Other Faiths

A sermon for the fourth Sunday of Easter

Fr. Tim Jones, St. Lawrence's, York

(15th April, 2009)

John 10.22-30

When I was a child, I was taught to be scared of gypsies. Not by my parents, but certainly by the other children in the streets where I played. Gypsies seemed to be like the bogeymen - strange people who didn’t live like the rest of us. If anything went wrong at all, there would be dark mutterings about the gypsy camp. There was even a game that we played at primary school, where if you were the loser then we said that “the gypsies would get you”. I knew nothing at all about what “get you” might mean, but by the age of 6, I knew that I didn’t like gypsies. They were “them” and we wuz “us”, and that’s all that needed to be known. The world was made up of “us and them groups” in my childhood - cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, Germans and English - including gypsies and “”the rest”.

Shepherds were generally despised in Jesus’ day. They lived on the margins of society, up in the hills with their flocks. There was a natural suspicion between the shepherd hill dwellers and the settled village dwellers. When Jesus spoke of himself as the Shepherd, it was yet another way in which he unsettled people and challenged their assumptions.

And for slightly different reasons he challenges us too. For people of faith there can be simple assumptions to which we cleave too happily until Jesus unsettles us. We know Jesus to be “the Way, the Truth and the Life” and that no-one comes to the Father except through him. We know it is true - it says so in the Bible, and I for one firmly and unequivocally believe it to be true. So what of Jesus’ enigmatic claim in today’s gospel reading that he has “other sheep who do not belong to this fold”? And this right after he has warned us that the good Shepherd lays down his life for his sheep? That’s us, isn’t it? ‘Jesus dies for us, the ones who believe in him, and so much hard luck for those who don’t know him or don’t follow him’ - isn’t that how we might be tempted to think? But then, there are those awkward words about sheep not of our fold. Like it or not, even in matters of faith, we cannot simply divide God’s creation into “us and them”. That task is reserved to God alone, and we pre-empt him at our peril.

Our calling is to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ without fear or favour. Where we find people of other faiths, insofar as they do not know Christ, our lives, our deeds - and, yes, our words - must bear witness to him. But our witness is a witness of love, and must be free of contempt, for that other person is a precious child of God also, created like you and I for God’s own good purposes. If we judge, and if we despise, then we do so very much at our own risk. We may well have a gospel to proclaim, but we also have much to learn; the first teachers about Jesus Christ were shepherds from the fields and the wise men from lands afar to the east. We may want to put the world into our own neat boxes, but our Shepherd tells us that he has other sheep, not of our fold, and so we just have to deal with it.

When I was seven, I had an epiphany. There was a lovely little girl in my class at school. Marie was pretty, and everybody, including me, liked her. And then one day, I can’t remember how, we discovered that she was a gypsy. It takes, for a seven year old, about an hour to change one’s entire world view. Without having the vocabulary to articulate my insight, I instinctively came to see within the hour that gypsies were not the bogeymen of playground games at all. By knowing the true humanity of Marie, I knew that there was a deeper “us” that trumped any shallow “us and them divisions”.

Today I would say that in the love of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, the Word of God which, when spoken, brings all things into being, in that real love of Christ, we have a unity which transcends social group, or nationality, or race, and yes, even creed.

That is profoundly good news, and many do not know it. The God given task of this flock - us - is to make that good news known. Whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, in Jesus Christ we are one.