Help! ... I call him Jesus.

A Homily for Easter 4C 

April 21, 2013

From the words of the Gospel:

"You do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me."

On Easter, everyone wrote a question on a card that they would ask God, which I said I would balk about during the homily time.  Thirty one really good questions were turned in.

The question for today is: 

  
Why, if most people believe in God, do they hate each other?  They may choose to call him or her what ever they want, but he is the same.  He wants peace and love through the whole world.  Why?  Is it a human thing?  And free will?  Why?  I do not understand because I am one of them.  Help! Because I am broken.  (They call God by different names.  I call him Jesus.)

Well, what do you think? 

I think it’s a huge question with lots of room for disagreement.  But I think it’s a question we might all want to ask God.   And I think it would be good, as usual, to start with the scripture for today and see if we can at least pick up some clues, and then come back. 

All the scriptures for today have one focus.  Every year, the fourth Sunday after Easter is called _________ ??? (Good Shepherd Sunday.)  And the focus is on God and Jesus as the Good Shepherd. 

The Reading from Acts is a story of Peter acting in the power and compassion and spirit of Jesus to raise a little girl from the dead.  (Or actually to “resuscitate” a little girl from the dead.)  This reading is actually part of a series of Sunday readings from the book of  Acts  which more or less stand on their own, but it’s not hard on Good Shepherd Sunday, to see the courage and compassion of Jesus, the Good Shepherd, working through Peter.

The Psalm for today is “The Lord is my Shepherd,” a Psalm about God’s shepherding of the psalmist, who in the end, is anointed by God as a shepherd himself!   

The reading from Revelation is about Jesus as the sacred Lamb who becomes the sacred Shepherd. 

And the Gospel of John is a snippet from a Good Shepherd discourse by Jesus, 

which identifies Jesus as “the Good Shepherd.”  

The point of Good Shepherd Sunday is to contemplate the ongoing presence of the resurrected Jesus as One who shepherds his sheep.  

The experience of the apprentices of Jesus who first used this metaphor to describe him, was a sense of his ongoing presence, guidance, patience, protection, compassion, and leading as they faced the challenges of discipleship.  

And their experience can be our experience as we get to know Jesus for ourselves.  If we pay attention, we notice that we are not alone in this world. The early followers of Jesus, in the freshness of their experience, invite us to ask ourselves when, in the for better and the for worse of life, have we sensed that we are being shepherded from beyond?  This is an experience we can hope to celebrate, too. 

To go deeper, however, John's language about Jesus as a good shepherd is not just a sweet pastoral image.  In the generations before Jesus, the prophets were exposing the leaders of Israel as “bad” shepherds.  They increasingly condemned the leaders of Israel for exploiting the people rather than caring for them.

Ezekiel says, 

“Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: ... I am against the shepherds; and I will demand my sheep at their hand, and put a stop to their feeding the sheep; no longer shall the shepherds feed themselves. I will rescue my sheep from their mouths, so that they may not be food for them.... I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep... I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy.”

True to their reputation, the leaders of Israel in John’s time had collaborated with the Roman empire to oppress the marginalized - even their own.  In contrast, Jesus was the ideal leader, the “good” Shepherd. 

In fact, in the Gospel reading for today, John uses the term “the Jews” to refer, not to all Jews in general, but to the religious leaders. Remember:  John himself was a Jew, and the early Jesus movement was Jewish.  So the “Jews” that John refers to as the unbelievers,  are not ALL Jews, but the “bad shepherds” (the corrupt leaders) and those who follow the “bad shepherds,” in contrast to Jesus the “good shepherd” and to those who considered themselves followers of Jesus. 

It is one of the tragedies of history, however, that as Christianity turned into a Gentile movement, scriptures like the Reading today from John, became the basis for polarizing Gentile Christians against their own Jewish heritage and their own Jewish brothers and sisters.  

And in just such way, history has repeated itself over and over, from century to century, from religion to religion, from nation to nation. (Christians against Jews, Christians against Muslims, Muslims against Christians...)  

The self-seeking behavior of a few, the generalization to the many, the fragile process of self-differentiation and identity formation by groups, culture gaps, socioeconomic gaps, power differentials, generalized fear, generalized resentment, generalized stereotyping, polarization, prejudice, suspicion, hatred, violence, war. 

And yes, in spite of some of the early, immature images of Gods (even the Hebrew God) as a Warrior God, the irony is that they all believe in a higher power, who (or which) ultimately calls them all to compassion and unity, until, as Jesus says in John, “there will be one flock, and one Shepherd.” 

From a slightly different angle, in reflecting on the question of the day, there is also the need of the ego (both personal and collective) to be right, often by proving others wrong, and by oversimplifying all reality into black and white, right and wrong, good and bad, so that we can more easily define ourselves as “good” and others as “bad”, rather than as the honest fact that we are all a mixture of both, and that the real “enemy” isn’t out there where we project it, but within ourselves.  (“We have met the enemy, and it is us.”) 

The fundamentalist mentality, which infects all religions, is simply the mentality that is driven by this ego need to oversimplify right and wrong, and to paint ourselves as right by painting others as wrong, to see “heaven” as a reward reserved for those who are right rather than as the utopia, the nirvana, the beatific vision of all people, all creation, coming together, healing our divisions and overcoming the things that divide us, both from within and without; the restoring of human beings with human beings, the integration of hearts and minds, bodies and souls, the reconciliation of all creation with itself and with God. 

So how would you answer the question? 

Why, if most people believe in God, do they hate each other?  They may choose to call him or her what ever they want, but he is the same.  He wants peace and love through the whole world.  Why?  Is it a human thing?  And free will?  Why?  I do not understand because I am one of them.  Help! Because I am broken.  (They call God by different names.  I call him Jesus.)

The simplest response I can think of is that most of humanity still functions at the level of consciousness where our egos are our masters rather than our servants. 

And the simplest antidote I can think of is the vision that raises our consciousness to see destiny to which we have all been called, even though it remains largely dormant.  As Jesus put it, “Repent (metanoia, raise your consciousness), for the Kingdom of God is at hand.  It is within you.” 

DISCUSSION - What do you think? 

Unto God be worship & praise, dominion & splendor, forever and ever. Amen.