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In the beginning, God impressed upon man His own character. “God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Gen. 1:27). Not a physical form, the image of God is being like God in will and action. Man was made to resemble God in his interactions with the world.
I have shared with you before a favorite quote from St. Irenaeus, that “God made man in order that He might have someone on whom to bestow His benefits. “
For man to be in the image of God, man would resemble this same attitude and behavior. Man would bestow his own benefits, the good things he received from God, on other people and the world. God made man to have someone on whom to bestow His benefits; man, receiving good things from God, turns and bestows them on his neighbors.
So the image of God becomes man’s guide, shepherding him in how life is shaped. Different people would have different gifts – one the gift of working with wood, another the gift of working with stone, one makes music, another prepares food. But in all these different gifts, the Lord would shepherd, guide, lead according to the pattern of His own character.
A character of a very different sort was impressed upon Cain, the first murderer. “The LORD set a mark on Cain, lest anyone finding him should kill him” (Gen. 4:15). The sign protected him from other people who might one day try to kill him. But it marked him also as being under the judgment of God. God Himself would judge Cain. He would not escape death.
This sign is also upon each one of us. All of us sons and daughters of Adam, like Cain, are stamped with a character that testifies to our inner character. We are led by a different shepherd, led astray like Cain into murder, and other great vices of pride and despair, madness and folly, a heart longing for vengeance, greed and envy, lust and loathing.
To summarize so far: God made us in His image, but now we have a very different character. We are marked for death, and we live as slaves to death and selfish desire.
The poet Paul Celan, whose parents died in a Nazi concentration camp and who himself did forced labor in Romania, wrote a masterwork called Todesfuge – “Death Fugue.” Its first line is haunting: Schwarze Milch der Frühe (“Black milk of daybreak”). This “Black milk of daybreak” refers to “the gritty mix of fog and human ashes from the death-camp ovens” (Timothy Smith, “Subject to Death & Life,” Touchstone, March/April 2010, p32).
We should never diminish the horror of the holocaust. But understand—what Celan calls Grab in den Lüften, the “Grave in the sky” still overshadows us. From birth, we are marked for death. And that death drives us to grasp and hoard and fight and give ourselves over to recklessness and abandon. It has become the human character – a far cry from the character God impressed upon us in the beginning.
That “Black milk of daybreak” is what got stamped unto our heads on Ash Wednesday. The ashes of mortality, marking us for death.
But the ashes were in the sign of the cross, a different kind of character. Coming then to the Easter Vigil, we saw the ashes, as it were, washed off with Baptism’s water. And this time we were marked again by a cross without ashes.
Now the death of Jesus marks you. It marks you not for death but for life. You do not belong to the company of Cain, marked for judgment, but you have come to a new owner, a new Shepherd who takes charge of your care.
He has marked us as His sheep. “I know My sheep, and am known by My own.” Though the black milk of daybreak hang in the air, He says, “Be calm; I have been through this shadow. It holds no power over Me—and you are with Me, I will lead you through it.”
Though we stray, perverse and foolish, He comes after us, though we be alone and seemingly without value. “I am the good shepherd,” says your Lord Jesus. “The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep.”
St. Peter today tells us how this applies to us: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree”—that’s the forgiveness of sins—but it doesn’t stop there; forgiveness has a result. It’s what the Lutheran Confessions call the new obedience: “That we might die to sin and live to righteousness.” What needs to change is not just our outward behavior, but our character, our nature. St. Peter continues, “By his wounds you have been healed” – the disordered desires that afflict us as a disease, He begins to heal in us. This is what we are praying for as we come to the Supper: “Create in me a clean heart, O God.” We are saying, “I need Your healing, I need a different kind of heart, a new character; be my Good Shepherd and impress upon me Your image.”
None of this happens alone. The Good Shepherd has put us into a flock. And like any flock, there’s an odor, sometimes we step in unpleasant piles – and some of those piles are of our own making. But what makes us the Lord’s flock, what makes us Church, is not a common ethnicity or social standing, we are not united by music or a school or a political party. The flock is the Shepherd’s, and exists entirely because it follows His voice. I’m not the Shepherd but the undershepherd. Jesus did not establish a single man or pastor to be the head of His Church, for His Word alone is our leader and guide. The Lord has brought us here, together, into this community He calls “church” or “flock.” So come then, let us follow Him even through the black milk of daybreak, through the valley of the shadow of death. His voice will lead us, His cross will save us, His resurrection will be our own resurrection.
For Christ is risen, and He has trampled down death by His death. The Good Shepherd laid down His life for us sheep, and has taken it up again.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed. Alleluia!