Thought for the Week

3 May 2009 – Easter 4

Collect:	Almighty God, Your Son Jesus Christ is the resurrection and the life: raise us who trust in Him, from the death of sin to the life of righteousness, that we may seek those things which are above, where He reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Readings:	1 John 3, 16 – end
	Psalm 23
	Acts 4, 5 – 12
	John 10, 11 – 18

For those of us on the inside of the Church, it is quite difficult to sort out the balance between Jesus’ power as the Son of God, and his weakness as a man. We sing happily about the “Servant-King”, but how do we actually reconcile those two very different concepts?

For those on the outside of the Church, there is a far more fundamental problem.

Most people, the vast majority indeed, agree that Jesus the Carpenter, from Nazareth was a great man, a teacher, a healer and a miracle worker, who inspired many, and who has had great influence on history. But those who do not regard themselves as Christians do not regard Him as God. Here in our Gospel Reading today, Jesus makes that claim as explicitly as it can be made.

In the first place, He uses the phrase “I am” to introduce a saying – “I am the Good Shepherd”. When Moses first encountered God, in the burning bush, while he was tending his father-in-law’s sheep out in the Sinai desert, he asked God who He was; “Who shall I say sent me?” And God replies, “I am who I am.” Hebrew in some ways is much simpler than English, but in its use of verbs, it is much more complicated, and far more nuanced. “I am” implies much more than just a description of a state of being; it has echoes of the concept of the first cause, the source of all things. Certainly, in Jewish thought, one name for God is “the I am”, and this is reflected in some of our hymns.

In the second place, Jesus uses the term “Good Shepherd” to describe Himself. Again, in Jewish thought, it is God Himself Who is the “Good Shepherd of Israel”. The Rabbis and the Chief Priests described themselves as the under-shepherds of Israel, and in all sorts of places in the Old Testament, we see the terms “Good Shepherd” and “Bad Shepherd” used to describe those who are faithful to their calling to care for God’s people, and those who are not.

When Jesus says, “I am the Good Shepherd” He is saying, “I am God”.

One of the people who used this idea of Good Shepherd/ Bad Shepherd was Philo of Alexandria. He lived from 20 BC to 50 AD. He was a devout Jew, and his brother was the Alabarch, which probably means that he was the leader of the Jewish community in Alexandria, which was the biggest Jewish community outside Judea at that time, so Philo was a very important person in Alexndria. When the Jews of Alexandria got into a bit of bother, they sent Philo to Rome to plead their cause before the Emperor Caligula in 40 AD.

Philo was a thinker, writer and philosopher, and he tried to help Greeks to understand and enter into Judaism by interpreting the Jewish faith from a Greek Stoic philosophical understanding. Of course, there was a Greek (Hellenistic) party in Jerusalem, and the ruling Herod family had at least Hellenistic tendencies. One of the reasons that the Jewish faith survived so long, (and remember that Philo was working some one thousand three hundred years after the time of Moses, and the roots of Judaism go back at least another six hundred years before Moses), was that it had always resisted being mixed with other religions. There was therefore much opposition to Philo’s work, and after the Romano-Jewish war, the Jews were virtually wiped out as a nation, and understandably clung on to their unique identity as God’s chosen people, so that almost no Jews followed Philo.

For the early Christians, however, it was very different. Many of the things that Philo said struck chords with the Early Church. He used the term “Good Shepherd” to describe both God Himself, and also the Logos, or Word, which Philo understood to mean the embodiment of God’s wisdom. Saint John uses almost the same imagery in the wonderful prologue to his Gospel – it is as certain as anything can be without a signed statement, that Saint John knew and used the work of Philo, when he was talking about Jesus.

Where the writer of the Fourth Gospel breaks away from Philo is in the concept that Jesus, the Good Shepherd, offers Himself as a willing Self-Sacrifice. The important part of this is Love – it is in love of God that Jesus offers Himself to express and fulfil God’s saving purposes, and it is Jesus’ love of us that binds the Sheep to the Good Shepherd, and allows us to share in that sacrifice. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is the “Victim”, and in Luke’s, He is the “Good Martyr”, but here in John, Jesus is the “Victor”. The whole purpose of his death is the Resurrection. It is only through Jesus’ death and resurrection that the Holy Spirit can come to us, and help us to live out the life of Christ in our time and place.

By the time that John was writing, probably about 90 AD, Jerusalem had been destroyed, and the Jewish nation had ceased to exist. Most Christians would by now have been Gentiles, and the Temple at Jerusalem had ceased to be the centre of Christianity a generation ago. Probably, most Christians, even leaders of the church, had never been to Jerusalem at all. John clearly refers to the Jewish Christians as those of this fold, but the majority whom John addresses, like us, would not have been “of this fold”.

John has his usual crack at the Pharisees – the hireling – did you notice it? By the time of Jesus, the intimacy of sacrifice had been lost. No longer did you sacrifice a sheep or goat from your own flock, yourself. Now, using special coinage at a ruinous exchange rate, you had to buy, at vastly inflated prices, a specially bred sacrificial animal, and then pay an official of the temple to sacrifice it for you. The “Shepherds of Israel”, as the Pharisees liked to call themselves, had indeed become hirelings, only in it for the money, and really did not love the sheep at all.

In Jesus, that intimacy is restored. His sheep, that is you and me, are his own. Metaphorically, He is not just paid by somebody else to look after a flock of sheep, but actually knows and loves each individual within that flock.

The reading from Acts today continues ministry in the same way. Peter and John had been thrown into jail because they had healed a crippled beggar. They had been going into the Temple for evensong, when the cripple asked them for money. In what must be one of the best known verses of the Bible, Peter said, “Silver and Gold, have I none, but what I have, I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk!” It is hardly surprising that the Temple authorities have to take action. The former cripple is leaping up and down, praising God at the top of his voice, Peter and John are accusing the authorities of having unjustly killed Jesus in whose name the cripple was healed, and the crowd is going wild. You can’t have that sort of thing disturbing evensong!

Naturally, the beggar was trying to cling to Peter and John, but of course it was Jesus who knew him, loved him and healed him, not Peter and John. Note that Peter and John have nothing to do with silver and gold, the prevailing ethos around the Temple.

Next day, they are hauled before the court, the same court that had condemned Jesus, probably just a few days earlier, though we cannot be sure of the timescale. It must have been absolutely terrifying for two barely educated fisherman to face the authorities of their own religion, but Pentecost is re-expressed here for the first time in an individual, Saint Peter. Saint Luke tells us that Peter is filled with the Holy Spirit. Peter then gives the kind of defence that Paul is to give to so many courts later on, but of course Paul was trained by one of the two most famous Rabbis of that age, and possibly of all time, Gamaliel. Peter was just a fisherman, but a fisherman who knew and loved Jesus.

Unlike Jesus, Peter and John escape with their lives. Given that the court has recently had Jesus executed, Peter makes astonishingly bold claims;

• That Jesus is the Messiah
• That the Jews have rejected the true Messiah, the Cornerstone
• That God has raised Jesus from the dead
• That Peter and John must do the will of God, not the will of the court – God demands that they go on preaching about Jesus.

Astonishingly, Peter gets away with it, perhaps because the former cripple is clear evidence that God has performed a great miracle through Peter and John. For the time being, the Early Christians even go on meeting in the Temple, in Solomon’s gateway, right under the noses of the Temple authorities. Peter and John are left free, at least for the time being, to preach Jesus, the Messiah, the man-God, the crucified and risen. The love of God will be conveyed to the world.

We need to turn again to John for the answer to the question about the servant King, and ion today’s Gospel reading we see the core of an answer. Jesus, the Servant, freely surrenders his own life obedient to God’s will and plan. Jesus, the King, takes his life up again, obedient to God’s will and plan. Both things He does within, and as an expression of, God’s love. It is God’s love that is the key to both questions, and it is only in the light of God’s love that we can understand Jesus as God and man, and as Servant and King.

May God bless you in the knowledge, experience and practice of his love. Amen.

Father Charles Howard: Anglican Chaplaincy of Midi-Pyrénées & Aude

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