Scripture: Acts of the Apostles 26:14 – “We all fell to the ground, and I heard a voice saying to me in Aramaic, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.’” (NIV)
Sunday is Mother’s Day, so I hope that you have everything ready for the wives, mothers, daughters, etc., in your lives. This Sunday is also “Good Shepherd” Sunday, the Fourth Sunday of Easter, where we hear Psalm 23 and a passage from Jesus’ discourse on being the Good Shepherd. When we think of God or Jesus as a shepherd, we think of someone who takes care of us. There are many paintings of Jesus holding a lamb in his arms or leading a flock of sheep through a pleasant meadow filled with sunlight and clear streams of water.
However, leading sheep is not all sunshine and roses. Sheep are stubborn and often do not go where you want them to go. Actually, sheep are pretty good as animals go in terms of being stubborn. Think about humans! Therefore, whenever pastoral imagery is used to describe the human condition and our relationship toward what God wants us to do, we hear about the goad.
A goad is a pointed stick. You use it to poke an animal like an ox to move where you want it to go. A more famous version of the goad is the spur, a sharp spike or pointed wheel that is used to get horses to move, especially in westerns. We may not use goads and spurs as tools much anymore, at least in our neck of the woods, but we still use those words as verbs to indicate moving people along.
Last Sunday in church, we looked at the famous story of Paul being blinded by Christ’s glory on the road to Damascus. When Paul later retells the story during his arrest toward the end of the Acts of the Apostles, he reports that Jesus also said to him, “It is hard for you to kick against the goads.” This is an interesting metaphor. It implies that God is goading Paul towards his destiny of preaching the word of Christ to the world, but Paul is stubborn or thick skinned or hardened against where God wants him to go. When Paul realizes this, he accepts God’s call for him to be a Christian.
Jesus is our God, but Jesus is also our goad. Jesus is always pushing us toward the right way of doing things, a way that reflects his command to love God and neighbor with all the power within us. But we have become hardened, like the skin of an elephant or the heart of a pharaoh. We listen to our bodies and our desires and our inertia until we can hardly feel God’s call anymore. Society pressures us to ignore calls to kindness and self-sacrifice and instead celebrates greedy, selfish, cruel, and exploitative behaviors.
It is at times such as these that we need to be goads for the world. There is perhaps another more loaded term for a sharp painful point that you can imagine that we need to be sometimes as well. We need to get people to move away from complacency and destructive behavior to move where the Holy Spirit wants them to move. And this starts by getting ourselves moving, for nothing is worse than someone who demands better behavior from others than they do from themselves. So, as you pray to today, think about where God is goading you to go, and discern why God is sending you there, and how you can use this perhaps unwished for opportunity to make the world a better place.
Prayer: God, I will go where you guide me if you will break down the hardness of my heart. Cleanse me and soften me with healing waters. Amen.
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