29 Apr Sermon for the 4th Sunday of Easter, Year A
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Sunday 26th April 2026
May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O God, our rock and our redeemer.
Sheep are my favourite animal – mainly because of how much I enjoy using their wool for various crafts – but because they’re my favourite animal, I’m always a bit offended on their behalf when people say things like, “Don’t be like a sheep – sheep always just follow the crowd because they’re too stupid to think for themselves.” Jesus clearly thinks much more highly of sheep than this, in today’s gospel passage he presents them as discerning, and speaks of their trusting obedience as a positive thing. The sheep know their shepherd’s voice, they won’t follow a stranger.
One of the best things about where I lived last year, Hilfield Friary, an Anglican Franciscan house in Dorset, is that they have their own sheep – just a small flock, two different breeds, about 20 or 25 in total. One of the sheep is called Vivi, and Vivi is everyone’s favourite. She’s the only one we can all recognise, because she has this dodgy patch of skin on her side, and she’s the only one that will let absolutely anyone pet her. So whenever I fancied, I could just go out into the field, spot Vivi, and go cuddle a sheep. But Vivi was maybe not quite as discerning as the sheep that Jesus was talking about in today’s gospel reading.
There was a time at Hilfield when we were all out helping to herd the sheep from one field to the next. Most of the time, Richard, the community member who looked after the sheep and who the sheep knew, could herd them on his own, because they did recognise his voice (and the sound of the bucket of snacks he’d shake at them), and they’d follow him happily. But because there was new lambs involved, this time we were all out to help make sure none of the lambs got lost. So Richard starts shouting and shaking the bucket, and most of the sheep – and most of the lambs following their mums – start running down the hill toward him. Vivi also started running, but instead of running to follow the voice she knew, she started running in the opposite direction, towards me, to get cuddles. I don’t know how you persuade a sheep not to follow you, but apparently not all sheep follow the crowd.
When we consider ourselves as the sheep that Jesus speaks of, it feels like we don’t always live up to the wisdom or trust that he describes – and instead, we often find ourselves acting more like Vivi, running in the direction of interesting distractions instead of towards the shepherd. It strikes me as curious that in John’s telling of the gospel, Jesus makes no reference to sheep that go astray or get lost. Because running in the direction of interesting distractions, even when we want to follow the shepherd, seems to be one of the most ubiquitous experiences of the spiritual life. I’m reminded of Paul in his letter to the Romans, sounding frustrated as he says “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Or Anselm, in the first chapter of his Proslogion, which we heard reference to in the collect for his feast day earlier this week, where he’s lamenting, “I was created to see you, and I have not yet accomplished that for which I was made”, “I was going towards God, and I was my own impediment”. “I cannot seek you unless you show me how, and I will never find you unless you show yourself to me.”
So what do we do with ourselves? Or as Anselm puts it, “Most High Lord, what shall an exile do who is as far away from you as this?” In our distraction and confusion, we can trick ourselves into believing that we are far from God, or that God is far from us – that we have to follow God a long way before we get near. But Jesus is our shepherd, the one who is close by, the one who is the very gate of the sheepfold, lying across the opening to keep us safely close to him.
As I was thinking about today’s readings, I was reminded of the hymn Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing – which I’m not making us sing because it’s an American hymn that you rarely find in English hymnbooks, but it expresses this tension between feeling close to God and feeling distant from God. In the last verse, it says: “Let Thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to Thee. Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love. Here’s my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for Thy courts above.” We may wander like sheep, but Jesus remains our good shepherd, going ahead of us and keeping us close to him.
We hear his voice, because he calls us by name – like the very first time, according to John, that Jesus reveals himself to someone after the resurrection, as he meets Mary in the garden, and it is only when he calls her by name that she recognises him. God calls us by name, so we can recognise who it is that speaks.
And Jesus, our shepherd, leads us out. The word John uses for ‘leads them out’ echoes the words he uses for Jesus being led out to his crucifixion. Is the shepherd leading the sheep out to their death, from the safety of the sheepfold to the dangers posed by thieves and bandits? Does the shepherd abandon us to our own devices, to our tendency to stray in search of easier distractions and instant gratification, to confirm our idea that we are far from God and hopeless? Obviously not – Jesus, the gate of the sheepfold, came that we all might have abundant life. This word ‘leads them out’ is also used frequently in Acts, where it refers either to people being led out of prison, or to the Israelites being led out of Egypt. It is the sense of being led out to freedom, from the safety of the sheepfold to a place where, yes, bad things can happen – there are thieves and bandits and also wolves, we can go astray and get lost – but there is also pasture, and fresh water, and the shepherd, always close at hand to protect us. This freedom that the sheep are led out to is the same freedom of Jesus being led out to the cross, and it is through Jesus’ freely willed submission that our union with God is perfectly restored.
Over the triduum, I was reading a lovely book of meditations on John’s passion narrative by Martin Smith SSJE. He pointed to this union of God and humanity being completed in the moment where Jesus announces his thirst and receives the sour wine – the last things he does before announcing, ‘It is finished’. Jesus’ thirst, he says, is the thirst of all humanity for God, that thirst which we numb with our distractions and busyness, our rationalisations and our replacements. Jesus, thirsting on the cross, is all of humanity’s desire for God, our desire for our creator, our desire for the one whose image we bear, with none of the numbing or muffling: as Smith puts it, ‘Jesus is all desire without restraint’. At the same time, he is the embodiment of God, and his thirst is the thirst of God for humanity, God’s thirst for their creation. As Jesus’ thirst is quenched, as he dies, the desire of God for humanity and humanity for God are brought back into complete union, and our thirst is quenched.
When we stray from God, or wander off in the direction of exciting distractions, God doesn’t leave us to it, or simply tell us to try harder, to do better next time. When we distance ourselves from our desire for God, when we numb our longing, God meets our desire with their own. God does not, will not, cannot, force us to love them, or follow them, or listen to them. Instead, God attracts us – reawakens our desire – a reawakening expressed by Anselm in the most famous bit of his prayer, “Let me seek you by desiring you, and desire you by seeking you; let me find you by loving you, and love you in finding you.” Sometimes, God reawakens our desire by concealing themself from us, as Jesus concealed himself from Mary when he first appeared to her, “For whom are you looking?”. Or as we heard last week, of Jesus concealing himself from the disciples as they walked together along the road to Emmaus.
Like most sheep, we go astray, but it is because we know our shepherd’s voice and desire to hear it that we notice when we cannot. This desire, however much we try to numb it, keeps calling us back to follow our shepherd, because through the cross God has met it, united it, with their desire for us, and it is ultimately irresistible.
Jem, Alongsider
Mauve, Anton, 1838-1888. Landscape with Shepherd and Sheep, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=51139 [retrieved April 29, 2026]. Original source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%27Shepherd_and_Sheep%27_by_Anton_Mauve,_Cincinnati_Art_Museum.JPG.