On Faith
Mike Young
Jesus’ flock exceeds
our understandingIn John 10:16 Jesus says, "I have sheep that are not of this fold." The line occurs in a series of sayings all related by the metaphor of the sheep and the shepherd. The series ends with the line, "and the Jews didn't understand."
I include myself in their number, for the meaning of this saying of Jesus is far from obvious. The series reads almost as if the author of the Gospel of John had used the search button on his online copy of the Sayings of Jesus. Only the shepherd can go in at the gate, my sheep know my voice, etc. Then comes this enigmatic statement. What other sheep fold could there be?
There is nothing in the Gospels about where Jesus spent the approximately 20 years between his appearance at the Temple at age 12 and his baptism by John the Baptist.
Did he spend those years as a carpenter in Nazareth, three miles from Sepphoris, a major Hellenistic city and a crossroads of the Roman Empire? Did he go to Alexandria in northern Egypt, a major intellectual center? Did he go east, perhaps as far as India? Did he spend that time in an Essene community, or as a follower of John the Baptist?
Just who were these other sheep not of this fold? What was their religious language and what was he to them? We do not know.
But that curious phrase ought to give us pause. We tend to assume that what he taught can be fully contained in the particular religious language of first-century Judaism or Christianity. We forget that it was two centuries before Christendom established any consensus about the meaning of that teaching, and even that was historically conditioned.
Each of our differing religious traditions take our version as the final articulation of the faith once delivered unto the saints. None of us acknowledge the inevitable incompleteness of our religious formulations. Yet all of our traditions have been reshaped and reinterpreted over time. Particularly in the challenge of living together in a pluralistic society, a certain humility seems in order.
At an interfaith conference some years ago, we were discussing the foundations for interfaith dialogue. Someone said, "All paths lead to the same place."
A Buddhist responded: "I do not think it is true, that all paths lead to the same place, but it may be true that we all get lost in the same territory."
He may have been a part of that other sheepfold.
The Rev. Mike Young is pastor of the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu.
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