A shepherd is abiding in the fields, keeping watch over his flock by day. And it comes to pass that he hears the sound of an approaching car. Suddenly, a brand-new BMW emerges out of a cloud of dust and into view. The driver is a young metrosexual, a well-groomed, manicured urbanite with waxed eyebrows. He lowers the tinted window and leans out far enough to ask the unsuspecting shepherd: If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one? The shepherd looks sheepishly (sorry!) at the man, then turns to gaze on his grazing flock. Sure, he replies.

The enterprising stranger thereupon parks his car, whips out his notebook computer, connects it to a cell phone, surfs to the NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system. He scans the area, opens a database and Excel spreadsheet with complex formulas. He sends an e-mail from his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a lengthy report on his portable printer. He turns to the shepherd and says, You have exactly 1,586 sheep.

That is correct; take one of the sheep, the shepherd says. He then steps back and watches as the young man selects one of his animals and bundles it into his car.

Then the shepherd says, If I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me my animal back? "Okay, why not?" the confident young man replies. Clearly, you are a consultant, says the shepherd. "That is correct," says the young man, "but how did you guess?" No guessing required, answers the shepherd. You turned up here, although nobody called you. You want to get paid for the answer to a question I already knew, and you don't know anything about my business. Now give me back my dog! [Homiletics (May 2004): 19.]

Too many of us want to be consultants to Jesus rather than his followers. We don't know anything about his business, and we don't even know what we ought to want, but we want him to be what we want him to be for us. We are not the first to make this mistake.

In John 10, Jesus is walking in Solomon's portico of the temple in Jerusalem. He is not ambling about minding his own business; he is minding his Father's business, and he gathers a crowd. He is teaching about his Father-the one of whom the shepherd king, David, wrote so beautifully, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

It is winter, John says. December, maybe. Time for the Festival of Dedication-Hanukkah. It recalls the miracle of the rededication of the Temple to the worship of the Lord of Israel. Judas Maccabeus and his ardent brothers had organized an uprising that began as a civil war against the temple priesthood and those Jews who accommodated Judaism to the Hellenist occupiers. It turned into an insurrection in about 163 BC against the dreaded Syrian ruler, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who had taunted the Jews and desecrated the temple by slaughtering a pig and spewing its blood all over the Holy of Holies. Judas and his victorious band of warriors cleansed the temple. There was enough oil for the lamps in the temple for only one day, but miraculously the lamps burned for eight days. Thus Hanukkah is called the Festival of Lights.

You can imagine, then, that the Jews who were gathering in Jerusalem and around Jesus in Solomon's portico had this story on their minds. Like Judas Maccabeus, Jesus came from the hinterlands north of Jerusalem. He was associated more with the Pharisees than the temple priests. The tension must have been thick as he walked and talked. How long will you keep us in suspense? Tell us plainly, Are you the Messiah?

Jesus answers with more bent talk than straight talk. Why can't he just say yes or no? That's what we want from him ourselves, isn't it? Yes or no. Tell us plainly. Don't make us think for ourselves. Don't make us have to go on faith. Make things plain. Religious leaders who try to satisfy this want in us to have things plain are doing just fine these days. They are willing to do what Jesus was not. They always know clearly God's will and way for every situation. If you come to this church, you can expect the staff and me to help you discern God's will and way for you, but don't expect us to know it for you.

Well, Jesus doesn't give us what we want, because he knows we don't know what to want. He knows if he answers the crowd in the temple the way they want, they will draft him to be Judas Maccabeus reincarnate. They will want him to initiate civil war against Jews who collaborate with Romans, who are the political occupiers this time round. Jesus responds by talking about being the good shepherd who knows his sheep, cares for them and gives them eternal life. If they do not believe in him, he says, it is because they are not his sheep. His sheep hear his voice and know him, just as he knows them.

Jesus challenges the wants of the crowd by changing their image of what a leader of Israel ought to be. Judas was from the Hasmonean family; he was the son of an old priest. But his nickname was Maccabeus, which means, "the Hammerer." Judas and his dedicated special ops force took the Hellenists by surprise and hammered them into submission by force. They set up the second Jewish commonwealth, the restored kingdom of Israel, dedicated to the glory of God, with liberty and justice for all . Jews like themselves. The crowd around Jesus wants the Hammerer, and Jesus tells them they ought to want the Shepherd. Like the consultant who tries to steal a sheep from the shepherd but can't tell a sheep from a dog, we prefer the kind of Messiah that has teeth-the kind that will protect our interests by inflicting injury on the wolves around us if necessary.

Christians are and always will be vulnerable in the world. Unfortunately, we often deal with our fear by trusting in weapons of the world to defend ourselves and defeat our enemies-whether those weapons are guns or laws or words. We are tempted to prefer the Hammerer to the Shepherd. We want Jesus to work for us, to fight for us, to set us up in a more favorable way in this world. Sometimes that's just a matter of praying for a job, or a raise, or an A, or a favorable ruling in a court case, or a girlfriend, or a husband, or a child, or a negative test result, or a positive annual review, or just a little peace and quiet. Sometimes it is more confrontational. We want Jesus to clear more space in the world for us to feel more secure in our faith. We want prayer in public schools. We want Christians in public office who will stop making us belly up to the bar of toleration toward those who refuse to acknowledge that we know more than they do about God and morality and childrearing and how to teach freshman biology. We want America to fly the Christian flag right below the American flag on our tanks and statehouses. But of course that is part of the rub, isn't it? We are willing to post the Christian flag below the American flag. No wonder some of our enemies think Christianity and America are the same thing.

All this grows out of fear, not faith. We want things that Jesus does not want to give us. And the question this morning to all us sheep of his flock is: What do ewe want? That's ewe spelled like a lamb, don't you know?!, because that is what we are, like it or not. What Jesus wants us to want, and what will be all we ever need in this life and the next, is only what Jesus wants to give us.

The shepherd knows his sheep. They know his voice, and he knows their bleating cries. They follow him. In other words, the first, most important thing that Jesus wants us to want is an intimate relationship with him that is more important than anything else.

Our own Allen Walworth talks about the special frequency of intimate relationships that parents and children have. It's like going to Disney World-that Mecca to which every family must make pilgrimage as least once in a lifetime. You wait in line for the rides. You wait in line for a table at the restaurant. You wait in line for the restroom. And all the while the omnipresent Disney music is dancing in your ears. You'll be humming It's a small world after all for weeks to come. When you finally get the little ones on the Merry-Go-Round, you realize there are a hundred other kids on there, too. And all of them are calling out, "Daddy, look at me!" "Mommy, come ride with me!" A stranger might think all that yelling futile. How could you tell your kid from all the others? But a parent knows the sound of a child's voice. A mother knows a cry of hunger from a cry to be changed from a cry to be held. There is a special frequency of love that brings security. [GraceWorks (May 2, 2004): 19.]

But what kind of security? We know that for all the ways we try to protect our children, the world is still a dangerous place. Our children can get sick. They can get into accidents. They can be hurt and even killed. Jesus says he gives his sheep eternal life and they will never perish. But he makes no promises that we will be secure in any way other than in our personal relationship with him in this life and the next.

Even Psalm 23 gives us that sense. At first we get a sense that it is an oh so peaceful, bucolic pastoral scene. He leadeth me beside still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in paths of righteousness. . He prepareth a table before me. . My cup runneth over. . I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever. But if we pay careful attention, we realize that the paths of righteousness are straight and narrow paths of justice that require careful footing. These paths take us through the valley of the shadow of death, where things threaten us all around. The Shepherd leads us through there; he does not lead us away from there or around there. And even when he prepares a table of good things before us, it is in the presence of our enemies, whom he has not seen fit to destroy on our behalf.

We must remember that the very way God has chosen to conquer the wolves of evil and death that threaten us every day is by sending Jesus to be the good shepherd that lays down his own life for the sheep. Jesus is not the hammerer; he is the one hammered to the cross for our salvation. Ironically, in one of the Bible's greatest mixed metaphors, the good shepherd becomes the Lamb of God who is slain for the sins of the world. God gives eternal life to us through the death and resurrection of Jesus. No other way. Most of us want life without death, resurrection without crucifixion, everlasting joy without temporal suffering. And it leads us to want another kind of messiah.

Joyce Hollyday of the Sojourners Christian community in Washington, D.C., recalls how when she was a child in a Montessori Christian school, she chose a picture of Jesus carrying a sheep as her primary image of God. Which is why it always puzzled her why she might not want Jesus to be her shepherd. She would say the 23^rd Psalm and fail to notice the punctuation in the text. She would say, The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want. She wondered why she should not want such a shepherd. And then she grew up and realized what we all do: We don't know what we want until we let the Lord who is our shepherd give us what will make us want no more. [Preaching the Word, an online ministry of Sojourners (May 2, 2004).]