John 10:11 “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”
I remember when I was young boy, me and one of my close mates would always borrow each other’s toys. And one week he’d got this amazing new Buzz Lightyear toy and I’d just got a brand new toy and so we were like, let’s swap and I’ll take your Buzz Lightyear for a few days and you can have my hot-wheels or whatever it was. And it was an amazing toy, it had a button that if you pushed it the wings popped out and he said ‘to infinity and beyond!’
I got it home and, to be honest, although I could see that it was fantastic, I wasn’t really into Buzz Lightyear and I’d only wanted it because I could see how much my friend had loved it, but because I didn’t really want it I didn’t treat it like it was mine. It was in my possession but I didn’t treat it like it was my toy; I didn’t take quite as much care of it as perhaps I should. I forgot about how cool it was on day one and on day two I thought it might be fun to use Buzz Lightyear to test a parachute I’d made and felt pretty confident in, on the concrete steps outside the house onto the patio. Poor old Buzz Lightyear took one pretty heavy fall onto the patio and ended up decapitated, and missing a leg, with a voice that sounded a bit slurred.
Immediate regret kicked in as my friend knocked on the door and his fancy new toy had become a used crashtest dummy with just a torso left, whereas my hot-wheels car looked, frankly, like he’d polished it. In fact I think I ended up blaming the state of the car on my baby brother just to alleviate some of the guilt. When I eventually did produce this tortured, miserable looking Buzz Lightyear, my friend bust into tears more at the PTSD of the traumatic sight of him than even the fact his toy was broke. Needless to say my friend didn’t let me borrow any of his toys again.
Isn’t it interesting, the attitude we sometimes take over things that are borrowed, compared to the things we own. When we own or take ownership of a thing, we bare responsibility for it, we protect it and cherish it. Even if only for a short time. Think of the pressure you feel under when somebody puts their baby in your arms as, for a few moments, you have ownership of the safety of that child, you are responsible for them. Well, brothers and sisters, that’s what Jesus says he does for us. He doesn’t pick us up half-heartedly with the intention of fleeting us go, he picks us up to keep us, to fight for us and to die for us.
Let’s look at our gospel reading. When Jesus says ‘I am the good shepherd’ he’s making a number of bold claims, as he is with each of the “I am” statements in John which all link back to the Exodus revelation of who God is and here, in Jesus, God is revealing something of who he is. This statement says a lot. I am the bread and I am the water we kind of get because bread and water still have significance to us but probably most of the people in this room don’t know any shepherds and definitely don’t know any from Israel in the 1st century.
Being a shepherd was a low class job. It was a dirty job and it was a dangerous job. We know a bit of that probably from sermons on the Christmas story, that shepherds were ordinary people, and so it’s interesting that that’s how God is describing himself, but actually he’s saying more than that. Like I say, being a shepherd was a dangerous job. When you were out in the mountains with the sheep there were wolves out there who wanted your sheep, and bears, and in Africa, lions too. That’s leaving aside the robbers, poachers and thieves who lived up in the hills. Being a shepherd meant taking your sheep out into the hills so they could live and putting your own life at risk. They often didn’t directly own the sheep themselves, but their livelihood depended on them.
Now, hired hands, of course, were not the same as shepherds, the hired hands didn’t affiliate themselves with that group of sheep. They weren’t their sheep, so when danger reared its head, the hired hands would do a runner. It wasn’t worth risking their lives for someone else’s sheep, and the point Jesus really tries to make is that he isn’t like those guys, Jesus is going to lay down his life for his sheep. He’s here to stay, he’s going to stick it out because we, the people who follow him, are his sheep and he takes responsibility for us. When the wolf appears, he’s not going anywhere, Jesus is going to get in the way and die for us.
Jesus is here to stay for us, even today, that’s what he did at Easter. Now for the people hearing this, they’d probably have heard of shepherds who did this sort of thing, as well as known people who’d run off and let sheep get massacred, so for them this would be an obvious message, Jesus is steadfast for his people. He takes ownership.
It’s a bit like that Buzz Lightyear toy I borrowed. I wasn’t really invested in it so I didn’t really take care of it. Or maybe you could think about it like this:
Some people, when they rent out a home, you’ll be able to tell that it’s rented because they don’t put as much time into the upkeep of that house or the grounds. Some people who rent (and I think I can understand the feeling, this isn’t a judgement on them but rather a fact of life), when they rent a property you can sometimes tell because the garden gets totally overgrown. There’s sometimes a mentality of ‘oh well, it’s not mine so who cares,’ even though they live in the house. They live there and, although of course they don’t own the property, they also don’t take ownership or responsibility of the property.
Meanwhile, there are some who live in the property and, although they don’t own it, they treat it like their own. They repaint when the walls look thin, they make the garden look immaculate, they dust and keep it clean. Even though they don’t own the property they take ownership of it. That’s how Jesus is with us. He’s taking ownership of us and if that means giving up his life then that’s what it means.
The reason I say all this is because we’re meant to be his sheep, we’re meant to go where he goes and we’re meant to do the same with the people around us. We’re meant to take ownership. A lot of people come to Church and they tick along and let things happen to them but they never really take responsibility for their own spiritual health. Things just sort of happen to them. Their spiritual lives are overgrown and they’re waiting for God to come and do something for them. They’re living like hired hands or like me with that Buzz Lightyear. They’ve got the gift of Jesus but they’re not caring for it; they’re not praying or reading the bible, they’re not trying to follow Jesus and lead other to him.
Take ownership of your faith today, brothers and sisters. Stand up and take responsibility. Don’t wait for your Priest. We can use this time to say that you are going to follow the good shepherd and like him, we’re going to give everything for our faith. We’re going to take responsibility for this church, for the people who have started to come. We’re going to stand up for them even if it means giving our all. Just like Jesus did for each of us.
Jesus died so that we could be saved. So that we could come close to God and bring others close to him too. So praise him, give him your all and lead others to follow him too.
Blessings,
Fr Jordan
All Saints Church Chorley 