Every year in the Episcopal church, the fourth Sunday of Easter is Good Shepherd Sunday. This year, Mother's Day falls on Good Shepherd Sunday, which naturally leads us to think about how Mothers embody some of the qualities of the Good Shepherd. I want to reflect with you about those qualities, recognizing that not all mothers have them, and also recognizing that many fathers, aunts, uncles, sisters and brothers do have those qualities. The odd fact is, that not every woman who gives birth to a child, has the emotional resources for mothering; many factors in a woman's life, including her own illness, may take away these resources. Very frequently, fathers, grandparents, sisters, and adoptive parents step in to provide what a birth mother wanted to provide and couldn't.

There are three qualities or perhaps I should say, commitments, of mothering, which are also qualities of the Good Shepherd. The first one is the love, care, and sympathy that anyone who mothers has for their child. This means a constant awareness of the child's needs, of the child's activities, the child's environment, and as well as an active seeking of what is best for the child. The second quality is protection and rescue: the constant vigilance for any danger, whether it be physical, social, or psychological, and the instantaneous effort to rescue, one's child without thought of personal risk. The third quality is a deeply held belief in the goodness, or potential goodness, of the child.

As an adoptive mother, I can attest that all three of these qualities were part of my experience. In 1985, I adopted my sister's son Jacob; and moved psychologically from being an aunt, to being a mother. Jacob had just turned 8 at the time, and had attention deficit disorder, I threw myself into providing what he had lacked in his father's household from which he had come to me. Very quickly I came to love him as deeply as I have ever loved. But in a few short years, the teenage boy would leave high school, and leave home testing that love as many children do. During those years when he was living irresponsibly, I continued to be believe in his essential goodness, and that he would eventually pull out of his adolescent rebellion. The night before my interview with Vestry of St. Thomas for the position of rector, Jacob was hit by a car, and almost died in a Denver hospital. As he recovered from that accident, he became a different person, who fell in love, rented an apartment, got a job, and then decided to go to the police academy. Miraculously, the police academy overlooked his teenage arrests and accepted him. Today he is a policeman in South Carolina.

As I look back on those years, I am very much aware of things I didn't do or think of, that would have made a difference for Jacob, and there are other things I said and did which I wish I could take back. Probably most parents and other people who engage in mothering a child, feel that way. There are so many stresses in life, and a multitude of other responsibilities we carry at the same time.

Because we are imperfect, and limited, the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd is profoundly comforting. He is to us, all that we wanted our mothers to be and, all that we would like to be toward our own children. In chapter 10 of the Gospel of John, we hear Jesus describe the specific qualities that characterize the good shepherd: that he knows each sheep by name, that he protects the sheep from danger, and rescues them when they are lost, and that he gives his life for the sheep. In saying these things, in identifying himself as the good shepherd, Jesus was drawing on a deep tradition in the history of Israel. The patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were all shepherds, and nomads, who moved around the land with their flocks, without building houses or settling down. When the Hebrew people came out of Egypt and invaded the land of Canaan, they occupied the hill country, where they continued to live for several generations as nomadic shepherds. When the greatest King of Israel, David, was identified as God's choice, he was shepherding the family flock; and he is the one who wrote the beloved 23rd Psalm. Through David, the imagery of the King as shepherd of the people provided a model of how the Kings were to rule, as providers, protectors, and guides. Many years later, the prophet Ezekiel received from God a message of judgment against the kings: they have fed and clothed themselves instead of the sheep. God says to the Kings: "you have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them."

Because the Kings had forsaken their responsibilities, God announced that he was taking the flock back into his own care. In the verses that follow our lesson, God says, "I will feed them with good pasture, I will seek the lost, I will bind up the injured, I will strengthen the weak-I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep!" So when Jesus claimed for himself the role of Good Shepherd, his listeners would have heard in that claim, at the very least, an assertion that he was God's Son, or even possibly, a claim to embody the direct presence of God on earth. And later in chapter 10 of the Gospel, we do indeed hear that Jesus is accused of blasphemy "because you, though only a human being, are making yourself God."

St. John is making the same point in the way he tells the story of Jesus: in chapter 9 he describes how Jesus healed the man born blind, in chapter 10 we hear that Jesus identifies himself as the Good Shepherd, and in chapter 11 Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. St. John is using the prophecies from the Hebrew Scriptures, to tell us who Jesus is. And then when St. John has persuaded us that Jesus is indeed the Shepherd of Israel, he begins to show us that Jesus is also, at the same time, the sacrificial lamb. Twice in today's reading, Jesus says, "I lay down my life for my sheep."

And according to St. John , the Last Supoer takes place not during the Passover, but the night before. Why? Perhaps because the lambs for the Passover dinners were all slaughtered on Friday morning, as Jesus was being led to the cross and crucified. There is an enormous, almost incomprehensible paradox here, that the Good Shepherd chose to become one of the sheep, needing the nourishment and protection of a shepherd, and beyond that, chose to become the sacrificial lamb. Just as Good Friday and Easter belong together, so also the Good Shepherd and the sacrificial lamb belong together as the astonishing news that God loves and cares for us like a shepherd, or like a mother, AND, that God suffers for us, and with us.

Three days ago we celebrated the feast of a saint to whom God revealed these things directly. Dame Julian of Norwich was a late 14th century mystic and anchorite, which means a person who had entered into an enclosed solitary life in a cell, in this case, attached to St Julian's church in Norwich, England. In her book Revelations of Divine Love, she frequently refers to Jesus as our Mother, because "on the cross he gave us birth into everlasting life." Please note that she is not saying that Jesus was a woman. She is saying that Jesus' role in our lives is that of mother, because "he feeds and fosters us, just as the great and supreme kind nature of motherhood, and the natural need of childhood, demand." And because he is a divine mother, she says, "he will sprinkle us with his precious blood, and make our soul very soft and tender, and in the course of time he will heal us completely."

What this means for us today, is that we are invited both to receive that love and healing which the Good Shepherd offers, and also that we are asked to become good shepherds ourselves. As members if Christ's body, as partakers of the new covenant, as ministers of the good news, we are empowered to be providers of food for the hungry, of comfort for the sorrowful, of healing for the wounded, of searching for the lost. We are to exercise those qualities, which we see in mothering and shepherding, for the benefit of the human family. That is exactly what the first woman to be honored in a Mother's Day observance did. Anna Jarvis, an Appalachian homemaker, organized women during the civil war to work for better sanitary conditions, and to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors. Today, as we honor the mothers among us, let us strive to embody those qualities of care and protection, of believing in and searching for those who are lost, that we see in Jesus, the Good Shepherd.

Amen