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Church of Our
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191 Flanagan Way (Rt 153) Secaucus, NJ 07094
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Mark A. Lewis,
Vicar
MLewis@secaucus.org
Dorothy Fowlkes
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May 01
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Listening
to
the Shepherd's Call
Reflections on the
lessons
for the Fourth Sunday of Eastertide, 6 May 2001
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
Numbers 27:12-23 / Psalm 100
Revelation 7:9-17 / John
10:22-30
Once again, more problems for me created by -- what else -- the Bible. Today's gospel hits me right off with at least three problems to solve. How to talk about shepherds and sheep in the shadow of the Empire State Building? And how to take the stunningly subtle images of John's gospel -- when just a tiny word placed just so contains a world of significance. And, most basically, how to make the leap from "thinking about" Jesus' message to "doing something" about it. Three problems. As my mother advises, let's take them one at a time.
First, the sheep and shepherd stuff. Jesus says, "My sheep hear my voice. I know them and they follow me". And what is that supposed to mean? Those of us who have never been pastoral nomads miss a great deal of the intention of the imagery here. So (I'm still in my infatuation with the information glut on the internet)
I scouted up a modern description of a sheep herding people, the Rabari of India. It may help us get a clearer picture of what Jesus wants us to understand. I turned, of course, to one of the highest of authorities on such things, The National Geographic (September, 1993). Having been recently featured in the magazine's pages ourselves (February 2001), I have a newfound respect for the old publication. Among the Rabari people, the shepherds out in the desert gather their various flocks together in one big crowd and the shepherds share the night watches. Some sleep while others patrol, banging their staffs and rattling things, so that the sheep are never unguarded and any predator or thief is made aware of constant vigilance.
But when day breaks, things change: Each shepherd has his own particular calls -- like a song. There are morning calls to move out, a call to bring the sheep to water, and so on. Each shepherd knows his own sheep and vice versa, and his particular flock will disentangle itself from the larger flock and move out behind the appropriate shepherd in the morning. This may or may not seem astonishing, until one realizes that perhaps 5000 sheep are gathered together in the single large nighttime flock. And when a symphony of calls breaks out in the morning the night flock will separate into over fifty different divisions. All through sounds alone.
This is the picture that Jesus wants us to have in mind: The one enormous flock dividing up into smaller flocks with the coming of day, as each shepherd calls and as each sheep recognizes the particular call of its own shepherd and assembles to follow him. Each shepherd is so intimately familiar with his own sheep that he will know at once which is present and which may yet be missing. And this despite the presence of thousands of other milling sheep -- all looking, at least to the amateur -- very much alike.
A reciprocal relationship, one of knowing and being known, is what is being proposed here. Here, and now, we imagine that a shepherd's flock must be faceless to the shepherd, but it's not true. Every single sheep is known as an individual to be guarded, protected, searched for if lost. And it is not just that the sheep are known so intimately by the shepherd but that the sheep can know the shepherd just as well and recognize his call above all the distractions around us. Just by listening.
And then there are John's subtleties. In today's gospel, we see Jesus teaching in the Temple at Jerusalem. "It was the feast of the Dedication at Jerusalem; it was winter, and Jesus was walking in the Temple, in the portico of Solomon." Every syllable of that sentence is heavy with symbol. The cold fingers of anger point to Jesus in what was a winter of religious and civic life. Everything here is cold. The cool disdain of the Roman domination system, the frosty attitude of the Pharisees toward any change at all. All that and more are there in "it was winter".
Jesus because of the bad weather had gone indoors, inside the porch of Solomon, to do his teaching. Solomon's porch was a great colonnade running along the east side of the Temple. It had been built for the rabbis who came regularly to teach there had found December in Jerusalem too cold for outdoor lectures. Jesus customarily came here, too, especially at holidays, when there were many more people there than usual. "It was the Feast of the Dedication," John tells us. It was Hanukkah. It was a fairly new feast at the time of Jesus -- events of only 165 years before his birth were commemorated. So the things it celebrated were a shorter distance from Jesus ' time than the American Revolution is from ours. And it was a holiday very much like our Fourth of July.
We have come to think of it as a kind of Jewish Christmas instead. It celebrates the re-dedication of the Temple after the Maccabean revolt when Jewish militants overthrew the Syrian occupation, and re-lit the Temple lamps. The army of Antiochus in 168 B.C had maliciously defiled the Temple by slaughtering pigs in honor of Zeus on the site of the Jewish altar to the God of Israel. Antiochus had burned the Torah, abolished the Sabbath, and outlawed Jewish holidays. But the Maccabees, a family of ardent patriots, began a guerrilla war that finally expelled the Syrians and purified the Temple.
John wants us to know that in the winter of an age, on the commemoration of a grassroots revolution, Jesus went to the Temple to say that the time had come for a new way to see the bonds that hold together God and God's people. Not force. Not traditional observances. The bonds that hold together a shepherd and a flock -- calling out to each other and listening and watching for each other until everything comes together again. All that in "it was winter", and "it was the Feast of Dedication".
And what could that possibly mean to us? What are we supposed to do about all that? The call is there; the voice is there. We can learn to hear that call. And that voice calls to us, not just to us collectively but to each of us individually. The difficulty that arises for human beings, as it does not seem to do for sheep, is that the voice that calls to us can be so easily drowned out by the competing tumult of the world. It is so easy for us to run to some other call. Or to simply become so busy and distracted that we don't notice anything except the noises of the sheep all around us and forget to listen for the shepherd at all.
Telephones, beepers, e-mail. Family, children, jobs, make endless demands on our time, energy, attention, dedication. We have houses to clean or to repair, meals to cook, newspapers to read, children to drive and drive and drive all over the place. I could go on and on. There are much darker things that add up to a cacophony of voices drowning out the voice that calls us out of confusion and into someplace better for us. It's so easy to forget what we're here to listen for. So easy, in fact, to forget about listening at all.
In an endlessly busy world that does not slow down for a moment, it is not surprising that it is all too easy for us to lose the capacity to pause, to reflect on who we are and whose we are. And above all else to listen, and to listen joyfully. And yet, it is simply this that is asked of us, that we listen. It's a good idea -- possibly the very best of ideas -- Jesus says, to listen for the morning call to move out.
We aren't, as John's gospel has Jesus saying elsewhere "sheep, harassed and without a shepherd". We have a good shepherd to follow -- in a kind of Zen-like safety -- along a better pathway. The Good News -- for everybody -- is that we don't have to get lost in the crowd and get stuck someplace where it's winter all the time.
.
-- Mark Lewis
Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org.
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.
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