May 8, 2014
The following is a homily for the weekend of Sunday, May 11.
The owner of the Clippers. The CEO of Target. Banks fined over a billion dollars. NBA coaches let go. Senators battling the CIA over secret files. Low popularity ratings for George W. Bush in his second term, and low popularity ratings for Barak Obama in his second term. The city of Sacramento in default, the city of Detroit bankrupt. These are not good days for leadership.
Jesus, giving us the image of the Good Shepherd, is doing more than alluding to a popular Psalm. He’s also talking to us about leadership. Both points that he makes challenge our modern ideas of leadership, which tend to aggrandize the leader. They say in 1920s, a chief officer made six times what executives made, now that number is twenty. “They earned it,” people say, because the stock price went up. They earn the ability to make millions while governments squabble over the minimum wage.
Jesus tells us that he is the sheep gate, that there is no other way to enter the pasture. The image echoes his words to Philip, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” Jesus is giving us a definitive path to follow – the path of his sacrificial, saving love. In the Gospel of John, Jesus gives us definitive signs of God’s presence and love, and none more definitive than his death on the cross. As he breathes out his last breath, it mingles with the breath he blows upon the Apostles after he rises: take my Spirit, my breath, my life – and make it your own! See how I give myself, in humble love. Give yourself in the same way.
To underscore this, Jesus brings up a second point, the contrast between the Shepherd who belongs to his sheep, and the hired mercenaries who are only doing their jobs. The Shepherd serves out of love and personal connection; the mercenary serves only because of the coins he will get at the end of the day. Leadership is not only loving, it also is generous. The leader looks to nothing but the chance to serve others; the Shepherd gives his life for the sheep because he stays with them, faithful and enduring.
In a world where most of us work for salaries, we surely can point to many who do their jobs not because of what they get paid, but because of the noble purpose they serve. Police and firemen, soldiers and many in the medical profession, teachers and those who give themselves to serving others in the name of God – clergy and religious. Parents instinctually will do anything for their children. But even among the most generous of us, there can sneak in the tiniest “What do I get out of it?” feeling.
So Jesus says: enter the pasture, find out what my kingdom is about, and continue searching the ways in which your life can echo mine. Peter even urges his readers not to worry about their sufferings; we have a God greater than all of those. And that God is revealed in the gracious self-gift of Jesus who has only one thing to gain – humankind redeemed, renewed, and saved. As we reflect on our own attitudes toward work and serving others, Jesus invites us to renew the Easter vision – humankind risen in his resurrection, the Kingdom coming about in our lives.
Few of us, I think, would have made it as shepherds – cold nights, hot days, hours of boredom, sleeping in fields and on rocks. But those inconveniences are little compared to the invitation Jesus gives us – go live for others, to live selflessly, and to find that in putting ourselves aside, we discover what God’s love is about.