“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.
The image draws upon a rich tradition of reflection both in the Jewish Scriptures and in philosophy. David is the shepherd king of Israel, an important image that shapes the Christian imaginary about the figure of Christ. “The Lord is my shepherd” in Psalm 23 grounds the image in God himself and in the powerful imagery of going “through the valley of the shadow of death” and “fear[ing] no evil; for thou art with me.” Such images are taken up in the understanding of the Passion. Ezekiel will work with the shepherd image to chastise the false shepherds, the leadership which uses their people for their own ends and thus betrays the meaning and truth of shepherding. It is profoundly about the good of each and all.
Plato, in the Republic, counters the claim that justice is the interest of the stronger, the idea of might equals right, the idea of self-interest and power over others, by showing that no ruler rules without a primary commitment to the good of those over whom he rules. The image is that of a shepherd. The shepherd cares for the sheep not out of economic interest because the shepherd, first and foremost, is a shepherd and not a businessman. You can see what happens when that is forgotten. Everything and everyone is turned into a commodity, a thing, a mere means to an end. That denies human agency, human freedom, and human dignity. George Bernard Shaw, commenting on the plays of Henrik Ibsen, captures the point rather nicely: “to treat a person as a means to an end is to deny that person’s right to live.” These are our current dilemmas, paradoxically within the therapeutic culture itself.
The radical nature of care in the image of Christ the Good Shepherd is about the truth of ourselves in God. It counters the false view of autonomy by placing us in the knowing love of God who knows us better than we can ever know ourselves. That knowing love places us in a community of souls united in the life of God. In this sense the image belongs very much to the pageant of the Resurrection in Eastertide where we are constantly being shown how the idea of the Resurrection comes to birth in us; in short, how it lives in us and sets us in motion towards one another. We may, like Mary Magdalene, “come to the garden alone” but in the Resurrection we, like her, are set in motion towards one another. “Go to my brethren and say unto them I ascend to my Father, and your Father; and to my God and your God,” Jesus tells her. That counters the false autonomy of the abstract individual, the tragic aloneness of the isolated individual, by incorporating us into the community of the Church.
There is, as we saw last week, always the third who walks beside you. This catches something of what the philosopher, Gadammer, means by “the dialogic nature of thinking.” Thinking as a conversation with oneself is not solipsistic; it is always engaged with thought itself. Aristotle’s idea of God as the thought that in thinking itself thinks all things becomes “the love that moves the sun and the other stars,” as Dante says at the end of the Divine Comedy. We find ourselves in that knowing love of God. This is only to suggest the radical nature of the image. It challenges the sentimental idea of the ‘gentle-Jesus-come-and-squeeze-us’ kind of care. God is not a teddy bear.
Christ the Good Shepherd is a comforting image, to be sure, but only because it strengthens us and teaches us the much more demanding yet freeing nature of our Christian life and witness. The care and compassion of the Good Shepherd is the Passion and the Resurrection of Christ in us. “Almighty God,” as the Collect says, has given “thine only Son to be unto us both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life.” Something done and given that is meant to live in us. Only so shall we be alive, alive to God and alive to one another in the inexhaustible mystery of essential life.
“I am the good shepherd”
Fr. David Curry
Easter 2, 2021