"Abundant Life" John 10:1-21

When my parents went to the Holy Land, they saw a shepherd with his sheep...only the sheep were running away from him instead of following. My dad asked the tour guide, "Why aren't the sheep following the shepherd?" The guide said, "That's because he isn't the shepherd, he's the butcher!" Jesus says in verses 4-5,

"When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recongnize a stranger's voice."

This is one of my favorite passages from John's gospel. I memorized it as a teenager and it still gives me guidance and hope.

Atheists and agnostics often accuse believers of having faith as a crutch to compensate for our own weakness and cowardice. But I find it quite the opposite. My faith is not a crutch, it is a pair of wings. My faith does not stifle or inhibit, but liberates. The "thou shalt nots" of the bible are things that channel my life for great productivity, health and joy. Jesus says,

"I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full."

My clear and unapologetic bias is this, "If you want to live fully, follow Jesus." Anything else is settling for less, a lot less.

The "good shepherd" section has brought comfort to people throughout the history of the church. Often a good shepherd would literally lay himself at the entry to the fold of the sheep to protect the sheep from animals and bandits. Some shepherds lost their lives doing so. Jesus is the ultimate good shepherd, laying down his life for the salvation of us all.

Verses 17-18 have sometimes caused people to raise a pointed question,"If the Romans and the Jews didn't take Jesus' life, but he instead chose this for himself, was his death a kind of suicide?" In other words, "If Jesus could have done this another way, why didn't he?" Indeed, as the Son of God, Jesus could have avoided the horror of crucifixion, but Jesus was not just divine, he was fully human. As John wrote in chapter 1, he "pitched his tent among us" and experienced the vulnerability we all do, only to an even greater degree. In the words of Philippians 2, he "emptied himself and took the form of a slave and became obedient unto death - even death on a cross." I'm not going to let the Romans or the Jewish leaders off the hook. The powers of evil led the full assault on the incarnation of the love and holiness of God and God made himself vulnerable to them, when he could have smashed them. Holy love is that way. It takes the hit.

But that is not the end of the story. The end of verse 18 says, "I have authority to lay it down and I have authority to take it up again." In the end, the incarnation of vulnerable holy love triumphs over evil, hatred, hypocrisy and death. On the face of it, that seems absurd. But as I look at Jesus and the impact his death and resurrection have had on billions of lives, including your life and mine, I know it would be a far greater absurdity to deny the truth of Christ.