Day: April 24, 2016

“The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.”

It is a powerful and familiar image and yet one which I think we often fail to comprehend. Perhaps the most familiar of all of the biblical images and certainly the one which is most commonly represented in the church culture of the Maritimes, it has, I fear, been co-opted by the therapeutic culture and emptied of its deeper meaning. It speaks to us about care, of course, but it does so in the deeper context of sacrifice. It is about something more, though not less, than hugs and squeezes, far more, though not less, perhaps, than the comforts of pharmacare as wonderful as those can be.

We forget that this image so popular and familiar belongs to the pattern of death and resurrection and the way that pattern informs our lives of sacrifice and service. For centuries the Gospel of Christ the Good Shepherd has been read in the Easter season. Christ, the only Son of God, has been given to us as “both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life,” as one of the prayers of the Church puts it. These are powerful and profound theological concepts that relate to the quality of our lives in faith. There is something quite suggestive, important and necessary about connecting the image of Christ the Good Shepherd to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

For that is exactly what the image of Christ the Good Shepherd is primarily about. It illustrates the theological idea that God can make something good even out of our evil. The power of the good is always greater than all and any evil.

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“The spirit of truth will guide you into all truth”

Along with the repeated mantra “because I go to the Father”, the Gospel readings on these three last Sundays of the Easter season open us out to the power and truth of the Holy Spirit, “the spirit of truth”. Christ’s going to the Father is the condition of the coming of the Spirit. These spiritual movements speak to the fears and uncertainties of our own age and culture, fears and uncertainties which raise important questions about our humanity and about our lives together.

What are our fears and uncertainties? In one way, they are legion but in another way they come down to felt sense of an emptiness within the soul of a culture when we can no longer say what it is that is worth living for, when we can no longer identify the principles and the ideals that dignify our humanity.

If there is nothing to live for, then we are the proverbial ‘walking dead’. Zombie Apocalypse is us! There is nothing to give your life to. Yet our lives are primarily about relationships and connections with and for one another. This is precisely where the Eastertide Gospels come so prominently into play. They provide a kind of counter to our current fears and worries about the empty darkness of our world and day, the emptiness within out of which comes such frightening and senseless acts of violence witnessed so frequently in our schools, our cities, our streets, and our world; acts which destroy all relationships. The essence of such acts is their meaninglessness born out of a sense of the nothingness within our souls and our culture, resulting in the active nihilism of terrorism. Added to that are the paralyzing fears of our uncertainties about what we can and should do, throwing up our hands in despair, as it were, retreating into the ghettoes of a kind of passive nihilism. The fearfulness that we have to confront and overcome in every way is our fearfulness. How will we confront it? How will it be overcome? Only in Christ.

Jesus confronts our fearfulness. The Gospel of the Resurrection is especially about his overcoming of our fearfulness. The message of the angel to the women, coming early to the tomb and finding it empty, was “be not afraid.” Jesus comes into the midst of the disciples whether they are huddled behind closed doors in fear in Jerusalem or on the road to Emmaus in flight from Jerusalem in fear.

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