Today’s audio for the sermon and video for the service is not available. The sermon text is provided below. You may listen and watch last years Good Shepherd sermon and service respectively here .
Sermon for Easter 2
1 Peter 2:21-25 + John 10:11-16
During the season of Lent, and even into Holy Week, we walked through Matthew 23 together, you remember?, where we heard what I called the harshest sermon ever preached by Jesus, against the scribes and Pharisees. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! Do you remember why He was so angry? It wasn’t because He was being personally attacked by them or personally targeted by them (though He was). It was because of the terrible, tragic damage they had been doing to God’s beloved people, to the precious sheep of the Good Shepherd, as worthless shepherds, doing grave harm to the flock entrusted to their care.
For those of you who were here on Wednesday, you heard the Good Shepherd again, tasking the apostle Peter, representing all the ministers of the Church, with “feeding His lambs, tending His sheep, feeding His sheep.”
In today’s Epistle, the same Peter was fulfilling that task Jesus had given him when he wrote to the scattered Christians and spoke of them as sheep who had once been going astray, but who had now returned to Jesus, the true Shepherd of their souls—the true Shepherd who, Peter says, bore our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, should live for righteousness.
All this talk about Jesus as a Shepherd and about His people as sheep and lambs is nothing new; it was pictured just this way in the Old Testament, from the 23rd Psalm, to the prophecies of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah. And so, when Jesus refers to Himself as that Good Shepherd in today’s Gospel, He is just connecting all those prophecies to Himself.
And, in the same way, the harsh things Jesus said about the bad leaders of Israel, like the scribes and the Pharisees, comparing them to hirelings and worthless shepherds, were already there in the Old Testament, where God also spoke angrily against those who were misleading His precious sheep. Behold, says the LORD God, I am against the shepherds, and I will require My flock at their hand; I will cause them to cease feeding the sheep, and the shepherds shall feed themselves no more; for I will deliver My flock from their mouths, that they may no longer be food for them.
Instead of letting the worthless shepherds tend His flock anymore, God promised to come and shepherd His sheep in person. And that’s exactly what He did in the person of Jesus. And so we consider again today His comforting words about how He tends His own sheep, the ultimate example of the saying, “If you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself.”
The first thing Jesus did for His sheep, which He mentions elsewhere, but not here in the Gospel, was to gather them around His preaching and teaching. He once lamented to His disciples that the people of Israel were like sheep without a shepherd, without anyone to teach them well, and guide them to the truth of God’s word, and lead them to believe and to act rightly—because of what terrible leaders the scribes and Pharisees were. He didn’t gather the sheep by force, or by bribery, as with a shepherd’s crook, pulling and tugging them along. He simply gathered them with His word, and God the Father drew them, by the working of His Spirit.
The next thing Jesus mentions is where our Gospel actually begins: The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. But the hireling, who is not the shepherd and to whom the sheep do not belong, sees the wolf coming and abandons the sheep and flees. And the wolf catches the sheep and scatters them. The hireling flees, because he is a hireling and does not care about the sheep. The hireling represents the scribes and Pharisees, and all the worthless leaders of Israel who claimed to be leading the people toward green pastures, but were, in reality, leading them over a cliff. Those hirelings, those worthless shepherds, only cared about themselves, and their reputations, and their riches. They didn’t care about the souls they were supposed to be leading, or about God, either.
Jesus, on the other hand, was not a worthless shepherd, but a Good Shepherd—good for many reasons, but most of all, because He cared enough about His sheep to lay down His life for them. This is love, John writes, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son—gave Him into death. Or as Paul writes, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. And again, Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
That was the purpose of Jesus laying down His life, to be a sacrifice for our sins, to atone for our wrongdoings against God’s holy law. The wolf—the devil—was coming for us, and had every right to come for us, because of our transgressions of God’s Law, because we had violated God’s standard of right and wrong. Because of our sins, we were in the devil’s power, and we would have died eternally, subject to the devil’s torture. But the Father loved us, and the Son of God loved us. And not just loved us in theory, or in His heart, but loved us to the point of suffering for us and laying down His life for us as the sacrifice that enables all who believe in Him to escape from the dungeons of death.
What else is involved in Jesus’ tending of His sheep? He says, I know my sheep, and I am known by my own, as the Father knows me and I know the Father. That means He both knows who they are, and what they’re like, inside and out, and what they need, for this life and for the next. Every believer in Christ is known by Christ perfectly and completely. If He already laid down His life for you, before you ever knew or believed in Him, what won’t He do for you now, to make sure you get through this life safely—to get through this life and make it to the Day of Resurrection with your faith still intact, so that you can spend forever in the green pastures of the Good Shepherd?
And it goes the other way, too. Christ is known by His sheep, by those who believe in Him. You need someone, sent by Christ, to lead you to Christ through His Scriptures. You can’t know Him apart from His word. You need someone to baptize you into Christ; you can’t baptize yourself. But once you know Him through His word—the Jesus who is revealed to you from Genesis through Revelation—once you are baptized and believe in Him as true God and Man, as your crucified and risen Savior from sin, and as your Lord and Master, you don’t the leaders of a church, or a council of the Church, to tell you who He is. You know don’t need strangers on Facebook or Instagram to tell you who He is, and you certainly don’t need someone who doesn’t know Him rightly to tell you who He is. You know Him, and are able to know Him, from His word, because His Spirit lives in you and is always working through that word to show you your Shepherd, Jesus, and your Father in heaven who sent your Shepherd into the world in the first place.
And yet, just because you know Jesus, doesn’t mean He hasn’t left you in someone’s care until He returns for you on the Last Day. He knows you, after all, which means He knows the care that you need for your soul.
He says, And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will hear my voice; and there will be one flock and one shepherd. Here Jesus is looking forward, past the time of His crucifixion and resurrection and ascension. He’s looking out into the first century, and the second, third, and fourth, all the way to the present time, all the way to the end of the world. And He sees and knows those who will believe in Him. And so, He must bring them into His flock! How will He do that? He’ll do it through the little shepherds He sends along the way, through the pastors and ministers of the Church, who aren’t sent to gather people around themselves, and their ideas, and their visions, and their great gifts and personalities—although far too many try. No, Christ gave some to be prophets, and pastors and teachers, to speak for Christ, to reveal Christ through His word, to baptize in the name of Christ, to call out, as Christ’s ambassadors, Be reconciled to God! God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that, in Him, we might become the righteousness of God. And then, as people are brought into the one flock, under the one Shepherd, into the One Holy Christian and Apostolic Church, the Shepherd doesn’t just sit back in heaven and watch. No, He’s there, doing the calling, and He’s there, tending to His flock through the ministry of those whom He has sent.
Now, as you know, those whom He has sent are all imperfect, and some are as worthless as the scribes and Pharisees were. But we have Jesus’ promise in this Gospel that He will not abandon His sheep. If anyone loves the truth, if anyone seeks the pure Gospel and begs the Lord to provide the ministry of it, even in the wilderness of this world, He will find a way. He will find a way to shepherd His flock, all the way up to the Last Day. He will tend His sheep, no matter what. And then, in the end, through the care the Shepherd provides, you and I will follow Him, together with all the faithful, into the greenest pastures you could ever imagine. Amen.
