John 10:11-21 "When the Wolf Comes . . ." Scott Hoezee

Those of you who are familiar with art may recall a funny habit which many Medieval painters practiced for quite a long time in Europe, and particularly in Germany. Artists such as Lukas Cranach and others painted many depictions of biblical scenes but they did so with the curious twist of dressing the biblical characters in the contemporary garb of the Middle Ages. So in one Cranach painting of which I have a copy, you see Mary and Joseph tending to their newborn son in a Bethlehem stable. You also see shepherds and others in the picture but every last one of them looks like a then-contemporary European. The men are wearing tights, silk shirts with puffy sleeves, and those big hats common to that era. All in all it was an interesting way to contemporize ancient stories.

But that mixing up of the old with the new and the past with the current must also have caused some eyebrows to be raised. Can you imagine what most conservative Christians today would say if some artist painted a portrait depicting Joseph in a pair of Gap jeans, Mary wearing Ralph Lauren blouse, and the magi in snappy suits from Armani?! There would almost surely be an outcry. You should not import the holy, sacred images of Scripture into a contemporary setting like that. It creates confusion, doesn't seem terribly respectful. And anyway we perhaps risk "losing" something of the original presentation by mixing it up with the trappings of our modern world.

But in a real way can we even avoid looking at the old through the lens of what is current? Tonight we arrive at the most famous metaphor for Jesus in the Bible: the good shepherd. I said last week that most of us have likely seen one form or another of this particular image depicted countless times in most of the churches we have ever visited, on greeting cards, in artwork, and in many more places besides.

The odd thing, though, is that although the world still has shepherds in it, the experience of being with a shepherd is as foreign to most of us as being with a real cowboy in Idaho or with some Eskimo fishermen in Alaska. We know that such people exist, but we don't have much to do with them and so their jobs and lifestyles don't loom terribly large on our mental horizon most days. We know far more about teachers, lawyers, doctors, business people, and accountants than we do about shepherds.

In a few minutes we will deal with that wrinkle, but first notice yet another aspect of this famous image which may likewise be foreign to our modern world. Whenever Jesus uses the pastoral image of a shepherd for himself, the point is nearly always the same: as the good shepherd of his sheep, he will risk his life and even temporarily abandon the flock if that's what it takes to save the one lost sheep. As the true shepherd who loves his sheep, he will let himself be killed rather than see one single sheep harmed. In every image of the flock which Jesus employs it is always clear that as important as the whole flock is, each individual sheep is as important to him as is the larger collective.

But many folks today don't think that way at all. Instead we hear about giant corporations which do cost-benefit analyses for their products. They calculate how much risk they can get away with in an effort to pad the bottom line by not having to lay out any extra money for additional safeguards. So food companies have been known to let certain products hit the market despite their knowing right up front that there is a slight risk that certain people could well get sick from this food and maybe even die. But if the percentage of people at risk for that is small enough as to be statistically insignificant, then they forge ahead. Politicians often live by polls and so base some pretty big decisions on projected outcomes. Even if some people may be disadvantaged by this or that program cut, if the majority will benefit (and so vote the right way once again at the next election), then those who will be harmed are back-handed aside as statistically irrelevant.

Ours is a world which looks to see how much it can get away with. Ours is a society where the majority rules and the minority had best just learn to live with it. But not so with Jesus as the good shepherd. A cost-benefit analysis would never cause the shepherd to leave the 99 sheep on their own for a few minutes in favor of finding the one lost lamb. If the shepherd had a risk-management committee, they would never advise him to let the wolf kill the shepherd but would say you could better survive to fight another day even if for the time being the wolf nabbed a sheep or two.

In other words, ours is a world and a society made up of hired hands with very few true shepherds around any more. We just don't love every single sheep near enough. But that is only one-half of our modern-day problem with Jesus as our shepherd. The other difficulty is that in a world of so-called "self-made individuals," many people are not exactly looking for someone else to lead them around.

Instead, ours is a time where we expect others to meet us where we are. The customer mentality has now taken over everything from college campuses to church sanctuaries. "I want it my way right way (and by the way, I alone will determine what 'my way' is.") Even our concept of a pastor has changed. Of course, the very word "pastor" means "shepherd" but as many observers of the American church scene have noted, pastors today don't lead so much as they follow. What people want in a pastor today, David Wells claims, is a pollster who holds up two moist fingers to see which way the congregational wind is blowing. He does not take the congregation anywhere but instead goes to where people already are so as to meets their felt needs. What kind of worship service should we have? What kinds of topics need to be addressed in sermons? Well, take a survey and then design liturgies and sermons around the poll results.

As Garry Wills notes, go into any bookstore and you will find dozens of books on leadership but none on followership. Everyone wants to be a leader, but no one wants to be led. We even sneer at those who get a "free ride," who inherit what they have. "He's just running his daddy's business; she's riding so-and-so's coattails."

So the imagery of shepherds and of sheep, of being led so that we do not scatter out into our own little individual directions: all of this kind of language seems like an echo from another time, another world. It's a little like what you hear whenever a teenager says he is going to "dial" his friend's phone number. Because in truth very few people under the age of 18 have ever used a rotary phone which you really do have to dial. To speak of "dialing" a phone is to employ a linguistic anachronism--that phrase is an echo of a bygone world that did not yet know about touch tone phones and digital keypads.

The image of the good shepherd could be like that, too: it's an echo from another world. Were you to quote John 10 to some people today, they would stare blankly at you for the same reason a teenager would look a bit bewildered if you talked about changing the needle on your record player's tone arm. A laser-driven compact disc world does not resonate to outdated talk of LPs and turntables. So also a world of fast cars and asphalt superhighways may have trouble relating to shepherds and pastures.

But has the need for an all-caring, all-wise leader really faded? Perhaps the imagery seems outdated, but has humanity in the modern world really outgrown its need for someone to love us fiercely and forever the way only a truly good shepherd can? In our quiet and secret moments, we yearn for someone stronger and wiser to take care of us. As Neal Plantinga once wrote, those of us who were raised in solid and good homes carry around with us the memory of how delicious it was to be tucked into our cozy beds at night without worries that would threaten our rest. Kids go to bed without fretting about whether ice will back up under the shingles, or whether the forecasted heavy weather will turn violent, or whether the bills can be paid, or whether someone at the IRS might just find that one tax deduction a bit too creative. No, as children we wriggled drowsily in our beds awash in the knowledge that someone else was in charge and so we happily allowed ourselves to slip over the edge of slumber the way only a child can, with literally no cares to make our minds too busy to sleep.

We adults carry that memory in our sub-conscious and we yearn for something like it again. Indeed, we pine for it even more acutely because now we know what it is like to live without that security. Now we know what it's like to wait for results from the pathology lab. Now we know what it's like to watch a deadly storm roar ever closer on the TV's radar scope. Now maybe we've gone through the pain of having to bid first grandparents and then parents and finally even friends a final goodbye.

Has our need for a good shepherd really faded just because our familiarity with sheep and shepherds is not as acute as was perhaps true for the people who first heard these words spoken by Jesus? Hardly. We still live in a dangerous world. Wolves abound. Our nation put one such wolf to sleep last week in the person of Timothy McVeigh. But whether you regard that as justice or yet another tragic death, whether you nodded your head on Monday at his having gotten what he deserved or shook your head over yet another killing, the fact is that there were plenty of fellow wolves out there who understand full well why McVeigh did what he did and who howl their predictions that more of the same may yet come.

So long as there are wolves in this world, so long as life out in the pasturelands remains dangerous, we will never be done with the need for a good shepherd. We will never come to a day when we will not need someone who will care for us no matter what. We need someone who can see every wolf that runs our way and who will get killed himself rather than abandon any one of us sheep as statistically insignificant. We need someone with the vision and the wisdom to lead us safely through the landmine-pocked landscapes of life in a world which is as bewildering as this one often proves to be.

Unless you really think that it is easy to see your way clearly through the multiple ethical quagmires that technology and genetic engineering are creating, then you need to be led around by someone vastly smarter than you. Unless you really think that you on your own can resolve the toughest questions of justice which confront us today, then you need a shepherd you can trust to lead you along toward that better day when justice will roll down live a mighty river and flood every street and back alley of this creation.

Jesus is, of course, that very shepherd. And he is our good shepherd not merely because he says he is but because he now looks the part in a way he didn't on that day in John 10. When we opened this series, I commented that if you look closely in John's gospel, you will discover that following every one of the "I Am" sayings which we love so much, Jesus gets put down, derided, roughed up, sneered at. So also here: Jesus utters a saying of such lyric power that it has made tears leap to the eyes of believers for two millennia now. But when first Jesus said these words, they called him a lunatic, a demoniac, Satan's little helper. Jesus, after all, was a carpenter, not a shepherd. And anyway, anyone who walked around Palestine calling himself everything from a loaf of bread to a sheep gate to a beam of light was clearly someone whose mental crankcase was at least a quart low. Follow him?! Trust him to lead you anywhere? Well, only if the loony bin is where you wanted to end up in the first place.

But now we see Jesus in a new light. Now he very much looks the part of the good shepherd because he has laid down his life for the sheep. He laid down his life for Judas, who sold him out. He laid his life down for Peter, who disavowed every laying eyes on Jesus. He laid his life down for every disciple who turned tail and scattered into the night when Jesus was arrested. And he laid his life down for every last one of us despite the multiple ways we betray him, deny him, embarrass him all the time. So great is the love in this shepherd's heart that when he saw the ultimate wolf coming our way, he threw his body down and got killed instead of us. This is one whose shepherd's crook is now shaped like a cross, and we follow him because now we have seen the love he has for us.

As we noted earlier, our lack of familiarity with sheep and shepherds means that when we get to passages like Psalm 23 or John 10, preachers like me often need to re-educate people on the nature of the pastoral life. Along the way in such sermons, we've probably all heard sheep described as being pretty dumb. But according to shepherds, sheep are not dumb at all--at least no more so than other animals. It's just that caring for sheep requires a different technique. Cattle, for instance, need to be driven from behind, the way you see it being done in those old Western movies as cowboys on horses gallop behind the herd, jeering and hooting at the cows to keep them moving in the direction they need to go.

Not so with sheep--they prefer to be led. Sheep, it seems, have an uncanny ability to form a trusting relationship with their shepherds. I'm told that a flock of sleeping sheep will not stir in the least if their shepherd steps gingerly through their midst. But let a stranger so much as set foot in the flock, and the sheep will startle awake as though shot.

In the Middle East to this day you can sometimes see three or four Bedouin shepherds and their flocks all arrive at a watering hole at about the same time. The sheep quickly mix and mingle together until the three or four individual flocks have disappeared in favor of forming one big mega-flock. But the shepherds don't fret this mix-up. Because when it's time to go, each shepherd gives his own distinctive whistle or sings his own unique little song, and immediately his sheep leave the others behind, form back into their own flock, and follow the shepherd they've come to trust.

A shepherd will tell you that when going through new territory, sheep like to know that the shepherd is going first--that way they feel safer proceeding themselves. "The Lord is my shepherd," the psalmist wrote. "I am the good shepherd," Jesus said. And both Bible passages are talking about the same person: our God who is now become Jesus Christ the cosmic Lord of lords.

We've maybe never met a real shepherd and perhaps we go through most of our days not in the least picturing ourselves as sheep. But no matter how much the world has changed since Jesus' day, this much has remained the same: it is still a world of hunger and want, of confusion and dead-end roads, of wolves and fierce enemies that wait to leap at us in the dark of night. We still need a sure guide who goes ahead of us so that we can feel more secure proceeding forward ourselves. It's not dumb to want your shepherd to go first, it's smart--eternally smart.

Some of Jesus' fellow Jews in John 10 were wrong in the extreme when they called Jesus full of the devil. But one thing is now certain for us latter-day readers of John 10: Jesus our shepherd certainly looks like he has met up with the devil. The marks of that particular wolf are all over Jesus. Yet he lives. He lives, and so will we if only we follow Jesus, the Good Shepherd of all this universe's precious sheep. Amen.