A true story goes on a Youth Sunday, where each child was to recite a verse of Scripture in worship. When it was his turn, one young boy just stood there -looking uncomfortable; he couldn’t remember his line. His mother sitting toward the front tried to prompt him. She formed the words, whispering the cue, “I am the light of the world.” The child beamed with a big smile and a proud clear voice declared, “My mother is the light of the world.”
Today, we have the coincidence of celebrating Mother’s Day and contemplating Jesus identity in: “I am the good shepherd.” As mothers can care for, protect, and guide their children, parallel trusting in and following the Good Shepherd shows trust and assurance — love and compassion.
This past Thursday, the church’s calendar remembered Julian of Norwich, the early 15th Century mystic who wrote in her Revelations of Divine Love:
The human mother will suckle her child with her own milk, but our beloved Mother, Jesus, feeds us with himself, and with most tender courtesy, does it by means of the Blessed Sacrament, the precious food of all true life.
Mother’s Day is a good day to call to mind and give thanks for those who have taken responsibility for us — especially when we can’t be responsible for ourselves.
In the book of Acts, Lydia is a mother to the early Christians. She offers housing, money, love, prayer, hospitality, and an urgent care for Paul and the early messengers of the resurrection. She embodies God’s peace for her whole household. Paul writes of Lydia, “She prevailed upon us.” Lydia insists on praying and supporting the work of God for God’s lasting peace. Lydia uses her work of selling fabrics to carry out the larger purposes of sharing in the gospel of Jesus.
In celebrating women and mothers, the holiday of Mother’s Day was not intended simply give flowers and a card to your mother. The origins of the holiday are in a peace movement. In 1870 when Julia Ward Howe wrote a “Mother’s Day Proclamation” it was a peace statement to unite family divided by the civil war to improve the health and sanitation of both Union and Confederate camps. Believing that women had the gift and responsibility to shape their homes and world for peace, the first proclamation read:
Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
whether our baptism is of water or of tears!
… Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
… From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
… Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after one’s own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, But of God.”
Often called Good Shepherd Sunday, our texts look to the Lamb power of Jesus by identifying with Jesus as both the paschal lamb, sacrificed as well as the shepherd of the sheep.
In Revelation 7, Jesus is both lamb and shepherd—both the one whose blood washes the robes of the persecuted multitude and the one who “will guide them to springs of the water of life.” It was pointed out in Bible study this week, that the original text from Revelation has the diminutive word of lamb, meaning not just a small sheep, but a little lamb that is young and innocentwhen talking of Jesus. Cute as they might seem, sheep are not the most pleasant of animals.
Jesus the Christ is as Sylvia Dunstan wrote, the one “whom we both scorn and crave.”
Like a Mother who loves and cares for a child even when they are perhaps dirty, vulnerable and helpless, in Jesus as the shepherd we recognize that we are deeply known and yet, at the same time, we trust that so many others so desperately need to be known.
Jesus as the Good Shepherd — who tends his sheep but is always going out to find the abandoned. Those thrown out, cast out, tossed out.
Jesus as the Good Shepherd loves his sheep, who calls them by name, but is constantly going out to find the one who finds herself alone at the well, who finds himself passed over and passed by day after day, who lays dead in the tomb.
This is Jesus as the Good Shepherd, who, last Sunday, reminded us that if we love God, we tend God’s sheep. Tending sheep, feeding Jesus’ lambs, and always on the lookout for those who need the protection of Jesus’ fold.
None of us escapes this life unbroken. Yet God sustains us and calls us to be about God’s work. We are not perfect. God loves us anyway—not just in spite of our brokenness, but because of it. And will not let us go or abandon us.
When we end up with scraped knees and skinned elbows, covered in disappointment, dripping with our sins and griefs long past, Jesus – the Good Shepherd – compels us to believe that our compassionate God gathers us up and cherishes us.
