He Guides Us Along Right Pathways Proper 11B

 He Guides Us Along Right Pathways for His Name's Sake

Between our passages from Jeremiah and Mark [Jeremiah 23:1-6 / Mark 6:30-34, 53-56], there are shepherds who scatter and destroy the sheep of God’s pasture, and those who gather them, feed them and heal them. Although the situations depicted in Jeremiah and Mark are some 650 years apart, it is safe to say not only are the situations pretty much unchanged, I think many people would agree the situation remains pretty much unchanged to this day. Which is why the treatise called Hebrews tells us, “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” [Hebrews 4:12]

 

Jeremiah issued warnings in the time of King Josiah, beginning around 626 BCE. As a result, an attempt was carried out to kill him by those who did not want to heed his warnings, and though rescued, he was imprisoned until the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 587, when he was released – by the Babylonians. As we saw last Sunday, being a poet-prophet was no easy job as we heard of John the Baptizer losing his head ordered by a particularly bad shepherd in the House of Herod!

 

Jeremiah also announces that a descendant of King David will one day emerge as the Good Shepherd, and indeed the people seem to confirm that Jesus is that shepherd. As he and his disciples try to get away from it all, especially having heard the news about John’s fate, alas, it is not to be. People see where he is headed and a great crowd rushes and gets there first to greet him. There were 5,000 men, not to mention women and children! As he went ashore, “he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.”

 

Then for some reason the lectionary leaves out 19 verses, which record Jesus asking his disciples to feed the crowd of 5,000. The disciples whine and say, “It’s impossible, it would cost too much money to buy enough bread for them all.” Jesus asks, “How many loaves of bread do you have?” They round-up five and two fish. We can imagine Jesus heaving a sigh of frustration as he takes, blesses, breaks and gives away the bread – the very same actions he will repeat with the bread at the Last Supper, and which we repeat every time we celebrate the Eucharist. The disciples see the glass as more than half empty, while afterwards they gather up twelve baskets of leftovers, demonstrating that when you dine with Jesus, you will come to see the glass as much much more than half-full!

 

No doubt Storyteller Mark places Herod’s dinner alongside Jesus’s supper with 5,000 to make a truly unmistakable comparison between a meal with a good shepherd like Jesus, and dinner with a bad shepherd who not only scatters sheep but destroys them by having them beheaded and the head brought to the dinner table.

 

We may think this is ancient and even primitive, and even fantastic stuff, but consider the following real-life scenario taking place on planet Earth at this very minute. Three of America’s wealthiest of the wealthy are racing one another to get into outerspace, with one having long ago already launched one of his automobiles into deep space for we know not what or why. Does he plan to drive it when he gets to wherever he thinks he is going? Great sums of money are being spent on these individual, competitive, not joint, ventures. Think for a moment how much bread could be purchased with their spent on space travel.

 

In the other corner, wearing the White Trunks, is Johan Eliasch, present owner of Head Sporting Goods Corporation (started right here in Baltimore by Howard Head, an aeronautical engineer at Glenn L. Martin). Mr. Eliasch is valued at £355 million by the Sunday Times "rich list" (he's number 145), and he has purchased 400,000 acres of the Amazonian rainforest, an area the size of Greater London. He bought it, he says, to save it, to preserve its plants and wildlife - and, by preserving old-growth forest, to do his bit towards counteracting rising CO2 levels. [The Guardian, April 3, 2006]

 

The Good News? There are still people who care more about the planet than escaping it. We are a people surrounded by Good Shepherds and Bad Shepherds who scatter and destroy God’s sheep – that is God’s people, which of course is all people, rich and poor, great and small, young and old.

 

When Jesus and the boys are finished with gathering up all those leftovers, they cross over the Sea once again, and people are again rushing to see Jesus. “And wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.”

 

At the end of the day, we can almost imagine Jesus saying, “The Herods and the Caesars you will always be with you, but you won’t always have me.”

 

Which is his way of saying, “What are you going to do about the healing the sick, the poor and the planet when I’m gone?”

 

May God help us all to follow as the Good Shepherd leads us to himself. Amen.