Greater Than All Else

The scriptures referred to are John 10:22-30.

I have to admit that I was a bit dismayed when I realized it was Good Shepherd Sunday again. Not because I dislike shepherds or the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd but because I have preached on it for the last 20 years and I have nothing new to say about shepherds.

But that is not the same as the Bible having nothing new to say to me. So I read our passage from John and got down to verses 28 and 29, where Jesus says this about his sheep, “No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of my Father's hand.” Did you catch the startling part of that? Jesus is saying that what his Father has given him is greater than all else. And what did he give him? His sheep—that is, us. Jesus is saying that nothing is greater than us!

I immediately went to other translations and commentaries to see what they said about this. And I was surprised to see that some other translations say instead, “My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all.” If the phrase “is greater than all” refers to God, that changes the import of the passage. I did however notice a footnote in some of the translations which said, “Many early manuscripts [have] What my Father has given me is greater than all.” So I wanted to know which manuscripts supported this translation and I reached for A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament by Bruce Metzger. Metzger, a great Greek scholar, was the editor of the United Bible Societies standard Greek New Testament. He also chaired the Committee of Translators for the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which we use in our lectionary.

It's important to know that we do not have any of the books in the Bible fresh from the hands of the original authors. We have copies. The same, however, is true of any ancient document: the works of Homer, Aristotle, Tacitus, Caesar's Gaelic Wars, etc. When it comes to the Bible what is unique is that we have many more copies and much older ones than any of the other classical works. While the earliest copies of the other authors' books only go back to the Middle Ages, we have literally thousands of copies of the New Testament, some partial copies going back to the 100s AD. Plus we have ancient translations and quotations of the text in the writings of the early Church Fathers. In fact, you could reconstruct the text of the New Testament, with the exception of just 11 verses, from those quotations alone. As for the Old Testament, the significance of the Dead Sea scrolls is that they give us a text of the Hebrew Bible that is 1000 years older than the early medieval Masoretic text. So by studying literally thousands of copies as well as papyrus fragments, and having access to the older manuscripts which archeology has unearthed in the last 200 years, scholars are more certain of the texts underlying the Bible than those of any of the other ancient works on which we base history.

But, of course, with so many copies there are variations in the texts. Most are easily recognized as common errors we all make in copying: misspellings, a word skipped, a word repeated, etc. They do not change the message of the Bible. And they are easily discovered when we compare copies. In addition scholars have come up with logical rules for figuring out what the original reading of a sentence probably is. Older manuscripts are more likely to be closer to the original texts, of course. Because humans like to “clean up” hard sayings, more difficult readings are more likely to be original than ones where the difficulty is smoothed out. Again because explanatory phrases are longer, shorter versions of sayings are more likely to be original. Textual criticism is a recognized science.

Anyway, without getting too technical, there are a lot of older manuscripts supporting the translation in our lectionary, though Metzger says it is “impossible Greek.” He sounds like my old Greek teacher who could not bring himself to say that Greek was highly irregular but just that it was “eccentric.” This of a language where word order means nothing and endings tell you whether a word is the subject or the direct object or how it relates to the other words in a sentence. Unfortunately there are lots of endings and they combine and elide so that they are not readily decoded. Which is why, though we were told not to by our Greek exegesis teacher, we all bought analytical Greek lexicons to help us untangle the non-obvious forms of the words we encountered. To me at least, labeling a sentence in Greek as impossible makes as much sense as saying that a portrait can't possibly be by Picasso because he could draw people better than that.

While I am not a Greek scholar and therefore unable to challenge Metzger's expertise, I will point out that our reading is supported by the older manuscripts. As well as by the principle that the more difficult a reading is, the more likely it is the original, rather than one in which the grammar was fixed. Speaking of which, John's Greek is rudimentary at best. (Luke, the only Gentile writer in the Bible, has the best Greek.) And finally, though Metzger oversaw the NRSV translation, this variant appears in it. Perhaps the other translators outvoted him in this case.

This means we can at least consider the implications of the idea that “What the Father has given me is greater than all else.” Whereas the other reading emphasizes the fact that no one can snatch us from God's hand because he is greater than anything else, this reading emphasizes the reason he holds onto us so strongly. We are more precious to him than anything else. But does that actually fit in with what the Bible says elsewhere?

Well, it says, “Your love, Lord, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies.” (Psalm 36:5) The psalmist is talking about his love and faithfulness to us, his people. Which makes sense since the Bible also tells us that God is love. (1 John 4:8) But the size of God's love is not the issue. Love always has an object. Of course, the natural object of the Father's love is the Son. And indeed John's gospel says, “The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hands.” (John 3:35) So what makes us think God loves us as much as this verse seems to say?

Real love is revealed in how one acts. God created us in his image and blessed us. (Genesis 1:27-28) Even after we messed up, God doesn't stop trying to win us back. That's what the whole story of the Bible is about. He chooses the children of Abraham as his people, through whom the rest of the world is to be blessed. (Genesis 12:1-3) Even when his people turn from him, indulging in idolatry and injustice, God does not give up on them. In Lamentations, which is about the judgment and fall of Jerusalem, it says, “Though he brings grief, he will show compassion. So great is his unfailing love. For he does not willingly bring affliction or grief to the children of men.” (Lamentations 3:32-33) Zephaniah, whose theme is the Day of the Lord, in other words, the day of judgment, nevertheless says, “The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.” (Zephaniah 3:17) We hear all the time about singing to the Lord but here God is so delighted in us that he will sing and rejoice over us!

How great is God's love for us? As the famous verse says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his unique son so that whoever trusts in him will not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16) But God did not send Jesus merely to teach us. He had previously sent lots of prophets to do that. We still didn't obey his commandments not to lie, steal, kill or harm one another. (Exodus 20:1-17) It's not that we lacked the knowledge to obey him; we lacked the love to do it. If you love someone and they ask you to do something, you do it. If they ask you to stop doing something, you stop. (John 14:21) People are motivated by what they love more than anything else. Unfortunately, we love other things, and especially ourselves, more than we love God.

God should have written us off. He doesn't because he loves us. So he sends his son into hostile territory on what amounts to a suicide mission in order to save us. And not because we deserve it. As Paul says, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8) It wasn't because we were particularly lovable either. As 1 John says, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (1 John 4:10)

It does no good, however, if this love is one-sided. We are meant to love God back. But we need help with that—which God provides. As it says in Romans, “...the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.” (Romans 5:5) But this love is not just some warm fuzzy feelings for God or for other people. Jesus prayed to his Father that “the love with which You loved me may be in them, and I in them.” (John 17:26) And what kind of love is that? Jesus says, “This is why the Father loves me—because I lay down my life... (John 10:17) And for whom does he do this? “...I lay down my life for the sheep.” (John 10:15)

Jesus loves us with a self-sacrificial love. Which means that is the kind of love God has for us. A parent will lay down her life to save her child. Even if the child is ungrateful. Because the child is more dear to the parent than anything else.

And so the rest of scripture does support this translation of the verse in question. But if it is translated the other way, the verses read, “No one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all and no one can snatch them out of the Father's hand. The Father and I are one.” In this translation, the emphasis is on the strength with which Jesus hold onto us. It is the very same strength as that of the Father, who is greater than anything or anybody, because Jesus and the Father are one.

That means that when we are dealing with Jesus, we are not dealing with some lesser created being to whom God has delegated things like our redemption; we are dealing with God himself. John puts this fact at the very start of his gospel when he says, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” (John 1:1) How do you come to know a person? Through their word and deeds. God expresses who he is through Jesus, by what he says and what he does. Which means God himself—not some secondary creature—is willing to die for us. That's how much he loves us.

And again, we are to love him back. And because he loves others, we are to love them too. Jesus said, “I give you a new commandment—to love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. Everyone will know by this that you are my disciples—if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34-35) He loved us enough to die for us, and so we are to love each other enough to die for one another. Such a love is so unusual, so remarkable that the world will sit up and take notice.

We have gotten very good at spreading the words of the gospel. We have put them in books and on billboards and on radio and on TV and in movies and on the internet. But only a few Christians have evangelized in the way Jesus commanded us—through self-sacrificial love. But we see it in the early Christians who did not flee the cities during the plague but nursed the sick at the risk of their own lives and so caught the attention of pagans. We see it in the English town of Eyam, which, at the urging of its clergy, quarantined itself from its neighbors to stop from spreading the Black Death in 1600s. 267 of the 334 people in the town—80%—died We see it in Father Damian who was a missionary to the Kingdom of Hawaii in the 1800s and ministered to the people in a leper colony, eventually contracting the disease himself. We see it in Corrie ten Boom and her family who hid Jews from the Nazis and who were sent to a concentration camp. The Jews they hid stayed safe but only Corrie survived the camp. These Christians did not merely communicate the gospel with their lips but with their lives.

They did this to express the true heart of the gospel, the good news, which is the love of God demonstrated in Jesus' sacrifice for us. And they did it assured of the fact that no one could snatch them from the hand of God. As Paul wrote, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39) Nothing, not even death, can take us away from the God we see in Jesus, who loves us more than we can ever know or imagine.