Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
Palm Sunday, April 16, 2000

Palm Sunday is traditionally the time to commemorate the event attested in three of the four canonical Gospels, when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, while the crowds who had come into Jerusalem to celebrate Passover lined up on both sides of the street and gave him the ancient equivalent of a ticker-tape parade, waving palm branches. This was the high point of Jesus' public ministry as the Gospels tell it; he was the darling of the crowds then. In John's telling, he had just raised Lazarus from the dead, so it's easy to see how he would be something of a hero. Yet within a week he would be betrayed, arrested, tried, convicted, and executed. Quite a trip down in fortune.

This morning I want to focus on another aspect of Jesus, which I think represents his high point in the later Universalist tradition as exemplified by the only image of Jesus to be displayed in this church, the stained-glass window behind me depicting Jesus as the Good Shepherd. I want to show how the idea of the Good Shepherd proceeds from core values of Universalism, and is still very close to the heart of our movement as expressed in our first principle, the respect for the inherent worth and dignity of the individual person, whether or not we want to keep Jesus in the picture today. I don't think I'm going to place the same interpretation on this window as my Methodist predecessor did in 1940, but maybe I'll give us some contemporary insight on how we can look at it today.

First, though, a little context. The ancient near east, from which both Hebrew Bible and the New Testament originate, was a mixed agricultural and pastoral society. In evolutionary perspective, all creatures have to figure out how to eat or they quickly become extinct. Where human society subsisted in the hunter-gatherer phase, humans got the plants and animals they consumed for food about the same way that other animals did, by finding them in the wild and killing them. The first step away from hunter-gatherers was the pastoral society, when humans first started domesticating animals to use for food, clothing and other needs. A pastoral society does not need a permanent relationship with a particular piece of land, but is quite content with a nomadic existence. In human economic organization, the step from hunter/gatherer to pastoral is not nearly as large as the next step, from pastoral to agricultural. When humans begin cultivating crops, they have to have different relations to the land and this implies a very different social organization, one which can give rise to hierarchies. I have spoken before about the tensions between pastoralists and farmers, which are mythologized in Genesis in the story of Cain and Abel, sons of Adam and Eve. Cain was a farmer and Abel was a herdsman. Both brought to God the first products of their labor, but Abel's offering of the fat of his lambs was more acceptable to God than Cain's offering of the first fruits of his land. So Cain becomes jealous and kills Abel. The story goes on to tell about how God asks Cain where Abel is, and Abel replies with the question that echoes down through the ages: how should I know, am I my brother's keeper? This myth reflects profound tensions between pastoral and agricultural ways of life in the ancient near east.

Now when I look at a story about Jesus or attributed to Jesus, I try to look at what the context was in which the writer of the story is writing. So when we look at the image of the Good Shepherd in the New Testament, we read it against the backdrop of two famous passages from the Hebrew Bible that would have been familiar to the readers of Matthew, and to Jesus' original audience. One is the 23rd Psalm, of which we heard two choral settings today.

Next to the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm is probably the most-memorized passage in the Bible. In the two rotations I have done as a hospital chaplain, I have found that this passage is the one that people ask for when they are in need of comfort. If you are gathered around the bedside of a dying patient with the family present, and you start the 23rd Psalm, most of the people in the room will join in from memory, regardless of their present religious affiliation.

And it is easy to see why. The image of the Lord as a shepherd is one of protection and comfort. This is really the origin of the image behind me. Who among us does not need this kind of comfort at some point in our lives? When things have broken down for us, when the people we thought we could trust have turned against us, when we're not sure we can find the strength to go on, don't we want someone to guide us, to make us lie down in green pastures, to lead us beside the still waters, to restore our souls?

The language is beautiful and poetic, in part because it is so reassuring. I think this language would certainly have been familiar to the people for whom Matthew wrote.

The second passage in the Hebrew Bible that forms a context for the shepherd story is the bit from Ezekiel we read today. In it, the prophet says he was told by God to prophesy against the shepherds of Israel. The problem with the shepherds, it seems, is that they are selfish. They put their own welfare ahead of those of the sheep. God, speaking through Ezekiel, gives this indictment:

"You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatling, but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them." [Ezek. 34:3-4]

What is going on here? This is clearly not a critique of shepherding practices, but a political and moral statement. It is thought that this part of Ezekiel was written after Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians in 587 B.C.E. It is part of a larger catalogue of the way that Israel fell away from God and thus brought calamity on itself.

For our purposes, the interesting thing is that Ezekiel sets up the idea of the Good Shepherd versus the Bad Shepherd. The Good Shepherd puts the welfare of the herd ahead of his own. The Bad Shepherd lets the herd scatter and get eaten by wolves.

Later in the passage, God says that if the shepherds of Israel won't do their job properly, God will take over.

"For thus says the Lord God, I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out...I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness." [Ezek. 34:11-12]

This sets up the image of God as being a better shepherd than the human shepherds, looking after the sheep in any place they may have scattered.

It was against the context of these passages that Jesus spoke and the New Testament Gospel writers wrote. Now I make the distinction between what Jesus said and what the writers wrote very deliberately. As I said in discussing the Gospel of Q, we don't have a tape recorder to play back as to what Jesus said, and so we are forced to interpolate among the various texts we are left.

When I asked my Christian colleagues at the clergy association meeting last week about this subject, they steered me both to the Ezekiel passage but also to the Gospel of John. In the 10th chapter of that Gospel, Jesus has an extended metaphor where he says that he is that he is the gate to the sheepfold. He also says explicitly, "I am the Good Shepherd."

10:1 "Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. 10:2 The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. 10:3 The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 10:4 When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. 10:5 They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers." 10:6 Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them. 10:7 So again Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. 10:8 All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. 10:9 I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. 10:10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. 10:11 "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. 10:12 The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away--and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. 10:13 The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep. 10:14 I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, 10:15 Just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. 10:16 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. 10:17 For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. 10:18 No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father."

In this passage, the writer of John is, to my mind, clearly trying to link Jesus to the Hebrew Bible passages we have been considering, but he does it in a heavy-handed and supercessionist way which does not sit well with me. When I say supercessionist, I am referring to the claim that the new covenant between God and humanity presented by Christ supercedes the old covenant between God and the children of Israel. Now I think the supercessionist claim is a big place where orthodox Christianity went off the teachings of Jesus, and I think that a part of orthodox Christianity in the last few years is beginning to recognize this. Universalists in particular, with our off-center cross, aren't going to be too enthusiastic about an interpretation of Jesus which says that he is the sole path to salvation, and these words are put in Jesus' mouth here in John.

So I go prefer to go back to the parable of the ninety-nine sheep from Matthew which we read this morning, for it also has echoes of the Ezekiel and of the 23rd Psalm, but does not have the supercessionist overtones. The passage also appears in Luke in a different setting, but it has no parallel in Mark. That means that it was probably part of what? (the answer is the Gospel of Q)

Let's look at the language:

"What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that is astray?"

The shepherd in this passage is not identified with Jesus or with God. It is simply a shepherd, and finding the lost sheep is simply what a good shepherd does. It is presented not as a commandment from on high, but as a thought exercise: What doe you think? What Jesus is saying is, isn't this just common sense? Wouldn't any shepherd do the same?

Maybe this idea wasn't in the minds of those who installed the window in 1940, but it might work for us today. Yes, the window depicts Jesus, but any one of us can be Jesus. Any one of us can be the Good Shepherd.

And I think this idea is inherent in Ezekiel, too. God is saying you haven't been good shepherds, and I'm going to have to step in and take over. But God definitely allows that the humans can be good shepherds, if they only will. In other words, I think Jesus in the parable of the lost sheep is putting forth principles that are essentially Jewish.

For that is one of the most promising ways to look at Jesus, as a great rabbi. We know that the Golden Rule, which is attributed to Jesus by the gospels and by popular opinion, was actually devised by Rabbi Hillel some eighty years previously.

But this is not only Jesus at his most Jewish, it is also Jesus at his most Universalist as well. For Universalism's bedrock idea is universal salvation. None of its sheep are lost. No matter how far they stray from what we may regard as correct belief, or proper behavior, they will nevertheless be saved in the end. That is a powerful and a radical idea, and it is not dependent on thinking of God or Jesus as in charge or in thinking of ourselves as sheep.

This is why the Universalists have historically been interested in prison reform and have been adamantly opposed to the death penalty from the earliest times. Here, for example is Dr. Benjamin Rush writing in 1791:

"A belief in God's universal love to all is creatures, and that he will finally restore all of them that are miserable to happiness, is a polar truth. It leads to truths upon all subjects, more especially upon the subject of government. It establishes the equality of mankind – it abolishes the punishment of death for any crime – and converts jails into houses of repentance and reformation." [quoted in George Hunston Williams American Universalism (Boston: Skinner House 1976) p.59.

At the present time more than two million of our fellow human beings are incarcerated in jails and prisons that are little more than cattle barns. This is almost one percent of the population, one out of every hundred of us. While we the ninety-nine sit back in unconcern. Are we being good shepherds, or are we so busy fleecing each other we don't have the time or will to think of the ones who have gone astray?

Looking at our lives today at the end of the 20th Century or beginning of the 21st, we can see that the parable of the lost sheep amounts to nothing less than the First Principle of our association, by which we covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every human being. We are all tempted at times to try to make exceptions in the absoluteness of this value. We are tempted to float theories such as this: when a person does so-and-so, he forfeits his right to have me promote his inherent worth and dignity. No, then the worth and dignity is not inherent. If we can strip it from him by an act of thought or will, it is not inherent.

So this warm and fuzzy image, Jesus holding the little lamb, if it is based on the parable of the lost sheep, sets out an ethic for us that is anything but warm and fuzzy: it is quite tough. It answers the question Cain posed to God: yes, we are our brother's keeper. And our sister's as well. We are the sheep and we are the shepherds. When one of us in is trouble we all are in trouble. Can we live this standard in our lives. Can we be responsible for each other?

Does this mean we have to abolish all prisons? Does this mean I have to give money to every panhandler, turn over my house to every homeless person, accept every person into every organization in which I have a voice regardless of suitability? Maybe yes and maybe no – I can't draw the lines for you, I can only point out that this is where this image points to me.

In addition, I think the image of the good shepherd works on another level, one that may be even less comfortable for us. Stop and think for a second. We wonder about the purpose of our lives – it is one of the most important religious questions, if not the most important. And we don't just wonder about why we are here, we also wonder about the purpose of almost everything else -- the flowers and the frogs and the birds and the lions, why they are here.

But not sheep. Sheep are different. Sheep have a clear purpose. That purpose is to clothe and feed human beings. Sheep are not directly created by humans, but they are bred and kept by humans, for humans, as is true of all other domestic animals.

So if the 23rd Psalm and the other biblical passages and this window behind me are making the analogy that we are sheep and God or Jesus is the shepherd, it is saying that we indeed have a purpose, and that purpose is to serve God. The purpose may not be known to us, it may be known only to God. But there is a purpose, and it is not our purpose, but God's.

There is something profound in this, and I think it is part of the resonance of the image. However, if we follow this line of analogy just a little further, we would reach the conclusion that God is keeping us in this world so that he can slaughter us and eat us. That's not a very comfortable thought; it's actually the converse of the orthodox Christian notion that Jesus is the sacrificial lamb. In the sacrifice, God consumes the animal which is offered up. This notion of Jesus as the successor to animal sacrifice finds expression in the liturgy of the Eucharist.

Now I expect that most of us come-outers from orthodox Protestant or Catholic backgrounds who learned about all these ideas in catechism class are pretty grossed out by the idea of eating Jesus' body and blood in the communion service. The taboo against cannibalism is pretty strong in most of us. Even in extreme conditions such as a shipwreck or plane crash, most of us would starve to death before consuming human flesh. And we would even feel queasy about eating meat from an animal if we had known or even seen the animal before.

But from another perspective, eating an animal is a very intimate interaction with it, perhaps the most intimate we can have. I had a Navajo friend in law school who told me that his religion required him to eat meat, but always to talk to the spirit of the dead animal as he ate.

Even if the purpose of a sheep is to be eaten, can we see ourselves as God's sheep? Maybe it isn't such a bad thing to be eaten in the end, if it is God that is doing the eating. Maybe that's all we can desire in life: being fed, kept safe from wolves, made to lie down in green pastures, being led beside the still waters, having our souls restored, and then ending up on a serving platter on God's banquet table. As Mary Oliver wrote,

"Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?"

To be in the end consumed by God may be the whole point of life. And it's all there in this window, if we can see it.

Amen.