Month: May 2018

The Good Shepherd giveth his life for the sheep

It is a most familiar and, perhaps, a most comforting image. It is the classical and quintessential image of care for Christians and even for non-Christians. Yet, as is often the case with familiar images, we take them for granted and sometimes miss their more radical meaning.

It is not by accident that the central icon or image in the School Chapel is the image of Christ the Good Shepherd, visible in the central window above the altar. It signals an ideal and principle about the nature of the School and about the kind of education that it promotes. At issue is how well we live up to the expectation and idea that this image conveys. It is, I suggest, about an education that cares for the whole person. King’s-Edgehill School is, I hope, an institution which cares for you as students.

That care is signaled in a myriad of ways in and through the myriad of experiences that contribute to the learning ambience of the School. The question for you is: do you care? Do you care about the School which cares about you? Do you care enough to step up and take your place in the various things that belong to the busy life of the School? Do you care enough to take on duties and responsibilities towards the community as a whole and for others?

The powerful passage about Christ the Good Shepherd turns on the whole matter of care. The Good Shepherd is contrasted with the hireling, the one who is hired, “a wage-slave,” we might say. The hireling is in it for the money, for a kind of self-interest. “The hireling,” we are told, “careth not for the sheep.” This is in complete contrast to the Good Shepherd who cares for the sheep and who knows his sheep. The word for “care” here means “to bestow careful thought upon” something or someone. That is the challenge for all of you every day. How do you think about one another and by extension the community and the world around you?

The image of Christ the Good Shepherd draws explicitly upon a number of familiar images from the Jewish Scriptures, particularly the so-called “Shepherd’s Psalm,” Psalm 23. “The Lord is my Shepherd, therefore can I lack nothing.” It signals the idea of God’s care and commitment towards our humanity as the Good in whom we find our good. Several of our hymns are based directly upon this psalm, such as “The King of Love my Shepherd is,” connecting care with love. The Psalm shows us something of the divine love for our humanity. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” Why?“For thou art with me; thy rod and staff comfort me.”

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Why stand ye gazing up into heaven?

The question raises a certain contemporary attitude towards religion. Isn’t religion, after all, utterly useless and of no earthly good? “Don’t just stand there, do something?” Isn’t that the familiar mantra of the culture of busyness? This presupposes the fatal separation between doing and thinking. It might be better and truer to say, “don’t just do something but sit and think”!

It is, to be sure, a post-Christian world and one in which there appears to be no end of suspicion and disdain for all forms of religion. But the triumph of secularism is itself an illusion. Our post-Christian culture is also a “post-secular age,” a point which has been well known for several decades, notably expressed by the self-described metaphysical atheist, Jurgen Habermas. He pointed out the demise of ‘secularisation theory’ in the phenomenon of the modern return of religion. That return is ‘the good, the bad and the ugly,’ perhaps, but it means, at the very least, that religion has to be thought about seriously. The gaping hole in our systems of public education is the place (or non-place) of religion.

There is no area of knowledge, no subject or discipline in the academic world, that does not have some sort of connection to religion as philosophy. The terms ‘science’ and ‘religion’ are themselves very modern constructs which presuppose a conflict narrative perpetuated on both sides. The term, scientia, knowledge, was for more than two millennia about an inner disposition of the mind, about the discipline of thinking ethically with respect to any number of different areas of knowledge and interest. It was only in the 19th century that the term was reduced to a body of knowledge and a way of thinking, mostly empirical, about the natural world and, sadly, without a sense of the ethical. Ironically, it is easily conflated with a body of knowledge at the expense of us as knowers. The term, religio, religion, too, is at once ambiguous and uncertain and does not easily map onto the earlier forms of philosophical discourse. Religion, historically, was more about philosophy as a way of life; our knowing as knowing and living ethically.

These observations simply go to the important question about how we read and think, speak and act, something which often gets addressed in Chapel. This week brought us to the Christian mystery of the Ascension of Christ. The question about gazing up into heaven is not about the uselessness of all things religious and spiritual but more about how Christ’s Ascension is the fullest possible affirmation of our humanity, soul and body, and of human individuality. The Ascension celebrates the homecoming of the Son to the Father. At once cosmic in scope, it says something profound about the dignity of our humanity; “the exultation of our humanity,” as the Fathers spoke about it. It highlights the spiritual insight that our bodies and the world of nature are not nothing; they belong and have their place and truth with God. The Ascension is the culmination of the Resurrection. It points us to a profound view about our humanity, about who we are in the sight of God.

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