In today’s gospel reading Jesus is speaking to some Pharisees who have taken great exception to his healing of a blind man. The Pharisees, we have to remember, were held in great esteem by the ordinary folks in Judea and Galilee; they were seen—and saw themselves— as role models, as leaders, as shepherds to others who did not have the inner strength and fortitude to embrace the whole Law so rigorously and righteously.

At the end of the brou-ha-ha after the blind man had gained his sight and has seen and recognized Jesus for who he is and what he is, Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” John tells us that some Pharisees overheard this and asked, “Surely we’re not blind, are we?” And, John goes on, the answer was, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains. Very truly I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate is a thief and a bandit. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep.”

John goes on to remark that the Pharisees, not surprisingly, did not have a clue about what Jesus was saying in this ‘figure of speech.’ We are more fortunate than they; for we, like the man born blind, at least have the glimmering of an idea about who Jesus is and what Jesus is and what this means for us. We, unlike the Pharisees, are not under any delusions that we are the true shepherds, the good shepherds, over anyone.

‘Pastor,’ as you know, is Latin for ‘shepherd.’ I’ve always thought that one of the great things about the Episcopal Church is that we have not adopted that term to designate the ordained ministers among us. Certainly we speak of ‘pastoral ministries’ and if you have read the resumés of the six candidates for bishop coadjutor of the Diocese of Texas, you will have noted how each of them pays lip service to the notion of a bishop as the chief pastor in the diocese— an absolute necessity if a candidate is to get any votes at all at the election council, but one far removed from fact and reality when it comes to the day to day business which faces the bishop of so large and populous a diocese with its many boards to chair and its many operations to administer. But we Anglicans are fortunate in our choice of titles: rector, vicar, even the wonderful old term ‘parson’— but never the ‘pastors’ or ‘senior pastors’ favored by so many other denominations; because we then can better see that there is for us but one pastor, one shepherd who is our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. We are more fortunate than those Pharisees in John’s gospel who were so mystified by the ‘figure of speech’ about thieves and bandits and the shepherd. We leap to make the identification of that shepherd with Jesus Christ, but that was not part of what we heard today. We’ll have to wait until next year on the Fourth Sunday of Easter to hear John claim that Jesus is the good shepherd. Today he made another claim when he has Jesus say, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep… Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture… I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

Later on, in the great Farewell Discourse which John gives to Jesus at the Last Supper, he will further identify Jesus as “the way, the truth, and the life.” And there too we are given the same double view of Christ as we have in the Good Shepherd discourse we begin this morning: Christ as the way, the gate, our access to a new life with God, and, at the same time, Christ as the Good Shepherd who leads us along that way and through that gate “to have life and have it abundantly,” that life which is Christ himself and which he made possible for us through the great act of love he performed through his death on the cross.

John’s lesson this morning is a lesson about Christ, but also a lesson about us; for it defines us, the Church, lay people and ordained ministers alike, as that flock which Christ leads, as those sheep who know their shepherd and whom he calls each by name to lead us through Himself to the Father and to bring us home to good pastures where flow the springs of eternal life. That is the truth, and the truth, we know, is Christ.

Back to sermons