Easter 4 2024 – Good Shepherd Sunday

“The Lord is my Shepherd”, says the familiar Psalm we heard just now. “he leads me beside still waters.” 

You don’t have to be the CEO of a big company, to find yourself having to take a lead sometimes, at work, at home or in the community. If you have a caring responsibility for children or family members, you’re a leader. If you take the initiative in supporting a friend in need, you’re a leader. Leadership comes in many forms. There’s a sense in which we are all leaders of our own lives, even if we don’t feel we lead anyone else. We have to make decisions for ourselves; prod ourselves into action when we’d rather just stay in bed, set ourselves on one course or another. But, how do you lead, “when you don’t know where you’re going?

Liminal times are times of change, times when we find ourselves stepping into a new situations, whether we wanted to or not. Life is full of them; the first day at school or college, starting a career, moving house, the beginning - or the end - of a relationship. A time of serious illness can be a liminal moment, and so can retirement and bereavement. Even if the change is a happy one liminal times can be very unsettling. For a while everything seems different, but eventually, if we hang on, we get used to the new routines, the new shape of the world around us. What seemed strange becomes familiar. It might feel better. It might feel worse, than what we had before, but eventually it at least stops feeling so strange.  

And today’s Gospel reading, a passage with leadership at its heart, was written by and for people who knew all about liminal times, times of change and disruption, times when they didn’t know where they were going.

Like much of the Bible, the Gospels were written against a backdrop of trouble and uncertainty. At the time of Jesus and the early Church, it was the Romans who ruled often brutally, and they cracked down on anyone who threatened their power or refused to fit in. Jesus and his followers, like so many others, lived with constant uncertainty, powerlessness, the knowledge that everything they relied on could be swept away in an instant if Rome decided they were in the way. Many of the first Christians had embraced huge changes when they decided to follow Christ too, losing family, friends and security. All the old certainties were gone. They lived in a constant state of liminality. But somehow, they hung on to their message, the message of God’s love, shown in the death and resurrection of Jesus. And that message took root, and still nourishes people today.  How did they keep going? How did they not give up in despair? It wasn’t because they had some secret knowledge of the future, a road map or a compass or a crystal ball. They didn’t know where they were going any more than we do, but they knew who was going with them - God himself - and they knew that it was safe to trust him because the resurrection of Jesus showed that even death couldn’t destroy his love. Jesus was the shepherd who didn’t run away when he saw the wolf of his crucifixion coming.

To understand the images Jesus uses in this passage we need to know that in Jesus’ time and place sheep weren’t kept in nice, neat fields. They lived on the open hillsides, in wild terrain. Their shepherds, often young boys, would lead them from one pasture to another, to find food and water, just as the familiar words of Psalm 23 describe. But how do you get a flock of sheep to follow you in a vast wilderness? A lone shepherd can’t round them up and drive them. They have to want to come with you. As Jesus puts it, “I know my own and my own know me just as the Father knows me and I know the Father… [my sheep] will listen to my voice.

It’s all rooted in relationships; Jesus relationship with his Father, and our relationship with Jesus. That relationship is shaped by time spent with God in prayer, in reading the Bible, in serving others, in doing the things he calls us to do. When we don’t know where we are, or where we are going, when our hearts are disoriented, the answer isn’t to look for the certainty of a detailed itinerary, even if that were possible, it is to orient ourselves towards God, towards good, towards love, towards hope. We don’t know what’s around the next corner, over the horizon, but we can know the one who walks ahead of us, who is faithful in his love of us, and when we know that, we shall not be in want, there is nothing we lack, as the Psalm says.

How do we lead when we don’t know where we’re going, in liminal times, whether we are leading a nation, a business, a church, a family, or just ourselves? The answer, it seems to me, is that we first need to follow, listening for the voice of the Shepherd who loves us more than we can imagine, so much that he even lays down his life for us. Amen