19. April 2026
Misericordias Domini
John 10:11-16

“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep. But a hireling, he who is not the shepherd, one who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf catches the sheep and scatters them” (Jn 10:11–14).

This is the Word of the Lord that came to me, so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in His + Name. AMEN.

The hireling runs. That is the only fact Jesus gives you about him. He sees the wolf coming, and he runs. The sheep scatter, the wolf takes what it wants, and the hireling is already down the road. Jesus does not tell you the hireling’s reasons. He does not need to. The man ran. That is his whole character, stated in a single act. Set that figure next to the Good Shepherd, and you have the entirety of the Gospel for this Sunday: He stayed.

You know what it is to have someone run. Everyone in this room has built something on a foundation that turned out to be a man calculating his own survival. The foundation held until it cost something, and then it didn’t. You trusted your own strength to carry you through a season that it could not carry you through. You built a floor out of someone’s approval, and they withdrew it. You were sure that if you held your life together carefully enough, the wolf would stay at a sufficient distance — and it did not. Every one of those things ran when the wolf arrived. And you stood in the field, in the dark, with the damage around you.

Ezekiel knew this all too well. He called it a cloudy and dark day. He was watching a whole people scattered across the nations, broken and sick and driven away, with no shepherd anywhere in the field. The shepherds had fed themselves on the flock’s wool and flesh and then disappeared. There was no one in the field who belonged there.

The hireling is not a special category of especially wicked people. He is the figure for every trust you have placed in something that could not hold under pressure. He is what runs. He is your own careful management of a life you thought you could secure. He is the comfort that worked until it didn’t. And at some point, you have stood exactly where the scattered sheep stand in Ezekiel — in the dark, on a cloudy day, with the wolf nearby and no one coming.

Into that field, God said in Ezekiel: I Myself will come. First person, emphatic. The Lord Himself, going out on a cloudy day to find the scattered ones. And the Son of God stood in a sheepfold in human flesh and said what the Father had promised: I am the Good Shepherd.

The word for good here is not the word for morally upright. It is the word for right, for fitting, for the thing that looks exactly like what it is supposed to look like. He is the Shepherd who is recognizably, unmistakably a shepherd — the one the sheep have been waiting for without knowing how to name it. And the thing that marks Him, the single act that defines Him against every hireling who ever lived, is that when the wolf came, He planted His feet and stayed.

He did not miscalculate. He saw the wolf clearly. He knew what it would cost. He had told His disciples plainly: the Son of Man will be handed over, crucified, and on the third day the Father will raise Him. He went to Jerusalem knowing all of it. He knelt in a garden and sweated blood over it. And then He stayed. He bore into His own body what your sins had earned and what the wolf had been doing to the sheep — the full accusation of the Law, the weight of your actual guilt, the death that was coming for you. He took it all, and He bled, and He died. That is what love looks like when it has a body. It stays.

The Father raised Him on the third day. The Shepherd who laid His life down for the sheep did not stay in the grave, because a life laid down freely in love for the flock is not a life death gets to keep. The Father raised Him, and the risen Christ walked out of the tomb as the living Shepherd of a living flock. And the earth, this whole broken, groaning earth, filled up with the mercy of a God who had stayed when every hireling ran.

The resurrection is not a reversal of the cross. It is its vindication. The Shepherd who stayed and bled is the same Shepherd who was raised and lives. He is not a different figure after Easter. He is the same One, and He is still in the field.

He tells you so in the Gospel: I know My sheep, and am known by My own. As the Father knows Me, even so I know the Father. The knowledge the Father and the Son share — the love that is the very life of God — that is the knowledge the risen Shepherd extends to you. He knows you. He knew you when He stayed. Your particular sins, your specific grief, the wolf circling your particular field right now — He knows all of it, and He did not run. He bled for it.

You were baptized into that truth. The Shepherd spoke your name over water, and you became His, and He has not changed His mind about you since. Peter says it plainly: you were like sheep going astray, and the Shepherd came and got you. The verb is passive. You did not find your way back. He found you. He stayed for you before you knew there was a wolf, before you knew you were a sheep, before you had any claim on Him at all. He stayed anyway.

He stays now. The voice that calls His sheep by name is the same voice in the absolution — your sins are forgiven, on account of the Shepherd who stayed for them. The body and blood on this altar are the Shepherd feeding His flock in the rich pasture Ezekiel saw, the table set in the presence of whatever is still circling outside. He is here because He stays. He does not calculate the cost of your company and decide you are not worth it. He has already paid the cost, and He has not left.

You came into this building carrying something. The wolf takes many forms. Some of you are carrying guilt you have not been able to set down. Some of you are carrying a grief that has not lifted. Some of you are holding together a life that is taking more effort than you have, and you came in here this morning on fumes. The hireling in your own chest, the one who keeps suggesting that God is going to run, too, eventually, that you are finally going to wear out His patience — that hireling is lying to you.

The Shepherd stayed when it cost Him His life. He is not leaving now.

You walked in here under the name of this Sunday, and the name means the “mercy of the Lord.” The psalm underneath it sings that the earth is full of that mercy — the whole earth, not just the sanctuary, not just the moments when faith feels easy. The field you will walk back out into is full of the mercy of the God who did not run. The wolves in it are real. The dark days come. But underneath every cloudy day is the ground the risen Shepherd purchased with His blood, and that ground does not give way. He stayed. For you. He is staying still.

This is the Word of the Lord that came to me, so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in His + Name. AMEN.

Rev. Christopher R. Gillespie
St. John Ev. Lutheran Church & School - Sherman Center
Random Lake, Wisconsin