Fourth Sunday of Easter
Sunday 3rd May 2020
As public worship has been suspended in a bid to limit the spread of the Coronavirus the service was recorded and made available online. That can be found here.
Easter 4
John 10.1-10
Dr Ken Scott
The Sheep and the Good Shepherd
Sheep have got an unfair reputation of being rather silly creatures. When you see how some humans behave, I wonder if we are giving them a bad name. They do like to be together in flocks, but often one or two will wander away through a hedge or fence into another field, and sometimes they get lost. Our image of sheep farming is a bit different to the one that Jesus followers had. We see them being moved around with quad bikes and dogs, but shepherds in first century Palestine led their flocks, they had no dogs, only a crook. Also, they kept sheep for wool, not meat, so they go to know them individually over time. Jesus used the picture of sheep to describe the human condition quite often. If we are honest, we all do silly things in our lives we later regret. We wander off the path we are trying to follow and easily get lost. We become prey to the kind of false shepherd Jesus refers to. The pursuit of possessions or position can take over our lives. We can go on in life thinking we are strong enough to cope on our own; we don’t need God anymore. But then something happens, and we are brought up short. And that is surely the case when we are faced with a pandemic we never saw coming. It has forced a lot of people to look again at their lives and face up to their own mortality. Maybe we can’t get through this life on our own after all, maybe we need some help.
So, we need someone who will lead us, guide us and protect us on our journey through life. Jesus claims to be that person. He wants to be a shepherd and what’s more a Good Shepherd. Jesus can seem a remote figure to us today. A distant person living 2000 years ago in a far away land. He can seem distant sometimes even when we worship in church, living, dying, rising, but so long ago. It need not be like that he says I know my sheep and they know me. He says he calls us by name, that is how well he knows us. Do you remember how after the resurrection Mary met him in the garden and did not know him until he called her by name. Then all became clear. Here then is a shepherd who knows the best and worst about us and still loves us just the same. If he knows us, how well do we know him? You have to spend time with someone to really get to know them well, but all too often our contact with the risen Jesus is fleeting and pretty superficial. The common excuse is lack of time “I’m too busy” how often do we hear that. Well at present that does not hold up. We all have more time that we have ever had in our entire lives. So, we can use it to read, to think, to study, to pray, to get to know our shepherd. And then begin to appreciate his great promise that comes in our lesson when he tells us why he came. “I came that my followers may have life and have it abundantly”.