Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot
Readings – Acts 4: 5-13; John 10: 11-18
“…he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth.”
The Good Shepherd is one of the most familiar Bible passages, and the imagery is so beautiful, that we can fall into using it as twee spiritual wallpaper. When we look at the text more closely, it has a harder and more interesting edge, especially if we consider the different lives of the shepherd and the hireling.
We can fall into using the story of the Good Shepherd as twee spiritual wallpaper.
The shepherd owns the sheep; they are both his savings account and his working capital. They are how he earns his living, and also where he stores his wealth. To others, his flock may seem modest, but for him it is the fruit of a lifetime’s hard graft. Indeed, it may even have been handed down to him by his forefathers, the result of generations of sleeping out alone on cold mountaintops as wolves howled in the darkness.
The hired man, who works for the shepherd, is in a different position; he has no capital, no savings, he lives from payday to payday. He may have no particular reason to show loyalty to the shepherd, whose wealth may seem modest to people like the fancy Temple clergy in Jerusalem, but still like a king’s ransom to the man whose wages he pays. The shepherd may have started out with advantages in life that seem extraordinary and even unfair to the hireling. The hireling may be a hard worker, he may be loyal to and genuinely friendly with his boss, but things get really tough, like when a pack of wolves attacks on a bitter winter night, he has no skin in the game when it comes to the flock. Looking after these sheep is just another job, and not one that comes with the sort of pay-cheque that’s worth risking your life for.
Now, St Peter may have started out life as a fisherman, but by the time Jesus said “I am the good shepherd”, Peter fancied himself very much as Jesus’ co-shepherd. He was Jesus’ best mate and self-styled Second-in-Command. When Jesus said, “I lay down my life for the sheep”, Peter was going to try to emulate him. So, at the Last Supper, Peter told Christ, “I will lay down my life for thy sake.” But Jesus knew Peter better than he knew himself, and told him that before daybreak, he would deny Jesus three times. Jesus, obviously, was right. When it came down to it, when the metaphorical wolves of the Temple were circling, Peter turned out not to be Jesus’ fellow shepherd, but just a hireling there for the payday he thought the Messiah would bring him.
At the time of this morning’s Epistle reading, from the Acts of the Apostles, the memory of his failure to live up to his high opinion of himself will be fresh for Peter. This story is set relatively soon after that terrible night; perhaps several months later or at most a year or two, and something has changed for Peter. He and John had just been busted, arrested for preaching and healing a man lame from birth in the Temple.
They are brought in front of a religious court, on trial before the high-priest himself, and all the members of the high-priestly family. In front of these fancy bigwigs, Peter and John stand out like a sore thumb with their strong Galilean accents—the sort of people who might be fishermen, or shepherds, or something like that. The author of Acts records, the religious leadership “perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men” yet “when they saw the boldness of Peter and John… they marvelled”. With his life potentially on the line, there was no denying going on this time: Peter had no hesitation in proclaiming that he was able to heal “by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead”. The fisherman had indeed become a shepherd.
Redemption is at the very heart of Christianity. There is always a chance to start afresh with God. That doesn’t mean we can undo the past – never forget that in the Resurrection accounts, Christ’s wounds are still part of His risen body. But we can start again, not from where we once were, but from where we are now, no matter how late in the day we think it is, no matter how badly we’ve messed up in the past. We can always turn back to Our Lord, the Good Shepherd, and He is always ready to receive us back into his fold.
This might be a good time to point out that every service of Holy Communion has confession and absolution – for a reason. As this is a Book of Common Prayer service, the confession and absolution come after the sermon. When they come, there will be a moment of silence, and I urge you to bring anything weighing on your conscience before God in your own hearts, so that you can receive God’s forgiveness of your sins when I pronounce absolution, or when any other priest does. These will often be things that have happened in the week since, or the few weeks since, you last received Communion. Some of them may seem quite minor; still, bring them to God, confess them sincerely, promise sincerely to change your life for the better, even if it is only in little ways. The Christian pilgrimage is a life-long one, and it is usually one of short, slow, steps more than dramatic gestures.
Perhaps, though, there are more serious matters weighing on your conscience. I am well aware that seemingly idyllic little villages often harbour dark secrets. In that case, I urge you all the more to bring them before God in your heart.
That might be a good point to mention that you can always ask to see a priest for confession, privately and in-person. We tend to think of that as a specifically Roman Catholic practice, but actually provision is made specifically for it in the first of the three exhortations in the Book of Common Prayer Communion Service. As Anglicans, you are trusted to make your confession in the privacy of your own hearts, but some people find it helpful to make a regular practice of seeing a priest for confession and spiritual direction, others have something weighing on their consciences that they don’t feel they have the wisdom to deal with on their own. The Anglican formulation on confessions has always been that all may, some should, but none must. None of you must make your confession anywhere except in your own hearts, but I felt I ought to bring the alternatives to your attention.
I think all this matters because it seems like quite suddenly, in the last 10 or 15 years, our culture has become much harsher and less willing to forgive. But the truth is we’ve all done things we are ashamed of—or at least that we ought to be ashamed of, for the flip side of a lack of forgiveness is that even people who have been caught red handed doing awful things try to brazen it out, as we’ve seen from some of our so-called leaders in recent weeks.
The message from this Sunday’s readings is both more realistic and more hopeful. The Good Shepherd is always ready to receive us back into his fold; for Him to do that, we need to admit that we’ve strayed. If we confess our sins to Him, and ask Him to guide us with the Holy Spirit, there is no limit to the good he can use us for, no matter how unsuited for greatness we think we are.
Now thanks be to God the Father, who has given us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Top image: A Byzantine mosaic of the Good Shepherd, in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna. Dates to c. 425.
