Easter 4 Year A

(Acts 2.42-47; Psalm 23; 1Peter 2.19-25; John 10.1-10)

In these weeks of Easter we hear readings from the Book of Acts each Sunday to remind us how the church is born, created, and formed in the days, weeks and years after the resurrection of Christ. Because just like those first Christians, we are part of a community, the church, that is re-formed, renewed today, as we gather around the Risen Christ and share his body and blood given for the life of the world.

In our reading from Acts today, we heard a wonderful summation of the life of that new community that has come into being: it’s a community into which new members are being baptised; that devotes itself to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer and thanksgiving. It is characterised by awe and wonder. And, we hear, ‘All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.’ Is it any surprise that we are also told that they had the goodwill of all the people?

We gather as members of that same community, that church. You may recall that when we baptise new members, we directly quote that reading from Acts as we ask them to promise to continue in the Apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers. To be baptised is to join a community committed to continuing that same practice and way of life. It’s perhaps no surprise that we don’t quote that second part of the description of the early church: how we maintain the practice of holding all things in common is more contentious. We might hear that as a plea for generosity, and it is certainly that, but in the early church, at least for a short while, it clearly went beyond that. It witnesses to a model of community and inter-dependence that feels a long way from our individualised, separate lives and our model of church now.

Our Gospel reading is the beginning of John’s sustained meditation, throughout chapter 10, on Jesus as the Good Shepherd. John begins that exploration, in these first 10 verses, by contrasting the leadership that Christ offers, as the Good Shepherd, with the example, seen in many Old Testament passages, of leaders described as shepherds of the people who act more like ravenous wolves. This Sunday is often known as Vocations Sunday: a Sunday to pray about the kind of leadership Christ embodies, and that we need; that we are called to model ourselves.

The explicit declaration of Christ that ‘I am the Good Shepherd,’ comes in the passage immediately following this one. In our Gospel reading today we heard the claim, ‘I am the gate for the sheep.’ But both claims are part of the whole series of what are known as the ‘I am’ declarations in John’s Gospel. The Gospel is structured around this series of declarations: I am the way, the truth and the life; I am the vine; I am the bread of life; I am the Good Shepherd. In structuring those claims about who Christ is, with the statement ‘I am’, John is drawing on the most holy name of God – the name revealed to Moses at the burning bush. I am who I am, reveals God to Moses. God is the great I am. ‘I am’ is the most fundamental name for source of all being. And so this naming of Jesus echoes that divine name. It’s not simply that Jesus is claiming to be God; it’s more that Jesus is seen as participating in the work of God. The I am sayings are all described in the context of the Son’s relationship with the Father: they are the outworking of that relationship, where the Son is sent into the world to reveal the Father, the source of all life, to the world. By inhabiting the roles described in the I am sayings, Jesus participates in that life, shows forth the One who sent him. Vocation, Jesus’s vocation, and ours, therefore, are about participating in something that precedes us; it’s about participating in the divine activity that, in Jesus’ words, comes to bring life, and life in all its abundance.

To think about vocation is to explore something dynamic and active; not simply a sense of our identity, who we are; but who we might be, what we are called to do, and what we might grow into.

Vocation doesn’t exist for its own sake, but is discovered in relationship. Jesus is the Good Shepherd, the one, we hear, who calls each of his own flock by name, who knows each one intimately; Christ’s vocation it is to help the sheep come and go and find pasture – be nourished and fed. And we are called to hear and respond to that voice: Christ’s participation in the divine mission to bring abundant life is known in that mutual call and response, in our listening and responding to the voice of Christ. That is our, corporate, vocation, as we gather together: to listen and attend to the one who calls us each by name, who brings us into the good pasture that will feed us, whose desire is life in all its abundance.

And that listening and attending, John is clear, is in contrast to, in competition with other forms of leadership that seek to grab our attention and allegiance: the way of thieves and bandits, those who are not interested in providing abundant life but simply to kill and destroy.

In his encyclical Laudate Si, about the flourishing of Creation, Pope Francis drew out that basic contrast. Jesus’ disciples, followers of the Good Shepherd, are, he says, to be pastoral people, carers who together seek the flourishing of creation and not predatory thieves who constantly consume and destroy, while others are not yet able to live in a way worthy of their human dignity.

And perhaps that is how we connect with that model of human community that we encountered in Acts, in the early church, when goods were held in common and the needs of all were met out of that common pool. The simplicity of that model is hard to sustain through time. Christian history is of course however studded with examples – monastic communities, hermits and anchoresses, the friars following both Francis and Dominic, modern examples of communitarian living – models of people who live intentionally in ways that share resources; that see their vocation as beginning in the call to a generous giving away of inherited riches. That call is not simply to generosity, however, but to a recognition that we discover who we are, what we are called to be and do, in relationship, in our inter-dependence, in our common life. The church is that place where our dependence on one another is acknowledged and celebrated; where we understand that we are social beings all the way down. We discover who we are only in relation to one another. And in that inter-dependence is abundant life, abundant life for all creation. Amen.