Scripture: Isaiah 55:1-2; John 21:15-19.
“Feed my sheep,” Jesus says to Peter. Those are essentially the last words Jesus speaks in the gospel of John, and I want to reflect on those words this morning.
Actually, I think I will mostly ignore the sheep part. It is unfortunately quite common for the Bible to refer to us humans as sheep and to God as the shepherd and to Jesus as the good shepherd. I’ve always stumbled over those parts of the Bible that compare me to a sheep. It’s not a big, big deal, but it’s also not a very flattering way to be referred to in my opinion. Not that I know very much about sheep. On the few occasions when I have been up close to sheep they seem loveable enough, but they do seem pretty docile, and what I read about them is that intelligence is not their strong suit. And what you do with sheep is herd them, which of course makes the comparison especially inappropriate at Sojourners, where herding is thankfully not a core value, and wouldn’t work very well anyway.
So I always raise an objection in my mind, or at least raise an eyebrow, when I come across these passages. But the Bible is so insistent about this that some time ago I decided I was just going to have to deal with it. And so having once again registered my unhappiness with the sheep metaphor, I’m going to put that issue aside for the rest of the morning. Sheep?! O.K., sheep.
It’s really the feeding I’m thinking about this morning. It’s a pretty direct thing Jesus is saying here. Feed my sheep. Feed my people. Like everything in the Bible, we can choose to treat it as “interesting” or I suppose uninteresting, as the case may be. We can choose to treat it as an ancient writing, far removed from us, or as something that was written or spoken to someone else, someone back then or over there. We can choose to fasten on the miraculous parts of the story (a risen Jesus talking to earthly disciples). There are all sorts of ways of keeping our distance. But I am choosing this morning to try and hear what Jesus said in as direct a way as he said it. Feed my sheep. I am choosing to try to hear those words very clearly, and to take them seriously. They speak to me, but just because words go directly to you, doesn’t mean that you don’t need to process them. So a few thoughts.
There are some things I take for granted when I hear these words, and maybe you do too. Maybe I don’t need to say what I’m about to say, but I tend to believe that most often things that I might think can be taken for granted often cannot be, or that sometimes it’s important to say those things out loud anyway.
For instance, when Jesus says “feed my sheep”, I take for granted that he means to include in that admonition, literal, physical feeding—with real food—that translates into flesh and blood—maybe even that tastes good. I don’t think I have to argue this at Sojourners, that material needs and material justice are not matters that are beneath our Christian concern because they are not spiritual enough. When confronted with people who do not have enough to eat, prayers by themselves are not enough, in fact prayers by themselves are blasphemous. I think we are probably agreed on that, but as I say sometimes we need to say it out loud anyway.
Also, when Jesus says “feed my sheep”, I don’t hear him saying that in some exclusive way. My sheep does not mean people who in some way belong to Jesus, who have said that they love Jesus or mean to follow Jesus or belong to some group that bears Jesus’ name or who have been herded in by Jesus, who belong to his flock. A relationship to Jesus is not necessary to qualify for food of any kind. Of course we don’t feed people who are physically hungry because they are already Christian, or because they are potential Christians. But neither do we think of offering spiritual food only to those who are already Christian, or for the purpose of turning someone into a Christian. Sometimes we think we know what food is good for people. We assume that feeding people means building up the strength of their belief, making people more firm in their faith, their Christian faith. A certain approach then would assume that feeding people means helping people to become more Christian. Though I think there is a place, an important place, for Christians to covenant together to build up one another in their Christian faith, I also have to say that that is not the way I am hearing Jesus this morning. He is not talking about the kind of feeding that Christians may choose to do just for each other.
So how do we feed each other? Part of me says this is not a question that has a complicated answer. Part of me says that Jesus didn’t intend for us to analyze the meaning his words, that we aren’t supposed to be struggling with the meaning of the word sheep, or the meaning of the word my, or the meaning of the word feed. Feed my sheep in one sense is pretty simple. If we know something about friendship, if we know something about love, if we know something about compassion, if we know something about what it means to walk with someone through a difficult time, then we know more than something about what Jesus means by telling us to “feed my sheep”. Granted that what we know of such things is not all there is to know, and granted that our actions are never perfect and never enough, still following Jesus’ mandate to “feed his sheep” may require of us nothing more than being attentive, on just a basic human level, to the people around us, the world around us, and what our own hearts and spirits call us to.
Still, for me, there is more to it than that. And it does have to do with faith, but maybe not in any simple, uncomplicated way. For me, being fed means being brought somehow into a closer relationship to God. And that’s not such an easy thing to describe or explain. If someone were to ask me what she should do to feed me in this way, I’m not sure I could tell her exactly. Because it’s nothing so simple or easy as doing something we might label as religious. Coming to church or saying a prayer doesn’t necessarily bring us closer to God, though sometimes it does. But coming closer to God is certainly not limited to that.
So I can’t give clear directions to someone who wants to feed me by bringing me closer to God. And if I can’t say exactly how I expect to be brought closer to God when I am the one being fed, then I also don’t know exactly what it is that I am supposed to do by way of bringing someone else closer to God, when I am the one trying to do the feeding. And I am also aware that other people may not feel things quite the same way I do and that others may not feel that being brought closer to God is how they need to be fed, or even has any meaning for them. So there are these complications, these ambiguities about feeding people by trying to bring them closer to God. We can never be sure that we know how to do that, and we can never take for granted that people want to be brought closer to God.
But in spite of the ambiguities, in spite of the fact that we may not be quite sure what this means for us sisters and brothers, and how we might do this respectfully and lovingly for one another, bring each other closer to God, still I can only testify that my soul’s food consists of what somehow brings me closer to God. And I know I have been fed by other people in this way. Sometimes they have known what they were doing. Most of them time they haven’t. And because I have been fed in this way, that is also an important part of what I hear Jesus saying to me when he says, “feed my sheep”. I also can testify that Jesus is one who has brought me closer to God, and that is one important reason I am able to call myself Christian.
Perhaps another dimension of this, or another way to describe it, is to say that what feeds us is what draws us deeper into ourselves, into regions of the spirit where words don’t come easily, and where God resides. It may not be possible to say, quickly anyway, what we mean by this or how it happens, but there are, as we all know, things we take in that don’t touch us in any very deep place, that allow us to be superficial with ourselves, to say nothing of each other, or as Isaiah says, there are things we consume that are not bread, that do not satisfy. And there are those things that make our lives deeper and richer, or as I would say that bring us closer to God.
I recalled the verses from Isaiah as I was thinking about these things this week, how easily we gravitate, how easily I gravitate, toward things that require less effort but that therefore are less likely to feed me. But when Isaiah remarks on how often we spend our labor and money for things that do not really satisfy, it also made me ask another question. Is it really satisfaction that we want or need? People talk sometimes about spiritual hungers and we think of spiritual food, maybe as something that will take the hunger away. But that may not be quite right.
It may be, in fact I believe it to be so, that faith itself is a hunger. It is a longing, a searching, a hoping, a desiring after God. And therefore we are fed not so much by things that satisfy us spiritually, but rather we are fed by whatever it may be that awakens that spiritual hunger within us. It is a paradox, to be sure, but we are fed by things that make us hungry—hungry for righteousness, hungry for justice, hungry for peace, hungry for God.
Images of faith, for me, almost always involve a reaching out of some kind. Like the woman in the gospels, the woman who had been hemorrhaging who reached out to Jesus for healing not with a heart full of self-satisfied religion and theological certainties but with a hunger that Jesus called faith and that he blessed. This (pose of satisfaction) is not a picture of faith. This (reaching out) is much more like faith, as I am familiar with it.
Forget faith. I know myself to be most alive when I am hungry, hungry for something worth being hungry for. And so what feeds me, as I say, is what brings to life that hunger within me, and therefore brings me to life. And I will testify here too that Jesus has, for me, been one who makes me hungry for the things of God, makes me hungry for the reign of God, hungry that God’s will be done on earth. Because Jesus feeds me with that hunger, because he brings me to life in that way, he is for me the bread of life.
How do we feed each other? May we do our best to make one another hungry, hungry for a new creation, hungry for a reign of shalom. Let this be our prayer, as we offer to one another today the bread of life. Amen.
Jim Bundy
May 6, 2001