Easter 4
At that time the Festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. Usually we translate things to make them clearer to us. But today we might have a better idea what was going on if we didn’t translate the title of this feast. The Hebrew word for “Dedication” is Hanukkah. At that time, the festival of Hanukkah took place in Jerusalem. In this Hanukkah story, Jesus is contrasting the actions of the temple leaders in his day with the actions of the Maccabees almost 200 years earlier.
It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. And the religious leaders in the temple gathered around Jesus and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”
And Jesus answers them: “You ask if I am the messiah, as if you were part of my messianic project: to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners. The works that I do in the name of God testify to me, but you do not believe because you do not belong to my sheep. You’re not working on the same project that I am.
The temple was the site of offerings to God: grain and fruit and animals. Of that which was offered to God, some of it was burnt entirely, to symbolize a total offering to God but that's not how most offerings worked. Some of the things that were offered on the altar then went to the priests, so that their families could eat, because we didn't want a bunch of starving Levites. But the overwhelming majority of offerings in the temple, both Judaism, and in other ancient religions that involved animal sacrifice, the animal was sacrificed, then prepared as a feast for all the faithful. The practice here at Saint Peter's that any religious celebration should involve a community potluck is an ancient one.
But in Jesus's time, a fourth destination for the food had crept into the list, one that literally took food off the table from the community feasts that hungry folks rely on. The temple offerings were also how the Roman tribute was paid. The temple served as a storehouse for wealth extracted from the Judean peasants to be taken to Rome. It was literally the site from which the spoils of empire were seized, a willing player in the enrichment of Rome at the cost of the Judaeans.
When Jesus says “The works that I do in my Father's name testify to me, but you do not believe because you do not belong to my sheep.” Jesus is saying “you are harvesting people’s offerings and letting the empire extract a tribute from what is given to the temple. I am proclaiming an end to oppression, exploitation, and empire. We are not the same!”
The religious leaders presumed they were on the same side as Jesus because they all were in the temple purporting to praise the Holy One. But not everyone who embraces the trappings of religion – not even those who use our holy language and metaphor and history and tradition and scripture – not everyone who embraces these things is actually on the side of good. Jesus told the religious leaders of his age, “if you were part of the Messianic flock, you’d already know I’m the Messiah.” Not everyone who comes to Jesus saying “Lord, Lord” actually seeks to follow the Jesus who sets us free. Not everyone who claims to be religious is actually worshipping our God of liberation. There’s a good chance that most of us who call ourselves “Christians” aren’t, most of the time!
It is no coincidence this dialogue happened at the feast of Hanukkah. In the year 164 BCE, the Seleucid empire tried to eradicate Judaism from The Land. They desecrated the temple with unclean offerings and tried to co-opt it to the worship of foreign gods and the exploitation of the people. But the Maccabee brothers recaptured the temple and wanted to rededicate it to the Holy One. They only had enough oil for a single night, but the rededication ceremony was supposed to last for eight nights to purify a space that had been desecrated. And when they tried to re-sanctify the space for the Holy One, a Great Miracle Happened There. The oil, only enough to burn for a single night, lasted the whole eight nights needed to purify the temple, re-dedicating it to the One who sets us free.
When Jesus called out the temple leaders on the feast of Hanukkah, the contrast between the Maccabees’ resistance to empire and the temple leaders of his day’s collaboration with empire stood in sharp contrast. Sometimes we hunger for a better world and sometimes we want to draw a crude forgery of God's stamp of approval on the inhumane systems we have in place. Sometimes we try to worship a God who hungers for justice and sometimes we want to adopt a domesticated version of God as the mascot for our empires. Sometimes the stories we tell about God are the caffeine that excites us to action and sometimes religion is the opiate of the masses. And I'm not even talking about different people; these tendencies are at war within each of us. Sometimes it's the same folx who shout "Hosannah" and "Crucify him!" They are both us. We are them.
When we’re part of the messiah's flock, we’re doing the messiah's work, not inflicting the damage that the messiah is coming to undo. But we are all complicit in the structures that terrorize God's beloved people. As Daniel Berrigan says, the goal is to find ways to be less complicit. We have all in one way or another made our peace with the powers and principalities that Jesus has come to upend. We are fighting for a place at tables Jesus came to flip over. We can’t stop doing that altogether, but how can we do that less? How can our life as Church be an ongoing project to find ways together to live less exploitatively?
The Revelation to St. John tells us: I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God. One of the elders addressed me, saying, "Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?" I said to him, "Sir, you are the one who knows." Then he said to me, "These are they who have come out of the great ordeal. For this reason they are before the throne of God and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat, for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
This passage follows the accounts of a series of cataclysmic disasters, including the four horsemen of the apocalypse: conquest, war, famine, and death. The survivors of these great ordeals are the ones described in this passage. After the gut-wrenching accounts of devastation, this passage marks a respite: the survivors of the horrors described in the book worship the lamb on the throne, their shepherd, who will protect them from harm, wipe away their tears and ensure they will no longer hunger nor thirst.
John, the author of this particular Book of Revelation, lived in the time that the Roman emperor Domitian actively persecuted followers of the Way of Jesus for their beliefs. John was exiled to the Island of Patmos – exile is when a government takes someone and forcibly removes them from the land where they live – and there he experienced this revelation, but many others were tortured and killed. John had these visions revealed to him there. The Greek word for vision or revelation is “apocalypse”.
Apocalypse is a particular genre of religious writing. Apocalypse in its original context, as I said, means revelation or vision in general; it doesn’t specifically refer to disasters or the end of the world. The word took on that meaning because of the contents of the most famous work in that genre: the very one we’re reading from today. The genre is generally written by and for people in disturbing times. The message to people in the midst of times when it feels like the world is falling apart is this: you’re not wrong. The world is indeed falling apart. But God is in charge, and even in the midst of unspeakable horrors, good will ultimately triumph over evil, so persevere in faith.
When I was younger, I was grateful that apocalyptic literature didn’t make sense to me. Not having lived through anything resembling the tumult and horrors described in the book, I couldn’t imagine how such disturbing stories could be comforting words in the right context. I was grateful the genre existed for people who needed it, but prayed that I never would. But here we are…
As we look about us now, the literature of apocalypse is very much a part of the full armor of light by which we might retain our sanity and our faith to resist the current horrors. O, that you would tear open the heavens and come down. Even so, Lord Jesus quickly come! As the leaders of empire – the ones who are anti-Christ –commit new abominations daily that were previously unimaginable, we, like the faithful of old, are encouraged to take heart: though it may seem that the forces of evil are rampant, they cannot win, even though they appear to triumph.
This passage ends by assuring the listeners that the lamb will be the shepherd. The Incarnation means that the one to care for the wounded, traumatized survivors of the horrors of empire is not another ruler over them, but literally one of their fellow sheep. The is the word to the hurting people of John’s day. This is the word to the people who need to hear it today: Your shepherd isn’t yet another outside force trying to exploit you, but a God who has become one of you.
The Lamb on the center of the throne will be your shepherd. Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne and to the Lamb. Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever!
Conventional shepherds take care of their sheep – but why do shepherds take care of their sheep? Shepherds take care of their sheep so that they can fleece them, breed them, and ultimately, slaughter them. Shepherds tend to their sheep, but the sheep are a means, and not an end. The relationship between shepherd and sheep is ultimately an exploitative one. There’s a reason shepherd’s pie is made with lamb meat.
But what Jesus is proposing is different. When Jesus says “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand,” he’s not talking about the exploitative shepherd sheep relationship. He’s certainly not talking about the relationship the temple leaders have with their flock, where they take offerings and then turn them over to the Romans as tribute.
The shepherd indeed cares for the sheep and the shepherd indeed extracts from the sheep, but Jesus promises that we traumatized sheep will have a different relationship with our shepherd than that of the temple leaders, and sadly, that of too many religious leaders today. When the church cares for the flock to bring us to eternal life, to the life and life abundant that Jesus longs that we have, we are indeed Jesus’s flock. We indeed participate in that messianic ministry. But when we tend the sheep so we can feed them to the insatiable appetite of empire, when we raise the sheep up not to liberation but to exploitation, and slap the stamp of God’s approval on the filthy rotten systems of oppression, we do not know Jesus, and we do not belong to his sheep.
The commoditization of care relationships vs care as the basis for liberation comes to light in a different dimension in the contrasting observations of the feast day American Civic Religion celebrates today. Mother’s Day began through the work of peace activists Ann Jarvis and Julia Ward Howe as a campaign by mothers that their sons and husbands not be sent away to die in wars killing other mothers’ sons and husbands. Efforts to atomize the day into separate isolated households sentimentally using mass consumption to celebrate an alienated, individualized ideal of motherhood fly in the face of the communitarian collective action that marks the day’s origins. In civic religion just as in the worship of God, we face a choice between ritual as numbing analgesic to make us content with the pain of inhumanity or ritual as empowerment to collective action toward liberation.
Our false worship of God can seduce us by the siren song of empire, or our authentic worship of God can be the trumpet in the morning, the clarion call that wakes us up to strive for justice. There are flocks on their way to being fleeced and slaughtered, numbed into tranquil acquiescence by the promise of pie in the sky when they die, and there are flocks that are healed and pastured so they have the strength to build a better world. Both flocks are plentiful, but only one of these flocks is what Jesus is calling us to be. The works Jesus does in the name of God testify to him; if we are of Jesus’s flock, we will see and be drawn to participate in God’s work of liberation, and believe in Christ who sets us free.
Jesus’s sheep hear his voice. He knows them, and they follow him. He gives them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of his hand. They will hunger no more and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat, for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
May we never forget whom we follow. May we never be seduced by the apologists for empire, but follow the banner of the lamb who leads us to life, and life abundant. Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen!
