St George's Cathedral, Cape Town

A sermon preached by The Reverend Bruce W. B. Jenneker in the Cathedral Church of St George the Martyr in the City and Diocese of Cape Town on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, Good Shepherd Sunday, 3 May 2009

There's a wonderful moment in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland – well, there are several, aren't there? The one I am thinking of occurs in her conversation with the Caterpillar. `Listen: Who are you?' said the Caterpillar. This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, `I--I hardly know, sir, just at present-- at least, I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'

That's how it is with all of us, isn't it. We are changing all the time. Now we are patient, and in the next minute we are all of a frenzy, preoccupied and easily irritated. Now we are edgy, sensitive and on the defensive and in the wink of an eye we are calm, relaxed and serene. We are a self-altering lot, aren't we, always changing, now for the better, often for the worse. But nor matter what we are or were; no matter what we become or how we vacillate, one thing remains constant. The-Love-that-Holds-the-Universe-Together, who positions the stars in their places and keeps the planets in their courses, that Love holds us always and ever, that Love loves us with a love that will never let us go. Through thick and thin, in good times and in bad, at our best and in our worst, we are held, cherished and treasured, each of us dearly and eternally loved.

This is the whole point and meaning of the life and ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In him God sought to make unambiguously clear God's absolute, unconditional and unqualified love for us. God chooses us before we are born and remains in solidarity with us through all the changes and chances of life. Neither sickness nor health remove us from God's love. Whether we are rich or poor, here or there, right or wrong, good or bad, alive or dead, nothing has the power to limit, restrict or inhibit God's love for us.

It was very difficult, in fact it proved impossible, for those who knew Jesus to believe this message. It was so offensive that they hated him for teaching and preaching it and they killed him for daring to live it.

Even those who were drawn to Jesus and wanted to follow him, they too couldn't grasp his message. It was too alien to their experience, counter-cultural and consequently incredible. Unconditional love, unreserved forgiveness, enduring solidarity– this was beyond belief. So, to give them glimpses of what living in the kingdom of God's love meant, Jesus told them parables. The four gospels recount over sixty of them. But in John's Gospel there are only three. Why doesn't John include the parables in his Gospel? Is it because by the time the Fourth Gospel was written the stories were so well-known that they did not need another repetition? John uses another way of presenting Jesus as the key and clue to the Love of God. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus leads us into the heart of God with seven 'I am' statements. One of these, repeated several times the tenth chapter of John, provides the focus for our liturgy today: I am the good shepherd. It is interesting to note that tenth chapter of John is the only chapter in the Bible which appears on the same Sunday in each of the three years of the lectionary cycle. Not the same verses each year, but verses from the same chapter of John's Gospel each year. 'I am the good shepherd.'

Whenever Jesus describes himself as the Good Shepherd, the point is nearly always the same: as the Good Shepherd of his sheep, he will risk his life and even temporarily abandon the flock if that is what it will take to save one lost sheep. As the Good Shepherd, he loves his sheep, loves them to the end, and will allow himself be killed rather than see one single sheep harmed.

John knew full well the deep resonances which the phrase I am carries for those familiar with the divine Name. It is first spoken from out of the fiery depths of the burnish bush when Moses hears the voice of God saying, “Say to the Israelites that 'I Am' sent you. I am who I am.” Every time Jesus began a sentence with I am, the significance of his words and the implication of his self-description was unmistakeable to those who knew the Torah. The good news of the gospel is that Jesus is the Good Shepherd who will lay down his life for the sheep. That good news also describes the sheep for whom the shepherd cares – they know the shepherd and he knows them.

Barbra Brown Taylor, the American Episcopal priest who is probably one of the most inspired preachers of our time, once pointed out, that in the Middle East to this day you can sometimes see three or four Bedouin shepherds and their flocks all arrive at a watering hole about the same time. The sheep quickly mix and mingle together until the three or four individual flocks have disappeared into one large muddle of sheep around the water. But the shepherds don't fret. The mix-up doesn't distress them. When it's time to go, each shepherd gives his own distinctive whistle or sings his own unique little song, and immediately his sheep leave the others behind, form back into their own flock, and follow the shepherd they've come to know and trust. I know my own and my own know me.

There is much to discover about Jesus in these verses from the tenth chapter of John's Gospel. However, here are also two remarkable descriptions of the flock which the Good Shepherd tends with such self-sacrificial care. The first is that the sheep know the shepherd and hear his voice. The flock is a listening flock. The voice of the shepherd breaks into their awareness because they anticipate it, recognise it and understand it. In the early nineties two social scientists, Andrew Wolvin and Carolyn Gwynn Coakley, examined the existing research into listening. Their work resulted in several books, the first of which was the ground-breaking Perspectives on Listening, published in 1993. Wolvin and Coakley developed a classification of types of listening, in which the process of listening always begins with what they called discriminative listening. This is the cradle and crucible of all listening, for in discriminative listening we gather and focus our attention in order to identify the voice we hear. Parents listen discriminatively to the cries of their new-born child, motor mechanics listen discriminatively to understand the malfunctioning of a car. The sheep listen discriminatively to identify the shepherd's voice.

Are we standing still, focussed and attentive, ready to hear the voice that addresses us and listen to it. Or are we too pressed upon by the sheep ahead, behind and alongside us, too busy guzzling the water to quench our burning thirst, too eager to claim these few well-deserved moments of rest and relaxation? To know the shepherd is not to be dimly aware of his existence or have his number on your cell phone. It is a connection deep and enduring, waiting to hear, attentive and eager. And in that connection is identity and security, direction and provision, faith, hope and love. Karl Rahner, one of the leading theologians of the last 50 years, described the Christian as a 'hearer of the word.' Before anything else, the Christian is one to whom a word is being addressed. Are you listening?

The second remarkable description of the flock is that it includes others who, though they are not present, do know the shepherd and do hear his voice. They too are the shepherd's own flock, they too are cared for, provided for and loved by him. We are not the only ones who hear and recognize the shepherd's voice. In a global environment characterized by vigorous cross-cultural, multi-cultural and inter-faith dynamics we cannot avoid re-examining the meaning of Jesus' words that “other sheep will hear my voice?” Originally Jesus spoke these words to Jews and was understood to be referring to the Gentiles. For us the loving concern of the Good Shepherd for 'the sheep not of this fold,' is a dramatic statement of the universal, even cosmic nature of Christ's mission and ministry. His extravagant self-sacrifice is the unshackling of the whole universe, the prodigal embrace of the whole world, so that no one is left out, no one is forgotten, no one is left behind.

This radical redefinition of the extent of shepherd's flock requires a major reassessment of the boundaries the sheep impose on themselves. We are not the only sheep. Not all sheep are like us, look and smell like us, think and act like us, choose and live like us. But every sheep is a sheep. It is the shepherd's choice that brings them into the fold. It is the shepherd's love that transcends our differences to make us one family, one flock with one shepherd. Are we standing on tip-toe, hands shielding our eyes as we scan the horizon for those the Good Shepherd is gathering into the fold with us? Or are raging against the porous boundaries, restricting who's in and who's out, determining the risk of contamination, setting up border posts, demanding visas. The sheep know the Good Shepherd's voice and follow him where he leads. Am I ready to follow where the Good Shepherd leads, are you – to the place where no one is excluded, where self-sacrifice is the order of the day?

The promise of the Gospel is that we have a Good Shepherd. The cost of that promise is that we must listen for and to him, identify with him, follow him, settle where he takes us, and be the fold that he assembles. May we be worthy of that promise and given the grace to meet the cost of the discipleship it invites.

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