Shepherds and Idols

Propers: The Fourth Sunday of Easter, A.D. 2020 A

Homily:

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

A former Catholic priest told me a story recently. He said it began one day with the television on, and a Protestant televangelist up on stage, working himself into a great froth, sweat streaming down his brow, with a big, floppy Bible in his hand. “People keep on asking me,” the TV preacher cried out, “What would Jesus do? What would Jesus say?” And here he built to his crescendo: “Well, I don’t care what Jesus says! Tell me, what does the Bible say?”

And the ex-priest said to me, “That’s blasphemy.”

A little while later this same priest found himself at a meeting in which several clergy were trying to discern how to respond to a local crisis, and one of them inevitably asked, “Well, what would Jesus do?”—to which a young and earnest priest, his evident consternation growing throughout the discussion, finally blurted out, “Jesus would obey the Church!”

And the ex-priest said to me, “That’s worse blasphemy.”

Our readings for this Fourth Sunday of Easter focus on Jesus as the Good Shepherd, the one who tends and guides and guards His flock, who gives them their food in due season, who lays down His life for the sheep. And in many ways this is a very liberating Sunday for most preachers, because it gives us the opportunity to say, “Do not trust me.” I’m just a man, just a sinner. I have a list of character defects half a mile long. If I have not disappointed or offended you as yet, just give it time. I surely will, whether I mean to or not. Every disaffected Christian has a “bad clergy” story.

But of course, we do not gather to worship other Christians. We gather to worship Christ—because you, my friends, have heard His voice. He calls His own and leads them out. And insofar as any pastor, preacher, priest, or prophet speaks a Word of Good News to the people of God, it is truly Christ speaking through them, speaking even in spite of them. I may be called pastor, but I am not the Good Shepherd. And thank God for that. I am here because I heard His voice, just like you; heard it whether I wanted to or not. All who came before Him were thieves and bandits. But Christ has come that we may have life, and have it in abundance.

I don’t often agree with John Calvin, but he was certainly right about one thing: the human heart is a factory of false idols. We constantly churn out images to worship, while ignoring or denying the only One truly worthy of worship. And Christians are as guilty of this as anyone. Oh, we may not set up statues of Zeus in the sanctuary, but as the story that ex-priest told to me made clear, we set up pious idols of our own, each and every day.

For Protestants, this can take the form of biblioidolatry—of worshipping a book, to put it indelicately. The Bible is not God. It was never intended to be God; it does not want to be God. The Bible exists to point us to God, to point us to Christ. Likewise the Church: we have a tendency to idolize buildings, liturgies, communities, traditions. Even worse, we turn to worshipping personalities, authorities, theologies, and hierarchies. And to do so is to turn the Church upside-down.

The Church is the Bride and the Body of Christ. We gather together to support one another in our relationship with the Lord, walking the hard and narrow Way. We do not come here to bend Christ to the will of the Church—the very thought of which would be greatly humorous, were it not so terribly wicked. The Bible and the Church are the tools of Christ, the servants of Christ, never His masters. We do not believe in Jesus because the Bible tells us so; we believe in the Bible because it gives us Jesus. We do not worship Jesus because the Church tells us to do so; we worship as the Church because Jesus meets us here, together.

He is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. He is the visible Image of the invisible God. He is the Good Shepherd, who lays down His life for the sheep. And we need to be reminded of that every week; because we forget it every week.

I recently read a very interesting book by a woman who had been born a Norwegian Lutheran and grew up to become an American Hindu. And she said, half in jest, that the difference between Islam and Hinduism is that Muslims know that no image for the infinite God is adequate, so they allow no images at all; whereas Hindus know that no image for the infinite God is adequate, so they allow the worship of all images, all of them equally inadequate, and therefore equally accurate even in their inaccuracy. They both make a twisted sort of sense.

The Old Testament is a lot like that. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, God commands the Israelite people never to make a graven image of Him—and so of course they do so all the time. That’s how the Bible works: God tells us what’s good and true and right; then we immediately go off to do the exact opposite. The Israelites build images of God as a calf, as a woman, as a stone, as a tree, and of course all of these emphasize aspects of God, what He’s like, what He does. But they all remain pale reflections, muddled shadows. They aren’t who God is.

This changes with Christ. The only appropriate image of God in the Old Testament is the image that God puts in human beings. We have the image of God within us, however hidden, however obscured. In Christ at last it comes out clearly. Jesus is the perfect Image of God. Everything the Father is, in His infinity and eternity, Jesus is, in space and time. Here at last is the true Image of God, the true picture, the true reflection, of the Father’s loving heart. This Man we can worship in Spirit and in truth.

And this must be for us a reminder that the Old Testament itself is a sort of false idol. Now hear me out on this. The Hebrew Bible insists that no image of God is adequate save the image He promises to give us in Jesus Christ: no statue, no bull, no stone—and no book. The image of God in the Bible is incomplete. We read these stories of God’s wrath, God’s violence, God’s judgment, and we think, “Is this really what God is like? Is this the all-good Creator of all things, in whom we all live and move and have our being?” And the answer is no. The Old Testament’s own answer is that God is not in a book—not even in the Old Testament itself.

The true image of God is Jesus. That’s who God really is. That’s what God really does. He alone is the Good Shepherd. He alone is the gate. Whoever enters by Him will come in and go out and find pasture. All the others that we would worship, be they people or possessions or structures of power, are thieves, who come ultimately and only to steal and kill and destroy.

I don’t care what the Bible says. What does Jesus say? I don’t care what the Church says. What does Jesus say? And yes, of course, it’s true that the only way we learn what Jesus says is through the Bible, through the Church. I’m not denying that. What I’m saying is that we mustn’t put the cart before the horse. We mustn’t mistake the servants for the Master. Christians do not worship the Bible. We do not worship the Church. We worship the One to whom both Church and Bible point.

We are Christians because we follow Jesus. He calls us and we hear Him. And this doesn’t make us any better or any smarter or any kinder than those who are not Christians. It simply means that He has called us out of love, and sends us out in that same love, that we might share the love of God with the entire world. It does no good to say that we have faith in Him if we do not do anything that He tells us. And what He tells us isn’t complicated; it’s difficult, but it’s not complicated.

Love God with all you have, and love your neighbor as yourself. Forgive others as you have already been forgiven. Feed the hungry as you have already been fed. Teach the ignorant, rebuke the wicked, absolve the sinner, speak truth to power, and always, always remember that you have been freed to love all people and all of Creation by the Christ who first loved you.

Live like Christ, in whatever way we can, and people will see Jesus in us. Live like Christ in whatever way we can, and people will see the true and perfect Image of God.

For He has come that they and we and all of us may have life and have it abundantly. And one way or the other, His will, at the last, shall be done.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

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