The Good Shepherd

DURING Eastertide we think of our Lord as the Good Shepherd. Anthony picks up this theme in his Commentary for the second Sunday after Easter (the third of Eastertide; Sermons I, 271-303). Our Lord Jesus Christ says, “I am the good shepherd,” and our Saint rightly points out that this is one of the great ‘I am’ sayings of Christ. It echoes the word of the Lord to Moses at the burning bush: “I am who am.” In the Apocalypse, John heard our Lord proclaim, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, who is and who was and who is to come.” You might say that God is the great Fact, the great Reality, which underlies all the other facts and realities that we experience. There are no ifs and buts, no perhaps or maybe, about God. He just is.

 

One who feeds

 

It is this great cosmic Fact that has come among us in Christ. In his life and teaching, Jesus sought to show us what that Fact means. He says, “I am the good shepherd.” Anthony explains, “A shepherd or ‘pastor’ is one who feeds; and Christ feeds us daily with his body and blood, in the sacrament of the altar.” There is a real linguistic link between the word ‘pastor’ and the Italian word ‘pasta’ – they come from the same root. The Lord is my shepherd: he shall feed me in a green pasture (another word from the same root).

The image of the shepherd is frequent in the Old Testament, our Lord’s own Scriptures. The righteous Abel, the first to die from human malice, was a shepherd. Both Abraham and Moses tended flocks, and David was a shepherd-boy before God called him to be king. The Psalms are full of this image: “But as for his own people, he led them forth like a sheep: and carried them in the wilderness like a flock” (Ps 78); “We are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand” (Ps 95); “Hear, O thou Shepherd of Israel, thou that leadest Joseph like a sheep” (Ps 80). Ancient Israel was familiar with this, not least because the worship of the Temple culminated in the offering of sheep in sacrifice, and therefore the care of sheep was inextricably interwoven with religion.

 

Christian paradox

 

The prophet Isaiah speaks of God feeding His flock like a shepherd. Anthony comments on our Lord’s words, using the language of Isaiah: “He speaks after the manner of a good shepherd, who leads his flock to pasture and back again. The little lambs who cannot walk he gathers in his arms and holds in his bosom; he carries the pregnant ewes that are weary.”

Jesus is, of course, both good shepherd and Lamb of God. “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” This is one of what G. K. Chesterton called the paradoxes of Christianity. In the old dispensation, sheep were offered to God in sacrifice, sometimes in thanksgiving, sometimes in atonement for sin. The shepherd cared for the sheep, certainly, but the sheep were destined to die. Jesus the good shepherd turns this upside down: he, the shepherd, dies in order that the sheep may live!

“Here,” says Anthony, “he expresses the essence of the good shepherd, his readiness to give his life for his sheep. This is what Christ did. In today’s Epistle, Peter says: Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. The Gloss says, ‘Rejoice because Christ died for you. And listen to what follows: leaving you an example, of insults, tortures, the Cross and death.’”

It is not enough for us simply to be grateful to God for what He has done for us in Christ; we must be ready to do likewise for our brothers and sisters, following His example. We may not be called to die, but we can devote our lives to the service of others. Above all, we must love even our enemies, sincerely desiring their welfare and not their destruction.

 

Lost souls

 

I have recently been re-reading Chesterton’s Francis of Assisi, a broad-brush impressionist portrait rather than a photographic likeness. With all his slightly irritating paradoxical style, Chesterton captures the spirit of the Saint, and the point I wish to make here is that Anthony was a follower of Francis, animated by the same spirit. Like Francis, he wished to follow Jesus as closely as possible, to frame his own life on the example and pattern set by the Lord. That is also the key to his teaching for us: be like Jesus! It is possible to be far too naive and simple-minded in asking “What would Jesus do?” in modern situations; nevertheless it is a valid question. We cannot apply the answers of the first or of the thirteenth centuries straightforwardly to the problems of the twenty-first; we must still approach them in the Spirit of our Lord, thinking not of personal advantage, but of the common welfare. We must carry the weary and the vulnerable, seek out the lost and bring them home, as good shepherds. The weary and vulnerable are easy to identify: the ‘lost’ may be those we do not warm to, those who have gone astray precisely through their un-Christlike lives, whose conversion will not easily be achieved. Even the banker is our brother!

 

St Margaret Mary

 

Chesterton makes the point that Francis could venture unscathed into the court of the Sultan, or into the lair of the wolf of Gubbio, because whoever he met recognised at once that Francis cared about him. That, surely, is the mark of the good shepherd. It was “when the world was growing cold” that our Lord set fire to the hearts of Francis and his followers; just as in the seventeenth century, another cold age, He revealed the fire of His own heart to St Margaret Mary Alacoque. This too is a time of chilly indifference, of selfish individualism. We need a new appreciation of the Love of God, of the Good Shepherd who cares for all of us, the sinner and the saint alike.

Anthony was, above all, a preacher. “Preaching should be corrective,” he says, “so that those who hear it should thereby amend their lives.” But, he adds, “Speaking loses its authority when preaching is not backed by practice.” Our Lord did not simply talk; He went about doing good, healing, and in the end giving His life for His sheep.