“For ye were as sheep going astray;
but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls”
“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way,” Isaiah remarks in a powerful passage that belongs to our Good Friday considerations and indeed to the General Confession in the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer: “we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.” But as Good Friday also makes clear “the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” The idea of sheep and shepherd takes on a whole new meaning and complexity in the image of Christ as the Lamb of God. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,” as John the Baptist says in John’s Gospel. And in an even profounder image, John the Divine in his Revelation proclaims that “worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing,” a passage that serves as the Eastertide Offertory sentence.
The liturgy underscores the image of lamb in the Agnus Dei , which means “lamb of God,” as part of our communion devotion, recalling us to Christ as the “Lamb of God,” “that takest away the sin of the world” whose mercy and peace we seek in the receiving of the sacrament of Holy Communion. The point, too, is taken up in the repeated refrains for mercy in the Gloria which emphasizes Christ as the “Lord, the only-begotten Son,” “the Lamb of God, the Son of the Father, that takest away the sin of the world” and who “sittest at the right hand of God the Father.”
All of these Scriptural references that inform our liturgy contribute to our understanding of one of the most familiar of all Christian images, the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. The deeper point is that the Good Shepherd is also the lamb of God, the Son of God who is for us “both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life,” as today’s Collect puts it. Something has been done for us and something happens in us that revolve around the image of Christ as the Good Shepherd “who giveth his life for the sheep.” We are the sheep, lost and astray, “but [we] are returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of [our] souls” by Christ the Lamb of God whose sacrifice “takes away the sin of the world.”
Such reflections suggest the radical nature of the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. An image of care, to be sure, it shows us the much more radical nature of care as cure. As such it is perhaps a much more challenging image about care and compassion than what we ordinarily think. The lesson from 1st Peter makes the same point: “Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps,” emphasizing too, the character of Christ’s humanity, “who did not sin” yet “who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree.” There is Christ’s sacrifice for us and there are the ways in which we participate in that sacrifice. It is also“an example of godly life” for us in our lives; in part through suffering patiently, something I admit I find difficult to do.
We are returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls. Our life is a constant “redire ad principia,” a constant return to God through our incorporation into the life of God. Such is the nature of the mystical theology of the liturgy. In the going forth and return of the Son to the Father, an idea which will shape the recurring mantra of the Easter Season in the phrase which we will hear repeatedly from Jesus, namely, “because I go to the Father,” we are returned to God in Christ. He is the Shepherd and the Bishop of our souls. Bishop here refers to oversight, the one who has oversight of our lives, our lives as lived to and for God, our lives as under God’s Providential care.
That kind of care, radical and complete, is the true meaning of Christ the Good Shepherd, an image which is set before us intentionally on The Second Sunday After Easter. In other words, we think the image of Christ the Good Shepherd through the idea of the Resurrection. It is, really, a resurrection image. Paradoxically, that is why all of the images of lamb and sacrifice, of sin and death, of passion and crucifixion, are so central to the understanding of Christ the Good Shepherd. It has its radical meaning in the idea of sacrifice: “the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.”
The image of Christ the Good Shepherd involves the gathering up of our humanity to God through the gathering up of a whole host of images from the Jewish Scriptures understood philosophically in the idea of going forth and return of God to God in the story of Jesus and in the forms of our going forth and return to God. We are reminded of the utter limits of our humanity, our finitude, on the one hand, and the even greater form of our separation from God in our sins, on the other hand. But in the image of Christ the Good Shepherd we are given to understand the going forth and return of the Son to the Father that is the overcoming of our finite limitations and our sinfulness. In other words, we are reminded of the Resurrection.
Here we learn the Resurrection as the return of our selves, soul and body, to God through the image of the Good Shepherd as the Lamb of God. “The Lord is my Shepherd,” the all too familiar 23rd Psalm says, “therefore can I lack nothing;” itself a powerful statement, that in God we have all things. “He shall restore my soul … for my name’s sake,” for the sake of God himself! Our humanity finds its life and meaning only in God and through our participation in God’s life. Suffering and death are all part of that participation. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” Why not? Because “thou art with me; thy rod and staff comfort me.” Death is changed. All these images undergo a kind of sea-change, a transformation, in Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection.
It is an image of care, to be sure, yet Christ the Good Shepherd teaches us the much more radical nature of the care of God. It is about our participating in the divine life itself. We “are now returned unto God,” as 1st Peter puts it; this is not about God being made captive to us, to our whims and fantasies, our projects and desires. God is not made the servant of our worldly aims. Redemption is about the gathering of all things back to God. That is the primary orientation for our thinking and for our living. It is, we might say, the resurrection understanding through Christ the Good Shepherd, the resurrection image.
“For ye were as sheep going astray;
but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls”
Fr. David Curry
The Second Sunday after Easter
April 15th, 2018