Day: April 18, 2021

“I am the good shepherd”

It is the classic Christian image of care and compassion and yet it is so often misunderstood in ways that diminish and deny human dignity and agency by rendering us passive and subject to the tyranny of others. In other words, care and compassion easily become the kindness that kills. This is contrary to the radical nature of care and compassion that belongs to Christ the Good Shepherd. The radical nature of the image shows us the care that has cure in it and that belongs to the dynamic of essential life in us. In this sense it is not simply about being taken care of. It is not about who is going to take care of me so much as how am I going to take care of others and myself. The care of others is not about controlling others for that would be to use others for our own ends. Such is manipulation and abuse, the care that is uncare. It makes us victims and victims twice over when we think that we are victims. We lose the agency that belongs to the image.

The radical care of Christ the Good Shepherd has altogether to do with the Passion and the Resurrection. We forget that this image is a resurrection image. It is about the triumph of life over death and about living in the meaning of that overcoming of sorrow and sadness, of evil and death. Why? Because of the essential life of God. “God is the beginning and end of all beings but especially rational beings,” as Aquinas notes. As the Epistle reading from 1st Peter puts it, “ye were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.” That return is God’s grace moving in us, alive in us through our awareness of both our waywardness and of our redemption.  We return to the truth of ourselves in God.

The Gospel makes this clear. Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine” and grounds that saying in his relation to the Father. “As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep.” The care here is self-giving love, the love which is greater than death, the love which gives entirely of itself and is never exhausted. Such is the radical meaning of the Resurrection in and through the Passion. We are known in God’s eternal knowing and loving. That is essential life and the radical meaning of the image.

(more…)

Print this entry