Quick Summary:

Good Shepherd Sunday. We're awfully good at telling stories so that the attention remains focused on US, the SHEEP: how we’re faithful and unfaithful. How we stay safe and how we get into trouble. How we’re baaaad sometimes and good other times.

But Jesus makes it hard for us to do that for very long this morning. He wants us, as thick skulled as we can sometimes be, to focus on the Shepherd rather than ourselves. And who is this Good Shepherd? He is the one who lays down his life for his sheep.
There’s a bit about a WOLF in this passage. And a bit about the HIRED HAND, who, when push comes to shove, is more likely to run off and save his own skin than stay and face the danger. But these characters, when all is said and done, says Jesus, are only bit players. The one we need to keep our eyes on is the Good Shepherd. And when we do that, everything else falls into place.

During his imprisonment at Berlin’s Tegel prison Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a reflection piece to his closest friends, asking WHO WILL STAND FIRM in the growing crisis engulfing Europe.
“Who stand firm? Only the one whose ultimate standard is not his reason, his principles, conscience, freedom, or virtue; only the one who is prepared to sacrifice all of these when, in faith and in relationship to God alone, he is called to obedient and responsible action. Such a person is the responsible one, whose life is to be nothing but a response to God’s question and call.

At the same time as Bonhoeffer wrote these words from prison, 800 miles to the west and south, the people of the Vivarais Plateau around Le Chambon, France, were being led by the Good Shepherd to hide, shelter, protect, and rescue thousands of Jewish refugees—many of them children—at great risk to their own lives.