THE GOOD SHEPHERD: IS COVID 19 TESTING OUR RESOLVE AS A HUMAN RACE?

 

 

THE GOOD SHEPHERD – By Fred Vergara

(Texts: 1 John 3:16-24; Psalm 23 and John 10:1-10)

Jesus said: “I am the good shepherd” (John 10).

 

The phrase “Good Shepherd” was used by Jesus in the context of first century Palestine. Jesus spent his actual ministry in Galilee, the rural, agricultural, communal, pastoral setting where the imagery of sheep and shepherd was real and vivid.

 

Tending to the flock was part of the geographical, socio-economic and historical background in the story of Jesus. Abraham, the ancestor of the Jews, Christians and Muslims offered a ram to God in place of his son, Isaac. A ram is a male sheep. Moses, the lawgiver of Israel was tending the sheep in Sinai when God called him to set free the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. David was a shepherd boy when God anointed him to be the king of Israel.

 

The prophets of the Old Testament were so familiar with the imagery that they likened the bad kings of Israel and Judah to that of evil shepherds. They visualized the coming Messiah as the Good Shepherd.

 

So for Jesus to say, “I am the Good Shepherd” requires no further explanation because the people He was addressing Himself to, understand what sheep and shepherds are all about.

 

This is not so in other parts of the world. There are some people in the world who have not seen a sheep. A story is told of the Wycliffe missionaries serving in a remote village in Sumatra.

 

To those of you who are not familiar with Asia, Sumatra is the largest island in Indonesia, very rich in oil and coal, plenty of coffee, rubber and tea plantations. It has also rich tropical forests inhabited by many tribal peoples, some of them have not yet been reached by the gospel.

 

The Wycliffe missionaries, so named after John Wycliffe who was an English religious reformer and theologian in the 14^th Century, are a group of non-denominational Bible translators. Their stated mission was to translate the Bible into languages that people can understand. At the moment, the Wycliffe missionaries have translated the Bible into 7,300 languages. It is an amazing, challenging and rewarding task but also filled with danger, difficulties and trials and I am all in awe of the works they are doing and what they have achieved for God.

 

Now back to the story: so the Wycliffe missionaries were trying to translate the bible in the language of a tribe in the mountains of Sumatra and they found difficulty with the words sheep and shepherds. There was no sheep in the village and people had never seen a sheep or a lamb. The closest animal equivalent was pigs. There were so many pigs in the village and the pig owners or the swineherds love their pigs as the shepherds would love their sheep.

 

So for a moment, the Wycliff translators were thinking that in translating Psalm 23, “The Lord is my Shepherd” into “The Lord is my Swineherd” was quite alright. The problem came up while they were trying to translate Isaiah 53 which is central to the understanding of Jesus as the promised Messiah who is both the Good Shepherd and the Sacrificial Lamb. You see in Isaiah 53:7 the bible says, “Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter and like a sheep before its shearers, He opened not his mouth.” The verse is a prophetic vision of Jesus who willingly obeyed His Father to become a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.

 

The sheep and the lambs do not open their mouth when led to the slaughterhouse but it is not so with pigs and piglets. The pig, when led to the slaughter, opens its mouth wide, kicking and screaming at the top of its lungs, until the end. Certainly to compare Jesus to a piglet would not be appropriate, would it? No! Absolutely not!

 

So what did the Wycliff Translators do? They decided to import sheep from nearby New Zealand, the country with of 3 million people and 33 million sheep. That was in the 1980’s. Now, New Zealand has a population of 5 million people and 55 million sheep.

 

So the Wycliff Translators brought hundreds of sheep to the village. They raised the sheep and appointed shepherds. As time goes by, the tribal people came to know the sheep. They cuddled the sheep and discovered that do not scream and kick like pigs even when they are led to the slaughter or when the wool are sheared from their skins. And so the story has a good ending, the Wycliffe translators were now able to call a sheep a sheep.

 

Wow? What a wonderful story and now I can go back to the message of today’s gospel. Why is Jesus the Good Shepherd and how could we describe what being a Good Shepherd is, in the context in which we find ourselves, particularly in this COVID-infested world in which we live?

 

Let us describe three qualities of a Good Shepherd:

 

The first quality of the Good Shepherd is that He cares for us like a Front-line Worker cares for his COVID patients.

 

Jesus said: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away—and the wolf snatches them and scatters them.”

 

In the COVID-infested world in which we live, Jesus is the front-line worker: the doctor, the nurse or the health care provider who practically risk their lives attending to those who are sick with COVID-19.

 

According to Medscape Medical News, from April 2020 to April 2021, more than 3,000 doctors and nurses and health care workers have died of COVID 19. They have become the frontlines in this battle against an unseen enemy, an enemy so evil and so ruthless that it is able to use our own family members, our own brothers and sisters, our friends, our own children, grandchildren, uncles and aunties to become carriers of its virus.

 

When we think of Jesus as a frontline worker, we see Him as a courageous caregiver, the advocate of our lives, our health and well-being, who is not afraid nor reluctant to give his life that we may live.

 

In this COVID pandemic, we see hundreds of thousands of health care workers who were willing to risk their lives in this fight against this deadly disease. But there were also who ran away, who quit being doctors and nurses and hospital workers because they see the virus coming. In some way, it is understandable. They have valid reasons. They are afraid of contracting the virus and endangering their families. At the early stages of the pandemic, there was little that we knew about Corona Virus. The leader of the free world at that time, said it will vanish like bubbles and disappear like magic. The hospitals did not have adequate protective gears to provide the health care workers. Many doctors and nurses, especially in the ICU’s had to make the gut-wrenching decision to step away from their jobs.

 

But this is the difference between the frontline worker who considers his job as a career and another who considers his job as a vocation. The difference is qualitative: a career is what you do because of money; a vocation is what you do because this is what you are called to do. You make a living by what you get but you save a life by what you give.

 

When we look at Jesus as our ultimate frontline Caregiver, we understand that this is His vocation. He was called by the Father to do this salvific mission. For what reason, he cared for us as a missionary. Just as the Good Shepherd is willing to give His life for the flock; the Good Front-liner is also  willing to take risks, even to risk his life,  for the wellness of his patients. He will strive to be careful, to put on the right protective gear, but he is not going to run away from the job, because that is his vocation, his calling, the noble task he was called to do.

 

The second quality of the Good Shepherd is that He knows each one of us by name

Jesus said: “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own knows me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.”

 

I find these words fascinating. I have a problem with remembering names. I can remember faces but for the life of me, it takes me time to remember names. But I know of a bishop who had a retentive memory. He was my Anglican bishop in Singapore in the 1980’s, the late Bishop Chiu Ban-it. At St. Andrew’s Cathedral, were I served for six years, there were around thousand worshippers at the main 8AM service and Bishop Chiu was reputed to remember most of their names.  If there are visitors, and plenty of them every Sunday, he would ask their names if they receive communion from him. He repeats their names and at the fellowship time or as he shakes hands as people leave the church, he would address them by their names. I believe it is a skill that you can learn and improve but for Bishop Chiu it was a spiritual gift.

 

I could imagine that most people were elated when the Bishop spelled out their names but can you imagine how heartwarming that would be when you hear God calling you by your name? “Samuel, Samuel,” God called the boy Samuel by name in the middle of the night. “Moses, Moses,” God called Moses by name from within the burning bush. “Abraham, Abraham; don’t lay your hand on your boy, Isaac; here is a ram caught in the thicket of thorns, that will be your sacrifice.” Abraham was so overwhelmed that He named that place on Mount Moriah as “Jehovah Jireh,” the Lord will provide. His grace is sufficient for me.

 

But if God were to be the father of us all, not just of Abraham, Isaac or Jacob or Moses or Elijah or Samuel, how would he be able to remember our names, all 7.7 billion human beings in the whole world?

 

That is exactly what the Bible tells us God can do. The God who made the world and everything on it, can infinitely do so much more that we can even think or imagine.

 

In Jeremiah 1:5, God says: “Before I formed you in your mother’s womb, I knew you and consecrated you to be a prophet to the nations.”

 

In Isaiah 43, God says: “Fear not for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and when you pass through the rivers, they will not overwhelm you; when you walk through the fires you will not be burned; the flames will not consume you.”

 

And in Luke 12:7, Jesus said: “God knows how many hairs you have on your head.” Of course, if you are bald, that would be easy. But the point is that God cares for each one of us, individually.

 

Third and finally, the Good Shepherd is a unifying healer.

Jesus said: “I have other sheep that are not of this fold; I must bring them also and they will listen to my voice; so there will be one flock, one shepherd.”

 

In the past, we understood this verse as a call for evangelism and conversion to Christianity. But the COVID pandemic has taught us another possible lesson. That this assault from Corona Virus was an assault against the whole human race and it is a test whether the human beings would abandon their wars against each other and instead unite against this common enemy, COVID 19.

 

No less than the Secretary General of the United Nations said and I quote: “Our world faces a common enemy” COVID-19. The virus does not care about ethnicity, nationality, faction or faith. It attacks all, relentlessly. Meanwhile armed conflicts still rage around the world...Let us not forget that in war-ravaged countries, health systems have collapsed, health professionals, already few in number have been targeted and refugees, women, children, people with disabilities pay the highest price. The fury of this virus should teach us the folly of our wars.”

 

I believe the COVID19 is testing the human race and the human spirit. If this is the start of the Third World War, then the enemy is not from within our planet earth. It is a War of Worlds. Somewhere in the cosmological complex of interstellar space, there are malevolent forces preparing for more attacks.  Some have already called this the start of the “Antrophocenic War,” the biological attack on the human body.

 

Now I have a problem with militarizing words but if this is a War of worlds, and this war is not between and among countries and peoples., then the  COVID 19 is testing our resolve. Shall we the human race shoot ourselves in the foot by continuing to war with one another or shall we unite against a common enemy and reach out to one another as one big family?

 

Don’t we need the Good Shepherd to call us together and that we listen to His voice, so there is only one human flock and one Good Shepherd?

 

Let us pray:

Lord, you made us to be single people, to be ruled by peace and justice; and to feast in freedom and unity. Break down the walls that separate us and unite us to be a single body, not divided by race, ethnicity, cultures, or creeds but united as one human race, one human family, one creation made in the image of God, nourished by the Blood of the Lamb and sustained by the Holy Spirit. Amen.