4th Sunday of Easter: B 23-24
4th Sunday of Easter
Acts 4:8-12 | 1 John 3:1-2 | John 10:11-18
Almighty, everliving God, lead us to share in the joys of heaven so that the humble flock may reach where the brave shepherd has gone before, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.
This Sunday focuses on the ministry that we all participate in, the ministry of caring for one another, shepherding one another, and one of the things that strikes me about this set of readings is in a way, the first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles, describes what was happening to the people who were believers, that had never happened before, because of this mysterious thing called redemption, God coming into the world and revealing something that was beyond our imagining. He was revealing the fact that we, we, all of us, are called to be like Christ, to be other Christs. It means our destiny is to be doing the same work that Jesus came into the world to do, and there are two things that Jesus did so powerfully and so clearly.
One of the things he was doing was revealing the heart of who God is. The Old Testament, as we know, is a long history of God slowing revealing himself to be the God who is. He begins with an image of the gods that are, revengeful, angry, demanding, and slowly he becomes more and more into the God who he is, slowly revealing to us a God that’s beyond our imagining, a God who is there because of his desire to be there for us. And the being for us is to engage us in the same work that he has come into the world to accomplish, and the role of God in the world is to save, to save us, bring salvation. And the shocking thing in the way it unfolds is that not only is he revealing to us his role in this incredible work of drawing us, not into a place of shame or fear or anger, but a place of peace, knowing that we’re being saved, we’re being lifted up, we’re being given everything we need in order to grow into who we are intended to be. That’s a powerful way of imagining salvation. Salvation is entering into the life that God has called you to live with the energy and with the strength that he has given to you to accomplish it. What are we being saved from? All those difficult tasks of trying to be worthy of a God who is not in need of our performing for him so that we are then worthy of his love. No, he reveals himself as the lover, the one who created us with a destiny, and all he longs for us to do is to enable him to reveal to us the fullness of who we are, and we are other Christs. We are those that are called into the world, like Christ was called into the world, to heal the world because of the divinity that Christ was participating in. He was also fully human, and so he’s inviting us to move from simply being solely human to also adding divinity into our essence.
We are children, as the second reading says, of God, children of the Father. Why would it be important to be told that? In the Old Testament, you might say that the gods of the Old Testament, particularly the last thing that they were saying. Is that, “You are equal to me, or you are a part of me, or you will be like me”? No, no. They were always demanding something from them so that the god of the — the old, pagan gods could dole out some kind of favor. No, we have this amazing new image of divinity, and divinity is not something that is lording something over us, demanding something from us but a divinity that enters into us and empowers us. And the fact that we are children of God means that, as we evolve, as we develop, we become more like God, like the Christ. To be like God does not mean in our humanity we shed humanity and become divine. No, it means we have this incredibly complex and wonderful communion of two dimensions that have always been, in God’s plan, to be united, and that is divinity and humanity in one person. That’s what it means to be a child of God, to have this dignity in us that we are participants in this mysterious thing called incarnation, and when it’s in us, we do the most extraordinary things. And the extraordinary things we do are symbols of what it means to be saved.
So you look at this first reading when the disciples are being hauled into the authority figures of the temple and saying, “What are you doing? You can’t do this sort of stuff. Stop it.” And they’re looking at them and saying, “We’re sorry. What we’re doing is simply what we’ve been called to do.” If you don’t understand salvation, salvation is the promise in God for us that we will become who he intends us to be. So salvation has something to do with being holy ourselves, whole, healthy. Notice always the miracles of Jesus were healing people of blindness and deafness and being mute and not being able to walk and not being able to do something with their hands, not be able to make something. It’s so clear to me that this dynamic force in the world, divinity in us, is there because we’re called to be instruments of giving life, wholeness to another.
So then we get to the image that Jesus loves about his role as one who is mirroring who the Father truly is. Instead of having a revengeful master God, we have a servant God, but this servant God then is described in a way that people of the time would understand, because they knew crops. They knew how to raise animals. So they had this image easily that makes sense, that there are people who give their life, their time, their energy to caring for a flock of sheep, and there’s a wonderful relationship in that whole dynamic of sheep and shepherd where the sheep know, somehow, who their shepherd is, that intuition in an animal who knows who their master is. It’s a beautiful image of the potential in a human being to intuitively know who is the one we turn to for true care, for true protection, and so we have in this image of the Good Shepherd a beautiful image of the ministry that we are called to have as people empowered by grace, by presence of God.
So let’s look at that a little more in depth, because there’s something in this way that Jesus describes a Good Shepherd that we need to understand is a description of how we are to take on this role as we evolve and become more like the God who is revealed in Jesus. Jesus is the perfect representative of who God is. We are told that our destiny is to be like that God, to be like him, not by being him but by participating in him, by him being in us. And how do you, as a human being, deal with divinity inside of you without getting caught up and thinking, “I am that source that is in me”? One direction would be, I guess, egocentric and self-centered, and the other would be, I'm not worthy. What am I? I can’t do anything. I’m just a lowly human being with a zillion problems and all kinds of failures and sins. So there’s no hope for me to be able to be used by God.” That tension between divinity and humanity is something that, I believe, Jesus is trying to describe in this very well-known passage of the Good Shepherd, because he’s describing your work, my work as we participate in the role that God has given to us as partners with him in this incredibly fascinating story of bringing the world to its full potential. God has planned for us to be his partners in this work, and we have extraordinary dignity in that role, but at the same time, we have another role in that that is describe in the heart of the Good Shepherd. That is the idea that he will lay down his life for the sheep. What does that mean? It means, if it comes to someone destroying my sheep or destroying me, I would let them destroy me before I ever let them destroy my sheep. Now, that’s — how would you say? That would be a very, very clear understanding that, in a role that God has as our God, our Father helping us grow into who we are intended to be, like him, he is willing to do anything for this to make it happen.
So what is it that he did that made it happen? Well, he became incarnate and laid down his life and allowed himself to be destroyed in the eyes of the world and suffered death, and then he rose up again. He took his life. His life came back to him. So there’s something in that image that is connected to what I think is the heart of this set of readings, is how do we understand being engaged in this mysterious union of humanity and divinity? How do we understand the role of those two things? Because in one sense, we know that there is this divine power in us that gives us an enormous, enormous dignity and value and worth. It needs to be honored. There’s something about human nature that is sacred and beautiful, and we’re told that we should honor and respect everyone for who they are. They have dignity. They have value. They have worth. At the same time that we’re told that we have all this dignity and worth, we’re told that there’s something else about us that’s so important for us to develop and understand is the capacity we have to put all of that aside and not to claim any part of that dignity and value we have and to become absolutely in service to something bigger than ourselves in that moment but with a kind of diminishing of our value in the eyes of ourselves and others. To be the fool, to be the one who is seen as without value or dignity in all the ways of the world as we enter into another world, the world of the spirit, is so radically different than the world as we know that God says is not part of us. It’s that egocentric, power-centered world.
So how do you understand this mysterious thing that Jesus is trying to say, that if you are going to enter into the world that he’s inviting you into, you’ll be like him? What he has as his greatest capacity is the ability to lay down his life and also to pick it up again, to lay it down and pick it up again. How does he lay down his life? When he was on the cross, he gave up all of his power, in the sense of his divinity and even said out loud, “If I wanted to, I could call upon all these angels, and I would be the most powerful person in this situation. I would have everybody terrified. I could have them destroyed. I could call upon that power if I wanted to, that life that I am that’s divine, but I lay it down. I set it aside. Instead of that, I’m seen in the eyes of the world as a victim, as valueless, as a nobody.” And yet in that moment of surrender of his need to be exalted or honored, he takes that role of a servant, of a shepherd, and he is so powerful in terms of changing the world. And what changes the world? Hearts that understand this mystery of what love really is. To be a loving individual in the world, a life-giving individual in the world is to be held in high esteem in terms of the way we understand truth. Nothing is more valuable in the world than a loving, giving, serving human being that cares more about others than themselves. That’s the goal, and yet the world would want us to be in this position of authority and power over things. And the power that God wants us to see, that is most essential, is that power that a human being has to put themselves second and to put somebody else first. That’s real power. That’s the power of divinity in humanity. What a gift, to be in a position of wanting to serve someone else no matter what the cost is to us, because all we care about, with every ounce of energy and desire inside of us, is to give life to someone else. And when you do that and you understand you’ve done that, you’ve emptied yourself. You’ve laid down your life, but when you realize what you’ve done, you’re lifted up again, and you are awesome. What a mystery. What a beautiful image to work on when we work on becoming who God’s called us to be.
Father, your plan to live within us and to empower us to be like you and to heal and to bring life, at the same time to embrace our humanity, our weaknesses, our sinfulness, this is a gift that can only be understood by your wisdom, not our understanding, not our minds. So bless us with the wisdom of understanding our dignity, our worth, our role and how it is that you call us, through this work of service, to be served and to be filled and to be all that you intend us to be. So bless us with this wisdom, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.