[Sermon delivered the Fourth Sunday of Easter, April 21, 2024 at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona]
✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.
I confess that I was tempted to recycle a sermon this year for this Sunday, as I had preached on the Fourth Sunday of Easter in 2022, but as I looked there was little in common with the readings (drat the inconvenience of the Revised Common Lectionary); also, a small aside in today’s Gospel beckoned at me.
That small aside in the Gospel is where Our Lord says, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.”[1] Its context lies within Jesus’ statement that He is the Good Shepherd, how others who claim to be the Shepherd are counterfeits (likely calling out the current roster of Israel’s High Priests) and who will leave the sheep (Israel) at the mercy of the wolves (their enemies, both political and spiritual), and how He will die for the sheep and rise again. Everything seems concentrated on the People of God’s Covenant with Israel, but then there is this unexpected aside about sheep from another fold.
Here I should mention that people tend toward exclusion. On a micro level one is either family or not. One is either a fellow-villager or not. Growing outward from there, people either belong to the clan or tribe, or they do not. On a macro level, people either belong to the same state, province, region, republic, or kingdom, or else they do not. On a more horrifying level, people are excluded based on race, ethnicity, orientation, and usually are dehumanized in the process. Taking the United States, for example, while this is in theory, “one nation, under God, indivisible,”[2] it is in practice a country rife with regional and class division, with a history of continuing genocide and apartheid that serves as a model for other countries wishing to follow suit.[3]
Israel was no different, and deliberately so. They were a people specifically consecrated by covenant to God’s service, and with strict rules of who could and could not become part of their number.[4] So when Our Lord stated that there were other sheep who did not belong to this fold, His listeners would assume that He likely meant Israelites from the Diaspora. However, a careful reading of this entire Gospel would indicate that His listeners would have gotten it wrong. When He was speaking to Nicodemus, Jesus informed him that God was not interested in saving just Israel, but that He was there to offer salvation to the whole world.[5] Our Lord shared the message of salvation with a whole town of Samaritans,[6] and even Greeks who had come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover with the Jews.[7]
This means that the Good Shepherd has broken the old patterns. While He was sent specifically first to the lost sheep of Israel,[8] Salvation had come not only to them but to the whole world. Our Lord concentrated on the Israelites in Judah and Galilee not to exclude the rest of the world but so that Israel could become a blessing to the whole word and that their Messiah could become the One in Whom the Gentiles hope.[9] The love of God, until now manifested openly only in Israel, is now revealed to the whole world, not as something new, but something that had always been there and was now proclaimed in the power of Christ Jesus’ Passion, Death, and Resurrection.
What a wondrous mystery this is! Yet it is so difficult for us to comprehend! Israel could not believe that God’s love could extend to Gentiles or Samaritans. Today we cannot believe that God could love people of another race, nationality, orientation, or politics. Worse yet, many of us secretly in our hearts believe that God cannot love us, that each one is unworthy of His love. The evidence that we are unlovable, admittedly, is abundant. Our evil behaviour, observed among others, and, for the more attuned and perceptive, observed within our own selves, seem to us to be proof enough that we are a singularly wicked species. Those who have no delusions about humanity’s goodness, agree with St. Paul’s assertion that, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”[10]
We must, however, beware lest this perception distort the truth. At one end is the truly pessimistic view that humanity is so corrupt there is no redeeming it and that only some, specifically picked out and justified by Divine whim, will be deemed fit for eternity with God.[11] Others live in denial, possessing the view that humanity is basically good, that each individual at heart is good, and that concentration on doing good will suffice for union with God.[12] As most heresies do, the latter exaggerates the fact that God created us; creation is good, being is good.[13] The former exaggerates the corruption under which humanity has fallen,[14] making it so total and pervasive that we are incapable any good, indeed our very beings are evil. The truth, as always, lies between the extremes. St. Paul says it best: because Adam sinned, death came into the world, and because we are all subject to death, we sin.[15] It does not deny that our creation is good, that our being is good, but it does state that it is corrupted, and that it is sundered from a relationship with God our Creator, and it is this condition from which Jesus came to redeem us.
The Good Shepherd came among us to gather us together to protect us from the evil and corruption that has beset us. He came not just for the descendants of Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham, but for all of us, sheep not only of that fold, but sheep throughout the world, because He loves us. Unworthy though we are, He still loves us. It is because we have been enslaved to Sin and Death, because evil acts and intentions run through and ruin the good creation God wrought, that Our Lord came among us to gather us to Him, to suffer on our behalf, to die on the Cross so that Death might take its death-blow, and to rise again so that we may share in His eternal life, our new nature in Him impervious to Death and united to God in the Person of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Yet even now we suffer division. We fall into an us versus them mentality, those within the Household of Faith and those without. Our practice has been once to exclude the unbaptized from even seeing the consecration of the Bread and Wine into the Body and Blood and even from fellowship with us. Conversely, some would give the Sacrament to all and sundry. To a degree, there is some merit to both views, but as I stated above, the extremes are where sin lurks, and the Truth is somewhere in the middle. Truly Christ is for All, He suffered and died for All, He is a ransom for many, the many being those who come to Him. So, we should ask why are the unbaptized and the so-called unbeliever among us? Why, if they have sought us out, do we exclude them? We should, as some demand, make every effort to include them, but I counter that involves full disclosure of what they are getting into. Those who come to the fold of the Good Shepherd need to understand that we are together because the one and only God took flesh and came among us, suffered, died, and rose again to restore us, and that this gathering is not only to worship Him, but to proclaim that message, and to partake in Him to further that message, and to bring a world fallen into Sin and Death to Him. About this we must be clear.
So, for those who come forward to receive the Sacrament, I offer this advice. If you come forward, you are forsaking all other allegiances, all other duties, all other entanglements, and throwing your lot in with Him. You are expressing unity and fellowship with the citizens of the Kingdom of God, a subversive organization not of this world, where might does NOT make right, where the winner does NOT take all, where the meek and the last have the highest honour, where the emptying of self and consuming love for others as God has loved us are the values we hold, and teach, and practice in defiance of the principalities and powers of the Age and in allegiance to the God of all creation. Truly this is the Body of Christ, where all who partake are members of His body. Truly this is the Blood of Christ, the seal of the New Covenant of Reconciliation to the Father. If one knowingly wishes to partake in this unity, what then is to prevent them from being baptized? It is the same commitment done in a particular order, one a beginning, the other ongoing. For those of us who are baptized, let us not lose sight of this and remember that all of us who partake are members of the same body, sheep not of the original fold but grafted in by the power of the Holy Spirit through the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
The Doors! The Doors! In wisdom, let us attend![16] The doors are opened, the veil of the Temple has ripped in two,[17] and the Salvation of God is freely offered to all. Let us forsake our old lives, the leaven of malice and wickedness, and take up the unleavened Bread of Sincerity and Truth.
✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.
[1] Jn. 10.16
[2] The Pledge of Allegiance, a common patriotic recitation in the United States of America defined in the United States Code (4 U.S.C. § 4).
[3] Cf. Wilkerson, Isabel, PhD, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, New York: Random House, 2020, pp. 79, 84-87, 405n79, showing the influence of American race laws on Nazi laws and policies.
[4] Cf. Deut. 23.3-8
[5] Jn. 3.16-21. Cf. Jn. 1.9-13
[6] Jn. 4.1-42
[7] Jn.12.20-26
[8] Cf. Mt.15.21-28, Mk. 7.24-30
[9] Cf. Rom. 15.9-12, Ps. 18.49 and 117.1, Dt. 32.43, Is. 11.10
[10] Rom. 3.23
[11] This is radical predestination, which even most Calvinists and Jansenists would avoid.
[12] This is Pelagianism, a very prevalent heresy in the 21st century West.
[13] Gen. 1.26-31
[14] Gen. 3.16-19
[15] Rom. 5.12. Please keep in mind most Western translations mangle the Greek of the last relative phrase unbelievably: ἐφ’ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον is made to refer to “man” or even to "sin" and not to its proper antecedent “death”.
[16] Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Liturgy of St. Basil of Caesarea.
[17] Mt. 27.51, Mk. 15.38, Lk. 23.45
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