Easter IV

Acts, 13:15-16, 26-33
Revelation, 7:9-17
John, 10:22-30

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Who is Jesus Christ to you?  What’s your vision of Christ?

One of the primary things that shapes our vision of Christ is the Bible and how we read it, how we internalize its images of Jesus.  Much of the tenth chapter of S. John’s gospel is about Jesus as the Good Shepherd.  It follows directly from a healing story in the ninth chapter.  A man blind from his birth had received his sight, and his healing allowed him to see the light and believe in Jesus.  The Pharisees heard about the healing, but they refused to believe the formerly blind man and cast him out; the Pharisees didn’t see the light.  John’s point is that there’s a division between those who are spiritually blind and those who see the truth of Jesus.

Immediately following this healing story, Jesus talks about himself as the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep and searches out other sheep to bring into his fold so that there will be one flock, one shepherd.

The setting for today’s gospel is the Feast of Dedication.1   We call it Hanukkah.  In the second century before Christ, the Syrians occupied Israel and Jerusalem.  They profaned the Temple and erected one of their idols on the main altar.  Judas Maccabeus led the Jews in revolt against the Syrians, violently drove them out, built a new altar, and re-dedicated the Temple.   Hanukkah celebrates the Jews’ victory in reclaiming their Temple.  In the time of Jesus when the Romans occupied Jerusalem, Hanukkah evoked the hope of another victory of the Jews against their pagan overlords who oppressed them and whose presence sullied their Holy Land. 

During Hanukkah, Jewish worship focused on shepherd readings.  The theme of God as a shepherd is  a significant theme in the Old Testament, a potent image of God’s relationship with his people Israel, with his straying sheep.2  For Jesus and his disciples, the shepherd metaphor illustrates political rule, not spiritual care.  Shepherding was about kingship, usually the king like King David, who led Israel to prominence and military power.  It makes sense that the disciples expected Jesus to move against Rome, to challenge Rome’s worldly, political power.

Today, however, we have gentle, pastoral associations with shepherd.  A pastor in Latin is literally someone who feeds animals.  We think of the risen Jesus who told S. Peter to feed his flock.  We think of the Eucharist.  We think of spiritual feeding.  Our bishops have croziers, a shepherd’s crook.  We think of spiritual guidance.  The ancient and the modern understandings of the shepherd image are significantly different.  This is one of many reasons most of us would probably have a different vision of Christ from first century Christians.

This example hardly scratches the surface, but it shows that Christians don’t have a rigid, static, monolithic vision of Jesus.  The Bible has four gospels, each with a different theology, each with different interests, each with a different vision of Jesus.  The Bible shows us more of the mystery of God than any one of us alone can comprehend.  While there is one shepherd, one flock, one sheepfold, the sheep don’t have one wholly unified image of who the shepherd is.  The sheep stray all over the place on that.  Each of us looks at the same person – Jesus, and each of us sees him in an unique way.  Every Christian will give you a different answer to describe who Jesus is to them.

Our different visions of Christ are the origin of the divisions in the Church.  They come from good people, people like you and me, who are trying to follow their vision of the Good Shepherd and sometimes lose sight of the unity the sheepfold.  Most often, we find that it is not us, but others who have neglected and offended the unity of the sheepfold.  We blame the other sheep for baaing too loudly and pooping in the wrong places.

The diversity of opinion about Jesus is not a flaw, not a weakness, but quite necessary, a way for us to know God more deeply and fully.  We learn from one another about who Jesus is, about how he’s present with us, about his love and care for us.  One of the blessings of being part of a diverse congregation, people with different backgrounds, different experiences, different needs, different identities, is that we develop a more mature and multi-faceted understanding of God and his Church.  God is active in everyone’s life, and we learn that our own experience of God, our own vision of God, is not normative, that our own vision is not the standard. 

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, once quoted William Blake, the English poet and artist:

That vision of Christ which thou dost see
Is my vision’s greatest enemy.

Williams says, “People who say to one another, ‘If you think that, you shouldn’t be here,’ are, I suppose, implicitly echoing Blake’s horrifying couplet.”3  The vision of Christ that challenges us, or offends us, the vision of Christ we see as less than true, can help us to see what is true.  It’s an adult business learning to accept different, even threatening, ideas about Jesus. 

People don’t deepen their vision of Christ if they’re dilettantes.  People deepen their vision of Christ because they are committed, because they are trying to be faithful, because they believe in Christ.  It’s just that we earnestly and honestly come to different conclusions about who Jesus is.

We have to hold our vision of Christ humbly.  Rowan Williams notices Christ’s

totally enigmatic face on the wall, the cross, the bread and wine.  Silent signs, as silent as he was before Pilate, consistently refusing a straight and simple answer.  We can’t feed him questions like a computer and receive tidy, systematic replies... Christ can bear all sorts of interpretations, and we can’t expect him to tell us which he likes. 4

Williams warns that the danger of “hating or fearing someone else’s vision of Christ [is] that we turn our backs almost permanently against our own.  This is horrible, because one of the things visions of Christ have to do with is reconciliation, our reconciliation with ourselves and each other and God.”  The common features in our visions of Christ start with love and mercy; they start with Jesus giving himself up for us on the cross; they start with each of us needing repentance.

Today we behold fierce Christian divisions – strife between Church denominations as well as within denominations.  The hostilities and animosities among the sheep are the scandal of every age.  But we will not become one, united flock by becoming less passionate about our vision of Christ.  The solution to our divisions is not to take our vision of Christ less seriously, not to believe it less intently, not to be less committed to it.  Rather, we have to become even more committed to it.  We have to be more passionate about the truth.  We have to allow ourselves to be changed so that our own image of Christ shapes us more fully, so that we live our own image of Christ day by day.5

Last week, I spoke about how conversion is a continuing experience, not a one off event, but the way God continues to change us, the way we become more like our vision of Christ.  That’s why this parish exists... to help us grow into our vision of Christ, a vision shaped by the Bible, by our prayer and worship, by our relationships with one another, by our focus to reach those outside of the sheepfold. 

We can be grateful for, and indeed celebrate, all the different visions of Christ because at the heart of every vision of Christ is reconciliation and charity; at the heart of every vision of Christ is seeing him present in every human being.  The shared Christian vision is to see God dwelling in every human being.  As that vision takes hold of us, as we live it more passionately, then like the blind man who received his sight, Christ is healing us.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

1 Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII, The Anchor Bible, Doubleday (1966), p. 402, for information about the Feast of Dedication.

2. Gerard Sloyan, John, John Knox Press (1988), p. 128, for the difference of the ancient and modern understanding of shepherd.

3.. Rowan Williams, ‘Different Christs?,’ A Ray of Darkness, Cowley (1995), p. 88.

4. Williams, p. 90.

5. Williams, p. 92.