True Image

Lections: The Fourth Sunday of Easter, AD 2026 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

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 once told to me a story. 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 to 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; ask my family. 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, which means “shepherd,” 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.

The human heart is a factory for 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 told by that ex-priest 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. But the Bible is not God. It was never intended to be God; it does not want to be God. The Bible exists in order to point us to God, to point us to Christ. Likewise the Church: we have a tendency, myself firmly included, to idolize buildings, liturgies, communities, traditions. Even worse, we turn to worshipping personalities, authorities, theologies, 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 once read a relatively 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, and so they allow no images whatsoever; 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. Those both make a twisted sort of sense.

Our Old Testament is rather a lot like that. In 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 biblical narrative ever seems to run: God tells us what’s good and true and right, then we immediately go off to do precisely the 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, analogies of God, what He’s like, what He does. Yet they all remain but pale reflections, muddled shadows. They aren’t who God is. 

This changes for us with Christ. Jesus—in His life, His death, His Resurrection—is the perfect Image of God. Everything the Father is, in His infinity and eternity, Jesus also is, here in space and time. He, at long last, is the true Image of God, the true picture, the true λόγος, of the Father’s loving heart. This Man we can worship in Spirit and in truth.

Christ is our lodestone, the one true Word of God. And we must remember this, lest we read the Bible in such a way that even our sacred Scriptures become for us false idols. We turn to ancient stories of God’s wrath, God’s violence, God’s judgment, and we think, “Is this what God is like?” And the answer of course is no. Should we read a story of God in the Bible, and can’t imagine Jesus doing the same, then we cannot take that story literally.

Jesus is our Imago Dei. He is who God truly is. He alone is the 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.

Of course I am aware that the way in which we learn of Jesus, the way we encounter the Christ, is through the Bible, through the Church, in Word and in Sacrament. 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 their 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 together we might share the love of God with all the 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 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. This is what it is to be the Church, to be Jesus for the world.

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 know the Image of the true and living 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.

Full disclosure: This sermon is a reworking of one that I preached six years ago.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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