Listen to the sermon with the player below, or, download the audio.
+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
See this wonder in the making: / God Himself this child is taking
As a lamb safe in His keeping, / His to be, awake or sleeping.
Jaroslav Vajda’s twentieth‑century hymn about God’s taking a child “as a lamb safe in His keeping” is appropriate for any Baptism, but Vajda’s hymn was especially appropriate for Lucy June’s Baptism on this Sunday, the Fourth Sunday of Easter, what is affectionately known as Good Shepherd Sunday. Vajda’s hymn is all the more appropriate on this Good Shepherd Sunday since, in this year’s appointed Gospel Reading, we hear Jesus, the Good Shepherd, speak about just how safe His lambs are in His gift of eternal life. This morning we consider the Gospel Reading under the theme, “The Good Shepherd gives His sheep eternal life”.
Before today’s Gospel Reading, the Divinely‑inspired St. John in his account uniquely records how, around the time of the Feast of Tabernacles (John 7:2), Jesus healed a man blind from birth (John 9:1-12), how the Pharisees investigated the healing and threw the man out of the Synagogue (John 9:13-34), and how Jesus spoke both about the Pharisees’ blindness (John 9:35-41) and about Himself as the Good Shepherd (John 10:1-18). Jesus’s teaching about Himself as the Good Shepherd again divided the Jews: some said that Jesus had a demon, was insane, and should not be listened to, and others said that Jesus’s words were not those of one with a demon and asked whether a demon could open the eyes of the blind (John 10:19-21).
Then, as we heard in today’s Gospel Reading, two months later in winter, when the Feast of Dedication (what we usually call Hanukah) took place at Jerusalem, in the Temple’s colonnade popularly thought to date back to David’s son and King Solomon, Jesus was walking about. So, a group of Jewish leaders gathered around, or “encircled” Jesus, with hostile intentions, as if to prevent His escaping them. Perhaps prompted by Jesus’s earlier having described Himself as the Good Shepherd, which was a figure of speech for the Son of David, the Christ, or “Messiah”, the long‑promised Savior (Ezekiel 34:23), the Jewish leaders repeatedly and determinedly demanded that Jesus tell them plainly if He was the Christ. Affirming that He in fact was the Christ, Jesus answered that He already had told them so—that the works that He was doing in His Father’s Name bore witness about Him—but they were not believing that He was the Christ—they were not believing because they were not among His sheep, to whom He was giving eternal life.
The Jewish leaders certainly could have been among Jesus’s sheep. The Jewish leaders could have heeded Jesus’s voice, and He would have known them; they could have followed Him, and He would have given them eternal life. But, the Jewish leaders did not heed and follow, for they did not believe that Jesus was the Christ. The real question was who was and who was not part of Jesus’s flock, and the answer to that question depended then and depends now on whether individuals are sorry for their sinful nature and all of their sin and trust God the Father to forgive them for the sake of His Son Jesus, the Christ. Without such repentance and faith, wandering and straying sheep—as the Jewish leaders were and as we are by nature—wandering and straying sheep are lost and perish eternally. By talking to the Jewish leaders, Jesus called them to be His sheep (Lenski, 753-754), and so also Jesus calls us to be His sheep. We pray now as we will pray in today’s first Distribution Hymn (LSB 510:2):
O God, let us hear when our Shepherd shall call / In accents persuasive and tender,
That while there is time we make haste, one and all,
And find Him, our mighty defender. / Have mercy upon us, O Jesus!
The Feast of Dedication recalled the Jews’ last great deliverance, nearly 200 years before the events of today’s Gospel Reading. Then, the Temple was rededicated after an abominable desolation: a foreign ruler’s placing a pagan idol in the Temple and sacrificing pigs on its altar. The annual Feast of Dedication (1 Maccabees 4:59) was a symbol of future deliverance—a present and future great deliverance that Jesus, out of love for you and me, brought about, by sacrificing the temple of His body, on the altar of the cross (John 2:21). The very next Passover, the next time that St. John records Jesus’s being in Jerusalem, the Jewish leaders at His trial again questioned Him over His identity as the Christ (Matthew 26:63; Mark 14:61; and Luke 22:67), and, when He again confessed His true identity as the Christ, they sentenced Him to death. Yet, that death on the cross for our sins—the Good Shepherd’s laying down His life for His sheep and taking it back up again (John 10:17-18)—makes it possible for Jesus, the Good Shepherd, to give you and me, His sheep, eternal life. Since the man Jesus is also the Son of God, a Person distinct from the Father, but also one with the Father, of the same divine substance or essence (John 1:1), Jesus could die a death that could make up for the sins of the whole world, including your sins and mine. And, our crucified and resurrected Lord both graciously reveals Himself to us and forgives our sins through His means of grace.
In today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus told the Jewish leaders that the works that He was doing in His Father’s Name, works such as healing the man blind from birth, bore witness about Him, but those works also effected the Father’s mercy and grace. Jesus’s Word is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes (Romans 1:16); His Word is recorded that we may believe that Jesus is the Christ and that, by believing, we may have life in His Name (John 20:31). As with probably all of us earlier in our lives, this morning that Word with water in Holy Baptism called Lucy June by name (John 10:3) and put the Triune Name—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—upon her. Spiritually blind by nature (as we all are!), she was made to see! Whether or not she herself can speak words confessing sin and professing faith, we are sure that God took her as a lamb safe in His keeping, for He promised to do so, and so I can question her and sponsors can answer for her. As long as it does not contradict Holy Scripture, the liturgy need not be limited to only what is explicitly found in Holy Scripture, even as our Lord in today’s Gospel Reading celebrated a Feast not commanded in the Old Testament.
Those who are baptized in the Triune Name privately confess to their pastors the sins that particularly trouble them and then receive individual Holy Absolution in that same Triune Name. By such absolution, Christ our Lord Himself essentially forgives us. His voice speaks through the pastor’s, and we sheep hear and follow. As we hear our Good Shepherd’s voice, He comes to us and eats with us and we with Him (Revelation 3:20). In the Sacrament of the Altar, our Good Shepherd prepares a table before us in the presence of our enemies (Psalm 23:5). With His wounded hand (LSB 625:2) He here feeds us with Himself—bread that is His body, wine that is His blood—that He might be in us and we in Him, one with each other, and one with Him, as He is with the Father (John 17:11, 21-23). In all these ways, through all these means of grace, our Good Shepherd, through His under-shepherds, as we heard in today’s First Reading (Acts 20:17-35), cares for, or “shepherds” His flock, the Church of God, which He obtained with His own blood. The Church consists of holy believers and sheep who hear the voice of their Shepherd (Smalcald Articles III:xii), gathering around His Word and Sacraments. As the Church was separate from the Synagogue of Jesus’s day and from the false churches at the time of the Reformation (Apology of the Augsburg Confession IV:400), so the Church is separate today from false bodies today. Those who reject the Church and Her means of grace thereby reject the Good Shepherd and His gracious gift of eternal life.
The Good Shepherd not only gives His sheep eternal life, but He also keeps them from perishing eternally and from anyone snatching them out of His hand. We indeed live as sheep in the midst of wolves (Matthew 10:16), wolves that would like to snatch us sheep away from the flock (John 10:12), but no one is able to snatch us from the Good Shepherd. Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus, was lost of his own accord (John 17:12; 18:9), and he is a warning to us of the danger of not abiding in Jesus (John 15:6). Unlike Judas, we do not fail to repent of our sin, and we also do not despair of our salvation (Formula of Concord Solid Declaration XI:12), but we let God, Who has predestined us to salvation, lead us to repent and believe and thereby strengthen our faith, assuring us of our salvation, through His means of grace. All of the power that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit share so works for our good!
An old European folk saying associated with infant Baptism supposedly says, “We took you to church a heathen; we brought you home a Christian”; Jaroslav Vajda said he translated that saying in today’s Baptismal hymn with the words (Rimbach, #842, HS’98: Handbook, 106): “Here we bring a child of nature; / Home we take a newborn creature” (LSB 593:4). That total transformation and the resulting gift of eternal life are Lucy June’s, and that total transformation and the resulting gift of eternal life are each one of ours. In the words of today’s Epistle Reading (Revelation 7:9-17), our Good Shepherd has guided us to springs of living water: the Baptismal Font (confer Isaiah 49:10). So, already now we who are so Baptized join all the company of heaven in the eternal worship of our Triune God. The Good Shepherd gives His sheep eternal life. We will never perish, and no one will snatch us out of His hand. We will dwell forever in the house of the Lord, our Good Shepherd (Psalm 23:6).
Amen.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +