the sermon as a family after church, and you get the question, “Honey, would you make any changes in me?” the correct answer is no! Many who knew our Lord were not quite ready to accept him as he was either!
That’s part of what was going on in today’s Gospel. The setting is Solomon’s portico in the Temple at Jerusalem during the Feast of Dedication, which is called Hanukkah today. For three years, from 167 to 164 BC, the Syrians had profaned the Temple by erecting an idol on the altar in the Temple. This abomination came to an end when Judas Maccabeus drove out the Syrians and rededicated the Temple. The Feast of Dedication, Hanukkah, was the annual celebration of the restoration of the Altar and Temple.
The scripture readings for the Feast of Dedication centered around God as the Shepherd of his people. So it’s quite possible that Jesus chose to speak of himself as a shepherd on this occasion because the shepherd imagery was already on people’s minds.
Something else was on their minds as well. The Feast of Dedication was the celebration of a past victory over the Syrians. Now Israel was occupied by Rome. Judas Maccabeus had turned out not to be the Messiah, and people were saying that Jesus of Nazareth might in fact be the Messiah. It’s in this context that they asked our Lord the question: “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ tell us plainly.” In other words, “Can we expect you to be the one who will lead us to victory against the Romans and make Israel a great nation, as it was under King David?”
What a loaded question! No wonder Jesus didn’t say, “Yes, I’m the Messiah, the Christ.” They wouldn’t have understood him. So, he spoke around the issue, letting them draw their own conclusions. “I told you, and you do not believe…My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me; and I give them eternal life.” Jesus was the Messiah, but he didn’t live up to their expectations, which were political in nature.
We know that Jesus is the Messiah. Furthermore, we understand that his kingdom is not a political reality, but a spiritual reality. We know all of this because he is our Shepherd and we are his sheep.
Yet, like true sheep, we’re sometimes dull of mind. We can miss the point! One of the most widely misunderstood terms that Jesus used is in the same passage of scripture: “I give them eternal life.” Most Christians think that what this means is when we die, we go to heaven, if indeed we’re his sheep. As Frederick Beuchner says in his book Wishful Thinking, “We think of eternal life, if we think of it at all, as what happens when life ends. We would do better to think of it as what happens when life begins.”
That’s what Jesus means when he says, “I give them eternal life.” He doesn’t say, “I will give them eternal life,” but “I give them eternal life.” Eternal life is available to us in the here and now. It’s life lived in the knowledge and presence of God. There’s a beautiful collect in the prayerbook that puts it this way: “O God, the author of peace and lover of concord, to know you is eternal life.” To live in Christ is to have eternal life. To be baptized is to begin this life, for the seeds of eternal life are sown in baptism. To be nourished by the Body and Blood of Christ is to taste and ingest eternal life. And to cast away the works of darkness and live a life of self-emptying love, letting the risen Christ minister through us, is to enjoy eternal life—here and now.
All of the other roads that we human beings take to find meaning in life are dead ends—they lead not to life but to death. The amassing of wealth and possessions, power over others, the respect and admiration of others—none of these are bad in themselves, but if we look to them for ultimate meaning in life, they become idols, just like the idol the Syrians erected on the altar in Jerusalem. We make any of those our idols and we’ll find ourselves still anxious, still unfulfilled, still empty. There’s only one kind of life that’s eternal, and that therefore gives peace, and that is life in Christ, eternal life. That’s why Saint Paul says, “For me to live is Christ.”
The German theologian Helmut Thielicke was a part of the confessing Church in Germany during the Second World War. He tells the story of two elderly ladies he knew. The ladies were sisters. One of them was the mother of a family and she seemed to have within her all the fullness of life. She had poured out her life in service to her family and sacrificed herself for them, but in the process she had become a vivid, vital person who had developed all that was in her to an amazing extent.
Her sister, on the other hand, was single all of her life and a highly cultivated individual, who had devoted her life to the development of her personality and had absorbed all the benefits of culture she could obtain. It was she, Theilicke said, the very person who wanted to develop herself and who had made her personality an end in it itself, who seemed dried up and one-sided compared with the other, who had forgotten herself and lived for others.
Whenever we give ourselves to others in sacrificial love, we are experiencing the reality of Christ crucified, and therefore experiencing eternal life. The first sister had experienced eternal life. Whenever we follow the Good Shepherd, he will lead us to that kind of self-emptying, sacrificial love. The result is the Easter proclamation all over again, for it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Sermon preached by the Rev. Fredrick A. Robinson
Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
4th Sunday of Easter
12 May 2019