Are you sheepish? I hope so. I
hope you recognize that for a Christian being sheepish isn’t a bad
thing at all. Now I don’t mean that I hope you’re shy and
withdrawn, which is the usual definition of “sheepish.” I’m not
talking about being so bashful and introverted that in any
gathering of more than half-a-dozen people, you go off and hide in
a corner somewhere because you don’t know how to relate to anyone
and you’re afraid you’ll say the wrong thing. That’s not at all
what I’m talking about.
When I ask if you’re sheepish, I’m
asking if you know that the Lord is your Shepherd who cares for
you. I’m asking specifically if you know that Jesus Christ is the
Good Shepherd who on the Cross lay down His life for you, for the
forgiveness of all your sins. I’m asking if what Jesus says about
His sheep – that they hear His voice and He knows them and they
follow Him – is true of you. I’m asking if Jesus the Good
Shepherd leads you daily beside the still, peaceful waters of your
Baptism, keeping you in His Baptismal grace and mercy. Are you
aware that in His Gospel He has made you to lie down in the green
pastures of His compassion and love? Do you know that here in
this church, in Word and Sacrament, God’s goodness and mercy are
present for you all the days of your life so you may dwell in the
house of the Lord forever, and that’s the very reason why you come
to Church? Because otherwise, apart from Jesus, you’d simply be a
lost, forlorn sheep without a shepherd, wandering through the
wilderness of this world simply waiting to die.
But if you’re one of Jesus’ sheep,
how different the picture is. If you’re a sheep of the Good
Shepherd’s flock, that changes everything. You aren’t lost.
You’ve been found by the Savior who came into this world as God in
the flesh to die for your sins and claim you as His own dear
possession. You aren’t forlorn either. Because your Shepherd
Jesus has promised to be with you until the end of the age and
beyond. Not only that but He’s placed you in the fold of His
Church with all His other sheep, of every time and place and
culture. Neither do you wander about aimlessly as one of Jesus’
sheep. No, your Savior goes before you as the author and pioneer
of your salvation. He leads you in the paths of His
righteousness. He leads you through the wilderness of this fallen
world to heaven and to the resurrection at the last day. All
these things are true, promised to you as a sheep of Jesus’ flock,
secured for you by His death and resurrection and your Baptism in
the Name of the Triune God.
As today’s Gospel reminds us, our
Lord Jesus Christ is good, merciful, kind and compassionate. He
is the very image of God the Father’s love for poor, helpless
sinners – God’s saving love in action. That’s important, because
one of the foundational truths of the Christian Faith is that
there’s something dreadfully wrong with us human beings, something
so deeply flawed and fatally corrupt that we are in desperate need
of a Savior. As sinners who’ve followed in Adam’s footsteps we’ve
each broken God’s commandments. We’ve each earned for ourselves
death and God’s eternal condemnation. We’ve lived by our own
standards, our own systems of morality, and have ditched the Ten
Commandments that are God’s unvarying standard of morality and
righteousness. We’ve invented a god created in our own image, who
only wants us to be happy and who would never do anything so
“impolite” and “uncaring” as to call us to repentance on account
of our sin. And so our fallen human nature chases after a fairy
tale god who doesn’t exist, an imaginary god who operates
according to our rules, our thoughts, our standards, and gladly
subjugates himself to our self-seeking desires.
And so we each, by nature, show
ourselves to be sheep without a shepherd. In our foolish
self-sufficiency we even try to be our own shepherds but that’s
just plain ridiculous when you think about it. It’s like trying
to be your own heart surgeon if you need cardiac bypass – how
successful do you think that would be? Sure, by doing it yourself
you’d save money -- enough to pay for your funeral -- but that’s
the only good that would come from it.
When we try to be our own shepherd
we show ourselves to be idolaters and sinners. That’s our big
problem, because when we think we can go it alone we’re failing
big time to fear, love and trust in God above all things. We’re
driving deeper and deeper the wedge of unbelief alienating us from
God.
Your sins have separated you from God, the
Scripture says. The gulf of separation is a billion miles wide and
a trillion miles deep – so high you can’t get over it, so wide you
can’t get around it. So what we’re left with is this: God be
merciful to me a sinner! God be merciful to me, a lost,
wandering, foolish sheep! God help me, for I cannot help myself –
even though I sometimes like to think I can.
And God
is
merciful – compassionate, kind, and caring. So merciful is He
that He sent His Son into the world for the sake of poor,
helpless, wandering sheep -- to find and reclaim them and bring
them home. Search and rescue – that’s one way of looking at the
Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. God became man in Jesus
Christ in order to search for us and rescue us. That’s what His
perfect, holy life was all about. If Jesus had been a sinner like
you and me, He would have been a lost sheep too. He would have
needed a merciful shepherd to find and save Him too. But because
He’s without sin Jesus can be the Good Shepherd who lays down His
life on behalf of the sheep.
Search and rescue is also what the
Cross of Christ is all about. This Shepherd dies for the sake of
the sheep. He lets Himself be swallowed up by death in order to
rescue us from death. He sheds His life’s blood so that in Him we
can be cleansed of sin and enjoy life with God. On the Cross He
endures the fiery anger of God in our place so we can be forgiven
and enjoy God’s blessing for all eternity. And He comes out of
the tomb on Easter morning to show that He is God in the flesh as
He claimed to be, that His teaching is true, that His sacrifice
for sin was acceptable to His heavenly Father, and that we are now
forgiven and declared righteous, by God’s grace, through faith in
Him.
How compassionate is Jesus your Good
Shepherd? Compassionate enough to die in your place so you can
have life eternal in fellowship with the Triune God.
Compassionate enough to say, “I’ll take the blame!” and be
punished for all your sins so you can go free. Compassionate
enough to lay down His life on the Cross for you, and suffer God’s
condemning wrath for you, and be raised again for you, so you can
be called righteous and holy for His sake. Jesus took the curse
so you can receive the blessing. He died as though He were the
worst sinner who ever lived so you can die in Baptismal grace as
one of His saints. And He causes His Gospel to be preached and
His Word to be taught so you can be confident of His forgiveness,
have faith in Him, grow in that faith, and know Him as the Lord
your Righteousness, your Savior.
Look how today’s Gospel shows us the
compassion of Jesus – the compassion of God – in action. Jesus
and His disciples had had a busy, stressful time of it, and they
were in desperate need of some down time. So many people were
coming and going, wanting to be healed, wanting to hear our Lord
preach and teach, wanting to see Him and touch Him, that He and
the disciples didn’t even have a chance to eat. So He told the
disciples to go away with Him to a quiet, solitary place and get
some rest.
But it didn’t happen. The
multitudes saw Jesus and the disciples leaving and raced ahead of
them to their destination. And here’s where we witness Christ’s
compassion in action. Seeing the multitudes, our Lord didn’t
throw up His hands in frustration and yell at them, “We need some
time off, people! Can’t you leave us alone!?!” He didn’t
grudgingly minister to their needs but all the while making sure
they knew what a big inconvenience they were. No, today’s Gospel
reports that Jesus
had compassion
on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So He
began teaching them many things.
He had compassion on them and taught
them many things. Our Lord knew their biggest problem wasn’t
hunger or sickness or anything like that. It was that they were
sinners. That’s our problem too. It was that they were laboring
under all sorts of false ideas about God. Ditto for us. It was
that they were separated from God by sin and false belief and
therefore were easy pickings for death and the devil, ripe to be
gobbled up by the gaping mouth of hell. Same for you and me –
that is, apart from God’s mercy and grace in Jesus Christ. So
Jesus taught them. And He teaches us too through His holy
life-giving Word.
Jesus says He came to seek and save
those who are lost. That’s what a shepherd does – go after the
lost sheep. That’s what Jesus did by His death on the Cross for
all the sinners in all the world and by His resurrection on the
third day. That’s what He does whenever a lost sheep is baptized
in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
That’s what He does when the words of absolution are spoken to a
troubled guilty sinner to bring God’s peace and comfort to that
person’s aching conscience. That’s what our Lord does when He
gives us His Body and Blood to eat and drink in the bread and wine
of the Sacrament. And that’s what He shall do for all His flock
when He returns on the last day to call the bodies of His sheep,
His saints, His redeemed people, out of the grave and make all
things wonderful and new again.
Jesus always finds His sheep. He
always forgives them, saves them, reconciles them to God and feeds
them with the bread of life. That’s what our Divine Service is
all about. Every time we hear the Gospel preached our Good
Shepherd is finding us and forgiving us all over again. Every
time we partake of The Sacrament of the Altar in repentant faith
Jesus is forgiving us and feeding us. Our Lord shows us the only
100 % true compassion there is in this messed-up world. And
gathered to Him by the Means of Grace we are no longer sheep
without a shepherd. Thanks be to God, we have a Shepherd now!
And His Name is Jesus Christ. And He is the Lord our
Righteousness, the Lord our Salvation.
So are you sheepish? Do you know
Jesus as your God, your Savior, your Shepherd? Do you gladly hear
His voice and follow Him in daily contrition and faith, trusting
in Him alone for forgiveness and life eternal? That’s what it
means to be one of His sheep. That’s what it means to be a
Christian.
In Nomine Patris. . .
