Lamb of God, Shepherd of All – Br. Keith Nelson

SSJE Sermons

Psalm 23
Revelation 7:9-17
John 10:22-30

Whatever your feelings about it may be, sheep-and-shepherd imagery is an inescapable facet of Christian tradition, which finds its roots in scripture. This body of imagery plays a prominent role in the Christian imaginary – imaginary used as a noun, rather than an adjective. One literary scholar defines an imaginary as “the creative and symbolic dimension of the social world, the dimension through which human beings create their ways of living together and their ways of representing their collective life.”

I grew up in an American suburb, and so the only place outside the Bible I encountered sheep were the ones made of cotton balls proudly displayed outside our Church nursery, and the ones that frolicked safely and sweetly in our Southern Baptist hymnody. It was hard to translate the gap between the Church’s imaginary and my personal reality in a way that felt real.

In 2020 I had the opportunity to pray my way through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola with my spiritual director. These Exercises clarify a person’s desire for spiritual freedom, and make extensive use of prayer with the imagination.

Because it radically changed my experience of the sheep-and-shepherd imagery in Scripture, I’d like to share a scene that unfolded in my own prayer as I engaged with Luke’s parable of the lost sheep, as a doorway into unpacking this morning’s passages from Revelation and the gospel of John.

You might choose to close your eyes and receive these words as the testimony of a lost sheep:

I find myself in an arid, desert landscape, forgotten in a vast expanse of wilderness.

I am a young lamb, trapped inside a dense thicket of thorns. My face is free, but my entire body is immobilized. The more I struggle, the more caught I become, and the long, dark thorns tear through my fleece and the tender flesh beneath. I no longer have the voice to cry out and I am on the verge of despair. Vultures circle above me, waiting.

But then I see him, one like a Son of Man coming toward me. Is it a mirage? No, he is here now. I am afraid, but this man is my only hope.

I summon one long, feeble cry that is louder and stronger than I thought possible: it echoes from the cliffs, and in each echo a layer of my sorrow, my regret, my shame, my self-blame for this miserable situation.

The man bends down low. He must get on his hands and knees to reach me. He himself wears a crown of thorns, and his face is marked with streaks of dark blood like tears. He bears this crown with unfathomable grace. He gazes into my eyes and sees me: my fear, my despair. Our foreheads touch, and he whispers: “This isn’t your fault.”

And then; he plunges his strong arms into the heart of the thorn bush and wrenches it open. The thorns that hemmed me in on every side are now an open place, though they gouge the man’s own flesh. With one arm he holds the bush open and with the other he grasps me and lifts me free.

I breathe. I live. This is mercy.

The man hoists me onto his shoulders. From this vantage point, I now see in all directions: bush after thorn bush all the way to the horizon.

Each bush contains a lamb like me, captive and struggling for life.

In a voice clear and resolute, the Son of Man says,

“I will not rest until the last lamb is free.”

In my own prayer life, sheep-and-shepherd imagery has been rehabilitated and refreshed by assembling the disparate images of sheep in Scripture into a single flock, as it were, and letting them speak to one another. This is exactly what the lectionary intends when it corrals Psalm 23, Revelation 7, and John 10 together.

The Lamb of the Revelation to John is a powerful and paradoxical image of the crucified and risen Christ.

The Church has represented the Lamb of God in countless media, from big, elaborate altarpieces to delicate embroidery, but usually in a more domesticated form – with a victory banner and a tidy wound, from which a tidy stream of blood flows cleanly into a chalice.

In Revelation, we first behold this Lamb in chapter 5. One of the elders around the throne announces that “the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered,” and so we are primed to expect the king of the beasts – long associated with the power of monarchs and deities alike.

What John hears and what he sees stand in stark contrast: “Then I saw between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders a lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth.”

This Lamb inhabits a disruptive, dream-like imaginary that John intends to startle us into serious contemplation and conversion of heart.

In another contrast between hearing and visionary seeing, earlier in Revelation 7 John records, “And I heard the number of those who were sealed, one hundred forty-four thousand, sealed out of every tribe of the people of Israel.”

But then, “After this, I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.” In John’s vision, the sheep-and-shepherd image is lifted from its imaginary in the culture of one people and made the central figure in a universal imaginary – a collective life in which all may find a place.

In John’s chapter 10, Jesus introduces the image of himself as the good shepherd who does not run but stands firm in the face of wolves who snatch and scatter sheep. In verses 28-30, we hear, “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.”

Jesus alludes here to a mystical reality he will flesh out further in his last supper discourse – the intercirculating, interabiding love between Father, Son, the disciples, and the promised Spirit, the Advocate. But here, the image I find most arresting is that the disciples – and by extension, we ourselves — are the Father’s gift to the Son, a gift that is “greater than all else.”

In her Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich elaborates upon this image:

“…through his Father’s courteous gift we are his bliss, we are his reward, we are his glory, we are his crown – and this was an especial marvel and a most delectable vision, that we are his crown! What I am describing is such great joy to Jesus that he counts as nothing all his affliction and his keen suffering and his cruel and shameful death.” (Ch. 22)

The Orthodox archbishop Kallistos Ware, who died in 2022, often returned in his pastoral teaching to a fundamental question and aspiration: “Dare we hope for the salvation of all?”[i] And his consistent answer was Yes. By this, he meant not simply all who confess Jesus Christ as Lord but all – all who have been, and are, and shall be. All who, at the hidden core of their being, long for “the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” The Lamb at the center of a multitude no one could count is surely the same Shepherd who seeks with undaunted compassion until the last Lamb is free.

What does it mean, then, to place this bleeding, fragile, glorious creature at the center of God’s throne?

What does it mean for us “to wash our robes and make them white” in his blood?

What is it like to see ourselves as sacrificial lambs, “standing as if slaughtered” and yet untouched by all that stands opposed to God’s love?

To esteem ourselves as priceless gifts given from Father to Son, and from the Son back to the Father?

We will spend a lifetime and longer laying hold of the answers, but for today, perhaps it means:

that the fragility and vulnerability we so often seek to disguise from others is the part of us Jesus loves most;

that there is no clothing more radiant than our unabashed and costly loyalty to him;

that together, we are held safely in the circle of a Love that draws all creation toward its final purpose;

and that when we see ourselves, one another, and every creature as pure gift, it is with God’s eyes of love that we seek, we suffer, and we see.

[i] The following article by Kallistos Ware is a cogent and insightful summary of the works of several theologians in the history of the Church who have held this position: https://www.clarion-journal.com/files/dare-we-hope-for-the-salvation-of-all-1.pdf