Greener Pastures

John 10:1-10

“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. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.” Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.

So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

We all know this metaphor—Jesus as the kind and gentle shepherd, leading us, protecting us. It’s such a common figure of speech, a common image even, Jesus is often portrayed in art with a staff and lambs by his side. Because this is such a familiar image, it’s easy to take it for granted, or to just kind of gloss over it and accept it without thinking about it too much. But it would’ve hit much harder for Jesus’ contemporaries, because it was a very realistic and apt metaphor. First of all, shepherds were a common job, and a noble one at that. It was a working-class job, but sheep were very valuable—they could provide clothing, milk, and meat—and shepherds had to do a lot of work to keep them rounded up and safe. Everything Jesus mentions in his metaphor would have been super clear and known to his audience: the sheepfold would have been a sort of stone corral where the sheep are kept safe after being out in the pastures; the sheep knowing the shepherd’s voice was also very real. The sheep got to know their shepherd’s voice and specific call, and knew to only answer to that. And ancient agrarian texts even show that shepherds did, in fact, know each of their sheep by name. So this is a very clear metaphor. And even we modern folks, without even being super familiar with this ancient art of shepherding can understand this metaphor; so that makes it even crazier that the Pharisees, the audience to which Jesus is speaking, didn’t understand what he was getting at… and we’ll touch on the reasons for that soon.

Now, with the knowledge that this metaphor might be clear, but not super meaningful for us today in the modern world. Al asked the question at Bible study on Monday, what could be a good parallel for us today. We all thought for a minute and found ourselves a little stumped. And then we started thinking about the reasons we were a stumped… we realized that maybe one of the reasons it’s so hard to think of something that makes sense for us today is that… we don’t want to be labeled as sheep. Sheep are docile, they’re followers by nature, easily corralled and manipulated. And sheep as long been an insult, insinuating those who are called sheep are shallow-thinkers, are followers who don’t think critically or intelligently, who are gullible, and believe everything they’re told. In the past decade or so, calling someone a sheep has gained even more traction, especially around the time the covid vaccines started to come out, and the Q-Anon conspiracies were entering the mainstream. Anyone who denied the outrageous, often antisemitic claims of conspiracy theories, or anyone who took the leap and trusted the science behind the covid vaccines was labeled a sheep.

With this in mind, let’s look at the bigger picture, the text that surrounds our passage for today, because this is definitely a case where when we look at the greater context, it really expands upon what’s truly going on here. Now, it may seem like this an easy starting point, but the lectionary has actually dropped us right in the middle of a story here. You may or may not have noticed that we don’t actually know who Jesus is speaking to here, without backing up a little. Just reading this on its own, you’d probably assume he’s talking to his disciples, but he’s actually talking to a group of very angry Pharisees— remember the Pharisees were the high-ranking priests and Jewish nobles who were essentially collaborators with the Roman Empire. And what’s just happened is that Jesus has performed a miracle, or, as they’re called in the gospel of John, a “sign.” He’s taken away a poor man’s blindness.  And the blind man is being interrogated by the Pharisees, who are deeply suspicious of him, and of this mysterious man who has healed him. This is that story, where instead of being amazed that Jesus made a blind man see, they’re angry that he did this on the Sabbath, and so they call him a sinner. They continue to grill this blind man, who doesn’t even defend Jesus really, he pretty much just keeps repeating, listen, I don’t know who this guy is, all I know is I was blind, and now I see. Finally, after seemingly trying to stay neutral, the formerly blind man says, “Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” Well, not surprisingly, this is not what the Pharisees wanted to hear. They yell at this guy, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” And they drive him out of the temple. They were only hearing what they wanted to hear; they were refusing to hear anything that challenged their narrative, that challenged their suspicions of this mysterious prophet and healer. And so they rid the temple of that challenge. But then, the challenge finds them.

Jesus, hearing the blind man had been driven out, goes to where it happened, and gives the Pharisees a cryptic little lecture in verses 39-41:

“…those who do not see may see and those who do see may become blind.” Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this and said to him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.

Jesus, as he is wont to do, turns the tables on the powerful. He tells them, you claim you can see, and yet you are the truly blind ones—you are blind to the truth, you are blind to all that could make this world a good place. And then Jesus continues with our passage today, this beautiful and very clear shepherd metaphor. And as it says, the Pharisees “did not understand what he was saying to them.” They don’t understand because they don’t want to understand. Understanding would mean giving up all the unjust power they’ve been hoarding in service to the oppressive Roman Empire.

In spite of their refusal to understand, Jesus continues his metaphor after our passage today ends, “I am the good shepherd,” he says, clear as day. He then goes onto compare himself as a good shepherd figure to a hired hand, “who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away… The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep.” This is a warning—don’t trust false prophets, don’t trust mercenaries who will take a job only to enrich themselves, and will sacrifice all those who follow him when things get hard, when danger closes in.

Not so surprisingly, the Pharisees don’t like this either. They take up rocks with the intention of stoning him, but Jesus still doesn’t back down—he starts referencing scripture to them, speaks truth upon truth, and their reaction is to try to have him arrested. He gets away, this time, but we know what’s to come.

One of the things that’s so tragically apparent in our world today is that it seems impossible to have civil discussion with people with whom we may not agree; and certainly this is one of the driving forces of division in this country. It can feel like you’re talking to a brick wall, it’s maddening. And I was thinking about this phenomenon when reading our passage for today—you have these powerful men who have seen a miracle take place, and yet they refuse to believe it happened, or they refuse to see it a good thing, because it doesn’t fit their narrative. It doesn’t fit the world they’ve built for themselves. It made me remember an article Chris showed me not too long ago, from the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen; it’s one he uses for his internet ethics class. It about algorithms and internet echo chambers, and there’s a term he coined called disagreement reinforcement mechanism. It’s essentially a fancy phrase for doubling down on something, even in the face of facts or any information contrary to your opinion or belief… but it goes a little beyond that. The people disavowing facts that are presented to them are, in fact, finding ways to make those facts paradoxically reinforce their false belief.

So in the case of Jesus and the Pharisees, especially in the case of healing the blind man, instead of recognizing that yes, of course this man is from God, he’s doing great things, they use the fact that he healed the blind man on the sabbath to reinforce their incorrect assertion that Jesus is a sinner. And we see so much of this today— the powerful manipulating or outright ignoring facts and statistics so they can hold onto their way of life. Because they’re scared and they’re threatened by people who are offering new, better ways of living for regular people. Because of those ways of life actually take hold, they might lose some of their power.

The Pharisees saw what Jesus could do, and they were angry; but more than angry, they were terrified. And when we’re angry and scared, when we’re threatened, we might act out. Now, hopefully we don’t resort to violence, but I’m sure we could all think of a time in which we’ve been proven wrong, or we’ve mistakenly done something that’s hurt someone, and instead of admitting we were wrong, or taking responsibility, we lash out or we get defensive, because our pride has been wounded, or because we don’t want to think of ourselves as the bad guys. The Pharisees had invested so much into the status quo, had invested so much into Roman rule that gave them the power they craved, the power that made them believe they were the good guys, the righteous ones, that they completely lost it when Jesus proves otherwise.

There’s a quote that floats around a lot that’s often attributed to John Steinbeck, but is likely a paraphrase, in which he claims that socialism never took root in America because the so many of the poor don’t see themselves as poor, but rather as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Now, this isn’t an argument for or against any new type of political order, but I was thinking of this  quote a lot while working on this sermon, because I think it shows just how deep these feelings of self-deception can go, and just how much people truly do not want to be so-called “sheep.” We would rather bootstrap than admit we need help, or admit our way of life may not be the ideal one. We would rather hurl insults at those who gently challenge our potentially incorrect notions of right and wrong.

In Nguyen’s article, to break the spell of the echo chamber and that that disagreement reinforcement mechanism kicking in, he writes, that one “would have to suspend belief in all their particular background knowledge and restart the knowledge-gathering process, treating all testimony as equally viable. They would need to, in a sense, throw away all their beliefs and start over again.”

So… become a blank slate, open to new and totally different concepts never entertained before. Not an easy task. Now, yes, Jesus tells us he did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it, but he was still asking his contemporaries to do something completely different—to think about what life could be, to think about a world with no more hierarchies or hatred or violence… to think about a world without death. It was more than people could handle. Those in power wouldn’t give up what they had, and those of lower social status who were against the values of Christ just couldn’t handle a new world, totally turned on its head, different from everything they had ever known.

Sheep has been used as a derogatory term for centuries, and its derogatory nature has certainly gained traction in the past decade or two. But our faith tells us that we need Jesus to lead us to greener pastures. Our faith tells us that we need to let go of the silly notion of power that we are always grasping at, and follow the commands of Christ. And those commands are not to prove yourself to be the best, the smartest, the strongest by any means necessary. Those commands are to love God, and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

The gentle voice of Jesus gets lost in the chaos and the tumult of our world. Remember just a few weeks ago on Easter, when Mary didn’t recognize Jesus until he said her name in the garden. We have to listen hard and with intention for the gentle shepherd’s voice in all the noise. And we have to be willing to follow. We have to be willing to give up some semblance of control and to understand that we need help, that we need guidance, and that we need each other.

I am the gate for the sheep, Jesus says, unequivocally. We could take this statement in bad faith and think of a gate as being exclusionary. But that’s not it at all. The gate is protection. The gate is, in this divinely paradoxical way, where we can finally be free of all that ails this broken world. So may we let go of our pride and our resistance to new ways of being. May we let go of our fear and our arrogance, and know that we need guidance, and we need each other. May we give in to the protection and the assistance, and the wisdom that we find in Christ, and in each other. May we understand that being one with the flock is, indeed, righteous. And may we make our way to green pastures of abundant life together. Amen.