Psalm 23:1
In the first four centuries in the catacombs of Rome, where people were buried, the most characteristic symbols and pictures on the tombs are the Good Shepherd, the Fish, and the Vine. Of these images, the popular religion of the early Christians was the Religion of the Good Shepherd. They saw in that image all they wanted: kindness, courage, grace, love, and beauty.
We are beginning this morning a series of sermons based on the Good Shepherd passages of the Bible, starting with Psalm 23. I was drawn to this series because of a book written by Kenneth E. Bailey, The Good Shepherd: A Thousand-Year Journey from Psalm 23 to the New Testament. (Although I have never met him, I feel like I have a personal connection with Bailey because when he was a child he attended the same one-room school in Egypt that my friend Ruth Iskander attended.) He has lived most of his life in Egypt, Lebanon, Jerusalem, and Cyprus and writes about the Bible from a Palestinian cultural perspective. In his book, he opens up our understanding of Psalm 23 and then follows the Good Shepherd image through passages in Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the gospels. Over the next seven weeks we will look at the segments of Psalm 23 and take each of them through the other Good Shepherd passages Bailey uses.
Because we are not from the culture of Palestine, it is easy to miss the depth of meaning Psalm 23 and other Good Shepherd passages offers. So I hope and pray that this will be a profitable series for us.
The dominant images of God in the Psalms have to do with needs for security. With enemies abounding, it was important to have high walls and strong defenses, a place of refuge. Psalm 18 uses many of these images. (Psalm 18:1–3 )
1 I love you, Lord, my strength.
2 The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer;
my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge,
my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.
3 I called to the Lord, who is worthy of praise,
and I have been saved from my enemies.
In an unsafe world, it was – and is – important to have a God who protects us and keeps us safe. There is comfort in knowing that God is all-powerful and able to protect and save us. We sing sometimes:
Our God is greater, our God is stronger
God You are higher than any other
Our God is Healer, awesome and power
Our God, Our God…
And if our God is for us
Then who could ever stop us
And if our God is with us
Then what could stand against
We sing this with enthusiasm because in an unsafe world, we need protection and security. But it is possible to be protected and still be hurt. In addition to external needs for security we also have internal needs for comfort and the Psalms offer us three other images for this.
Psalm 23:1 tells us
The Lord is my shepherd.
Psalm 131:2 reads:
But I have calmed and quieted myself,
I am like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child I am content.
Psalm 103:13 reads:
As a father has compassion on his children,
so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;
God is a strong arm that protects us, a high tower, a shield. But he is also a good shepherd, a good woman, and a good man. Bailey points out that when Jesus taught his trio of parables in Luke 15: The Parable of the Lost Sheep, The Parable of the Lost Coin, and the Parable of the Lost Son, this was no accident. These images are the images used by Jesus to communicate who he was. He passed by the dominant security images of the Psalms and chose these three, more intimate images.
In the Old Testament, although there are pictures of God that reveal the intimacy of our relationship to him, God is not near. God is on Mt. Sinai with thunder, smoke, and lightning. The whole of Mt. Sinai trembled and the people were afraid. They wanted intermediaries between God and themselves. This is the dominant view of God in the Old Testament; God is distant and to be feared. But then Jesus was born. God became flesh and our relationship with God was transformed.
The writer of Hebrews wrote about this contrast. (Hebrews 12:18–24)
18 You have not come to a mountain that can be touched and that is burning with fire; to darkness, gloom and storm; 19 to a trumpet blast or to such a voice speaking words that those who heard it begged that no further word be spoken to them, 20 because they could not bear what was commanded: “If even an animal touches the mountain, it must be stoned to death.” 21 The sight was so terrifying that Moses said, “I am trembling with fear.”
22 But you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, 23 to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, 24 to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
Immanuel, God with us, Jesus was born and we were brought into an intimate relationship with God through him. So the writer of Hebrews points out, (Hebrews 4:14–16)
14 Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. 15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. 16 Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
So when Jesus chose images from the Psalms to speak about who he was and is, he passed by the security images that dominate the Old Testament. In fact, these images are not to be found in the New Testament where God is never described as a fortress, a rock, or a high place. It is not that these images fail to describe who God is; it is simply that Jesus thought it more important to emphasize these more tender images.
David’s psalm begins with:
The Lord is my shepherd
“The Lord is my shepherd,” among other things, means “I have no police protection.” In open spaces, away from the community, the shepherd or shepherds are alone and vulnerable to thieves, wild animals, and other natural dangers. Without hesitation, the sheep follow the shepherd, knowing that with him in the lead all will be well.
David knew what it was like for a sheep to be well cared for by a shepherd. David led his sheep to green pastures and still waters – which we will get to next week. David protected his sheep from predators and thieves. And as David considered all he did for his sheep, he realized that God cared for him as he cared for his sheep. The Lord was his shepherd. David understood that God did more than protect him. God was more than a high tower for David. David realized that God cared for him, God loved him.
Later in his life David was not a good shepherd. Uriah, one of David’s military leaders, was called back from the field of battle because David had seduced his wife Bathsheba and wanted to cover up her pregnancy. It was probably one of the servants in the household of Uriah that told him what had happened and Uriah resisted David’s urging to go to his wife. Finally David gave up and sent a message with Uriah telling his general, Joab, to put Uriah into the battle where he would be killed.
What Uriah needed as he made his way back to the battlefield was not a strong tower but a good shepherd. Uriah was powerless to object to what David did or said. David had all power over him. Uriah was helpless but his heart must have been broken. He needed a good shepherd to come by his side, love him, and care for him.
The prophet Jeremiah also needed a good shepherd. God gave him a message no one wanted to hear: God was going to use the Babylonians to capture Judah. Judah was at war and Jeremiah was telling everyone God was going to give the enemy victory over them. This is the message of a traitor and so the religious leaders and king of Judah persecuted him.
The Good Shepherd passage in Jeremiah was spoken by Jeremiah between the first and second deportations of Jews to Babylon. Jeremiah was grieving for the suffering his nation was experiencing and grieving because his message was that it was going to get worse. Jeremiah was the reluctant prophet, proclaiming what God gave him to say even though it hurt him to say it. And then Jeremiah suffered for having proclaimed the word from God. It is likely that Jeremiah was in prison or under house arrest when he received this word from the Lord. In it he introduces the theme of bad shepherds that is picked up later by Ezekiel and Jesus. (Jeremiah 23:1–6 )
“Woe to the shepherds who are destroying and scattering the sheep of my pasture!” declares the Lord. 2 Therefore this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says to the shepherds who tend my people: “Because you have scattered my flock and driven them away and have not bestowed care on them, I will bestow punishment on you for the evil you have done,” declares the Lord.
King Zedekiah and the kings before him who had reversed the reforms of King Josiah are the bad shepherds Jeremiah attacks. They had the responsibility from God to rule justly, but they reintroduced idol worship and neglected the poor, widows, and orphans. As judgment, Babylon had already conquered Judah and taken many of its leaders into captivity. Now, as a second deportation loomed, and as Jeremiah sat under arrest, he had the most amazing revelation.
God spoke to Jeremiah and said,
3 “I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them and will bring them back to their pasture, where they will be fruitful and increase in number. 4 I will place shepherds over them who will tend them, and they will no longer be afraid or terrified, nor will any be missing,” declares the Lord.
“I myself.” I will be your shepherd. I will care for you. Seventy years later this was fulfilled and the Jews in Babylon returned. Psalm 126:1–3 celebrates this event.
1 When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like those who dreamed.
2 Our mouths were filled with laughter,
our tongues with songs of joy.
Then it was said among the nations,
“The Lord has done great things for them.”
3 The Lord has done great things for us,
and we are filled with joy.
Jeremiah goes beyond this to prophecy of a much more distant event, now two thousand years in our past.
5 “The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch,
a King who will reign wisely
and do what is just and right in the land.
6 In his days Judah will be saved
and Israel will live in safety.
This is the name by which he will be called:
The Lord Our Righteous Savior.
Jesus, the Good Shepherd, was promised to Jeremiah, a discouraged man preaching an unpopular message during a time of great national sorrow.
Ezekiel was taken captive by the Babylonians in the first deportation and was living there when he received news of the second deportation when Jerusalem was captured and destroyed. He begins his prophecy, as did Jeremiah, with a judgment against the bad shepherds, the rulers of Judah. (Ezekiel 34:1–12)
The word of the Lord came to me: 2 “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Woe to you shepherds of Israel who only take care of yourselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? 3 You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock. 4 You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally. 5 So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and when they were scattered they became food for all the wild animals. 6 My sheep wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. They were scattered over the whole earth, and no one searched or looked for them.
In just a bit we will come to the parable of the Good Shepherd in Luke who leaves the ninety-nine to look for the one lost sheep. Ezekiel condemns the rulers of Judah for being bad shepherds, caring for themselves but not for the sheep under their care. Who will care for the sheep who have been used and abused by the rulers of Judah?
11 “ ‘For this is what the Sovereign Lord says: I myself will search for my sheep and look after them. 12 As a shepherd looks after his scattered flock when he is with them, so will I look after my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places where they were scattered on a day of clouds and darkness.
“I myself will search for my sheep and look after them.”
God is not a distant god, uncaring about those he created. God is not a god who uses people for his own ends. God is the Good Shepherd who rescues us from bad shepherds. God came himself, was born to Mary and Joseph, lived and died for us, and then rose triumphantly from the grave and continues to shepherd us.
This is the image Jesus used to teach about himself. In Luke 15 Jesus told the parable of the lost sheep.
3 Then Jesus told them this parable: 4 “Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? 5 And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders 6 and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.’ 7 I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.
Jesus told this parable in the context of being criticized by the Pharisees and teachers of the law for welcoming tax collectors and sinners. Jesus declared to them in this parable and the parables of the lost coin and lost son that God is one who seeks his lost sheep. The Pharisees and teachers of the law were preoccupied with obedience to their regulations while Jesus was seeking the lost sheep God wanted in his kingdom.
It was not until the night when the sheep were counted that it was discovered one was missing and it was in darkness that a shepherd searched for his sheep. The night belongs to predators so setting out at night was dangerous. In rough terrain, it was easy to stumble and fall. It would be far better to wait until daylight but a good shepherd does not wait because he knows the lost sheep is suffering and vulnerable all by itself in the dark of night.
Bailey quotes M. P. Krikorian, an Armenian pastor who survived the Armenian genocide. As a boy in the early 1900s, he had been a shepherd in the hills of what is today Turkey and he wrote a book about Psalm 23, illustrated by his years of experience as a shepherd. Late one afternoon he discovered that a goat was missing from his herd.
I called [over to] my cousin, the village shepherd across the valley, and reported our loss. He was too exhausted to go and search with us but he reported having seen her [the goat] at the foot of Haivali Dagh, the Quincy Mountains. So my brother and I sought for our goat. For four hours we walked in the moonlight over rocks and through thick thorny bushes. We covered every part of the mountain, climbing and then descending again…. We imitated the goat’s “Baa, baa, he, hoo!” At last, weary and bleeding from thorns and sharp stones, we gave up hope of finding her. Just then we seemed to hear a faint response in answer to our call. The call was repeated. The answer came again, clearer and stronger. Exhausted and perspiring, we kept moving on in the midnight stillness towards the direction of the answer to our calls. To our unspeakable delight we found our blue goat curled against a mossy rock, bathing the latest arrival of her family. I took the pretty kid in my arms close to my bosom, and my brother held the mother goat by the head as we made our way through the thickets to the path to continue homeward. We found our own souls restored as we brought our wandering pet to a place of safety.
The Lord is my shepherd and because the Lord is a good shepherd, he seeks after us when we are lost. He cares for the ninety-nine who are safely in the sheep pen and he cares also for the one who is lost. God is not finite. He is not limited in his ability to care for each person in the world. In Matthew’s version of this parable, Jesus concluded by saying (Matthew 18:14)
In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish.
In the world we make calculations. This past week was the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My father was in the US Navy, in Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, waiting for the imminent invasion of Japan, when the bomb was dropped. Estimates are that 500,000 Americans would have been killed in that invasion and five to ten million Japanese. 102,000 Japanese were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and my father always defended dropping those bombs because if the war had not ended and Japan had been invaded, it is possible he would have been killed.
We make calculations, sacrificing a smaller number for a greater number. But this is not how God operates. The world says the death of a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand people is better than the death of one or two million people. The world sacrifices some for the sake of others. God does not think that way. God does not sacrifice one person to save another. Each one of us is valued. God does not have an A-list and B-list. Every person is sought for. Every person has value. And God will not rest until he has rescued his lost sheep.
Luke follows the parable of the lost sheep with the parable of the lost coin and the woman who turns her house upside down to find it. She will not rest until that coin is found. The good woman is a picture of God who will not rest until we are found.
And then Luke has the parable of the lost son, the prodigal son, the son who insulted his father and took his inheritance and wasted it in a foreign land. The father of this insulant son never stopped looking for his son, but this parable teaches us that God will not force our hand. The father allowed his son to take his share of the inheritance and leave. The son was free to do what he wanted to do. God will not force our hand. He will not coerce us into becoming his follower. Finally, the son came to his senses and returned home where he found his father waiting and searching for him. God searches for us but we must want to be found.
The sheep who is lost must respond to the call of the shepherd who seeks. In the dark, if the sheep does not respond with at least a weak, “Baa,” the sheep will remain lost and most likely die. The shepherd calls and calls and calls and waits to hear at least a faint, “Baa” before the sheep can be found.
We are distracted by the noise of the world. We walk around with earphones, music playing, radio, television, internet videos and we rarely are quiet with no outside distractions. We need to walk and drive without the intrusion of technology. We need to be silent and hear our thoughts. We need to be attentive to the call of God.
There are many reasons we do not hear the call of God, distractions, willfulness, temptations, sin. So we move through life hearing the call of God but not responding.
I remember a Sunday School teacher in 7th grade, when I was 12 years old who taught Sunday School differently than others had. The church I grew up in did not talk about Jesus wanting to be in a relationship with us and this was something new. But what he said did not penetrate deeply.
When I was 14 years old I went on a bus trip to the south of the US to work with a church in Florida that was integrated, both blacks and whites in the church. This was the summer of 1964 when there was violence in parts of the south against northerners who came to help the civil rights movement. We were never in any danger but I remember one night when I was feeling upset and went out to walk in the night. I found a church that was open and I sat there and cried and experienced the peace of God. But I never followed up on that.
At the end of that year, my oldest sister came home from university and told us about having a personal relationship with Jesus and we rejected her. I heard what she said but did not want to respond.
It was seven years later that I began wanting to be found and cried out, “Baa.” Jesus, the good shepherd had found me in the dark and rescued me.
The Lord is my shepherd. I lack nothing.
I can tell you that Jesus has been faithful to me in the years since then. There are many times I wanted things he never promised me. I never won the lottery. I never lived in the home I wanted to live in. I never made as much money as I wished I could. But there is a huge difference between what I want and what God knows is best for me. Jesus has blessed me beyond measure. I lack nothing.
I cried out, “Baa,” and he took me in his arms and has been my good shepherd all these years.
The Lord is your shepherd. You may be his found sheep, one of his wandering sheep, or one of his lost sheep. The truth is that we all drift away and we have to repeatedly call out “Baa” so we can once again be found.
I hope you have discovered that Jesus is your good shepherd. I hope that you are paying attention to his call. As you wander through the world there are many temptations that will pull you away from Jesus. You need to pay attention, listen to his voice, and respond when you hear his call.
When the Lord is your shepherd, you will never lack anything he knows you need.
Over the next couple months we will be focusing on Jesus as our shepherd and I pray that as we learn more about how we are loved, we will be more willing and able to cry out, “Baa” and be found. I pray we will learn to trust him more and follow him with confidence that he will lead us safely through this world and to the safety of our eternal home.
