One Shepherd, One Flock: Jesus on the Foolishness of Prejudice

Text: John 10:11-18

One of the earliest things we learn is how to tell things apart. This begins long before we ever step into a classroom, before Kindergarten or any kind standardized testing. We learn easy things first: this is mom and this is dad; this is red, this is blue; this is cold, this is hot. We need to know these things to stay safe, and just to get by in the world. You need to understand how thing A is different from thing B in order to understand anything particular about things A or B. Then, as we get older the distinctions grow wider and wider. By the time we are adults there seem to be infinite variations on a theme. Creativity is born out of seeing these distinct possibilities. In one famous—perhaps apocryphal—story, Abraham Lincoln once tried to close the US patent office because he believed everything that could be invented had been invented. The following 150 years have told a very different story.

            Making distinctions is crucial to invention, safety and critical thinking, so we tend to think categories are universally good. However, there are limits to their helpfulness. On moral issues, making distinctions can be downright tricky: what is right or wrong, “good” or “bad?” In making distinctions of judgment we need to be careful that we don’t confuse our view of a thing with ultimate truth. It’s one thing to argue over the greatness of sports team but quite another to caricature based on race, gender, or religious beliefs. For instance, we may call a warm day “good” or a blizzard “bad,” but that is a very different judgment than to have positive thoughts about a woman because of her race, or negative thoughts about a man because of his beliefs.

            Jesus gives us a cautionary example in talking about the Good Shepherd. Who is the Good Shepherd? The one who guards the sheep, but also the one who does not make distinctions within the flock. Jesus is the shepherd who protects and saves every sheep. And more to the point, Jesus values his own life only to the extent that he is willing to give it up for the sake of the flock. The sheep are all the same. One shepherd, one flock; and the flock is broader than you might think. Jesus says that he has other sheep that do not belong to this fold. These are not “white” sheep or “black” sheep; they are just sheep. No divisions, nothing to make them distinct. Sheep alone.

            In fact, in the entirety of this John 10 account, sheep are never mentioned in the singular. Never once does Jesus separate us into individuals who receive according to our own goodness or badness. We are anonymous but communal.

            It is we who have made all sorts of suggestions about who is worthy to be a member of the flock. It is we who have taken all manner of stances about a person’s “goodness” or “badness.” These may very well be necessary judgments to keep us safe, but Jesus isn’t talking about life as it is down here. He is talking about life as it one day will be; he is talking about not just an ideal but a reality beyond the veil of our lives.

            Jesus names a reality—he is the Good Shepherd, we are sheep—and he doesn’t care if we are big sheep or little sheep, ugly sheep or pretty sheep, sheep that are black or white, male or female, rich or poor.

            The kingdom of God rejects distinctions, because our primary identity is the body of Christ; not our names, not our memories, not our relationships or our identities.

            So if we believe this is true—that the kingdom of God rejects distinctions, things that separate us from one another, traits that we consciously or unconsciously consider “good” or “bad”—if the kingdom of God is a place where we are united as one flock—one body—then we do a poor job whenever we take sides down here. Our prejudice may take many forms. It may be biases along racial, gender, or class lines, but it is not only these. Anytime we believe ourselves to be of innately greater worth to God than another person we puff ourselves up as if trying to show the Good Shepherd that we’re the bigger sheep.

Notice, please, that Jesus doesn’t care.

This past week the Washington Capitols eliminated the Boston Bruins in game 7 of their opening round series in the Stanley Cup playoffs on a goal by Joel Ward, a forward who happens to be a black man playing a predominantly white man’s game. Within minutes, Twitter had erupted with racially charged epithets aimed at Ward.

It’s easy to condemn the people behind the tweets, and rightfully so. They displayed their ignorance, and worse still some of them remain defensive of their posts, trying to justify that “everyone was saying the same thing.” But behind the vulgarity, there is something in this circumstance that tells us about how we see the world. All of us distinguish between “us” and “them.” Why is it that the first gut reaction we have to Ward is that he is a black man? Because he is a minority in that sport? Perhaps. Nobody, as far as I know, mocked Ward for being from Ontario, or for his stocky build, or for wearing the number “42”. Instead, they saw two things—he plays for the opposing team and he’s black—and from those two details they were armed with enough previously learned prejudice to say some awful things. We all have our own categories for “us” and “them”. It is our associations with a thing—in this case, race and sports team affiliation—that cause us to fall off the boat.

This is important for us because we tend to ascribe to Jesus the same kinds of biases we feel ourselves. Isn’t it funny how the Jesus we believe in dislikes the same people we dislike? The reality, however, is that Jesus defies making even the simplest distinctions. Jew or Greek? Slave or free? Male or female? Neither, says Jesus. Why? Because those things we have created to separate one person from another are not applicable to the kingdom of God. Jesus doesn’t care if you are black or white, athletic or uncoordinated. That much should be obvious.

But what should also be obvious is that we do the kingdom of God a serious disservice when we continue to form judgments based on these arbitrary characteristics. If you think less of a person because they are short or tall, skinny or fat, old or young, black, white, Hispanic, or Asian, or because they are a man or a woman, then how can you have any hope of experiencing hints of God’s kingdom on earth?

Jesus came to break down those walls that separate us one from another, and Jesus died for you and for me and for all of us that can’t help but continue to make distinctions between those things that are good and those things that are bad. Jesus, thankfully, doesn’t care. We are his flock—one flock, one shepherd.