Easter 4 - May 15, 2011
Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal
Rev'd Dr. Elizabeth Rowlinson
Today is often called Good Shepherd Sunday, because three out of the four readings use the image of the Lord as a good shepherd. First, the much-loved psalm which we sang: then the reading from the first letter of Peter, which ended ‘For you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls’: and then the gospel reading from John ‘He calls his own sheep by name, and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.’ The gospel writer was probably familiar with the Hebrew scriptures and he must surely have been influenced by the lovely psalm.
This psalm must be one of the most loved of all biblical passages, not only by Christians but by Jews as well. I was at the funeral of an old friend in Toronto last month, a Jewish friend, and, at the request of the family, Psalm 23 was read by the rabbi. He read it beautifully, each line first in Hebrew and then in English; it was very moving, for Jews and Christians alike. Many of you can probably say it by heart; if you’re an anglophone in my generation, you probably learned it in the King James version, and that’s what stays with you. ‘The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.’ For thousands of years, those words, in many different languages, have comforted and consoled the faithful, in times of trouble, in sickness and at death. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.’
But we have to remember that the psalmist’s vision is not one of pure peace; the evil is there, the enemies are there. Not peace, but a sword. I recently came across a story about Richard Meux Benson, the founder of the Cowley Fathers. When he was very old and dying, his community used to wheel his chair out onto the lawn in the sunshine. One day a Salvation Army officer saw him sitting there, an old priest obviously near the end of his life. He crossed the grass, and asked ‘Sir, have you found peace?’ And the fierce old monk answered ‘No! War!’
We’re not promised an easy solution to our problems; the human predicament – pain, loneliness, loss - is still with us. What we are promised is the security of knowing that we are not alone; the Lord is with us. But it’s the security of hard reality, not a cosy, romantic, optimistic view. Calvin said ‘There is a great difference between the sleep of stupidity and the repose which faith produces.’ The good shepherd walks with the sheep; when they are in peril or hardship, he shares the perils with them. We’re not promised a way out of our problems, but a way through them, watched over by a loving God.
If you’ve travelled in the Near East, you’ll know that sheep are ubiquitous, usually with a shepherd, now as in antiquity. The psalmist chose an image that would be immediately familiar to his hearers, and it would be a natural one to carry over into New Testament passages. Some of the earliest depictions of Christ in art - for instance in early Christian sculpture, or in the frescoes in the catacombs in Rome - show him with a sheep draped round his shoulders, just as he’s described in Luke’s version of the parable of the lost sheep. If you go to our Music Calendar for today on the Cathedral webpage, you’ll see one of those catacomb frescoes; they’re lovely.
We were on a walking holiday in Greece a couple of years ago, and we passed a sheep pen; the leader of our little group went in, picked up one of the sheep, and hoisted it onto his shoulders, two legs each side on his chest, just as it must have been done for thousands of years. Man and sheep looked perfectly comfortable; it was a wonderful biblical moment. So that was how the good shepherd carried his sheep.
But perhaps for a few minutes we should look at some of the details of our passages. Both the psalm and the gospel reading have some rather odd features, and we can only guess at their significance – or lack of it.
First the psalm. The first three verses speak about the Lord as though to a third person: ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want’. The next three address the Lord directly: ‘For you are with me, your rod and your staff, they comfort me’. Could it perhaps be that in times of trouble, in the valley of the shadow of death, the psalmist feels the need for a more personal relationship with the Lord: ‘You are with me’, not ‘The Lord is with me’. And then in the last verse he switches back again – I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever. As in the first three verses, he proclaims to other hearers the goodness of the Lord.
And this is perhaps how we feel too, isn’t it? When we offer praise and worship and thanksgiving, we want others to join with us: an offering of the whole community. But in times of trouble, we want, we need, the quiet personal comfort of a one-to-one relationship with the Lord. So we need in our own spiritual lives the double focus of the psalmist; we need to make a place for both the worship of the gathered community, and the quiet times of personal prayer and attentiveness. So perhaps the switch from third person to second person and back again has a real significance; it teaches us something.
And if we look at the gospel reading, it’s even harder to untangle. You may have noticed that it splits into two paragraphs: in the first, we have the sheep in the sheepfold, and thieves and bandits trying to climb in; only the shepherd comes in by the gate, and the sheep recognize him by his voice. He’s our good shepherd, implicitly, but at this point not
explicitly, Jesus. But in the second paragraph, Jesus isn’t the shepherd at all– he’s suddenly become the gate, the way in for the sheep, the way to salvation. How can we tie these two images together? Firstly we perhaps need to know that biblical scholars think they may be remnants of two distinct parables that were never intended to be together. But can we learn something from the juxtaposition, accidental though it may be?
In both of them, we are the sheep; that much is reasonably clear. And perhaps what we have here are two aspects of Christ and his relationship to us: the first, caring for the flock, feeding them, protecting them from enemies and predators: the second, as the gate, the way, that leads to eternal life. And perhaps this is the reason why the writer of John’s gospel strung these two seemingly disparate images together. He reminds us that while we trust in the Lord for our well-being, we have to do our part by walking faithfully in his way.
And it’s only in the verse after our gospel reading that Jesus returns to the shepherd image, and here explicitly identifies himself with the good shepherd. ‘I am the good shepherd’, he says.
So here we are, back again at our psalm: the Lord as shepherd, who loves and cares for us in good times and bad: this beautiful psalm, known and loved by Jews and Christians through the ages. At funerals, it provides poignant words of trust to say in the face of the enemy who is not yet destroyed. The familiar words comfort us in sickness and at our death, in times of trouble and sorrow. At weddings, it assures us of God’s guidance in our future lives. It is loved by simple people, and by the great ones of the earth. Some of you may remember, as I do, that at her wedding in 1947 the Queen, then Princess Elizabeth, asked for the metrical version of it, which we’ll sing in a few minutes. It was her favorite hymn. And the ancient idea of monarchs as shepherds of their people survives in our coronation service; the shepherd’s rod and staff become royal insignia as the rod and scepter, symbolizing justice and mercy.
When we sing or say these words, ‘The Lord is my shepherd’, we are linking ourselves to Christians and Jews through the ages, to early Christians gathered together for simple rituals, to great ceremonies filled with pomp and splendour, to our own forebears. We align ourselves with those millions of faithful men and women who have used this psalm in their worship and in their prayers, every one with his or her own hopes and fears and joys and sorrows. May we be comforted, strengthened, and supported by these familiar words, now, and always.
