KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 22 April
I lay down my life for the sheep
It is a familiar image and one which has entered into contemporary culture in its claims about care and compassion, yet the image of Christ the Good Shepherd is not only taken for granted but often greatly misunderstood. It is not about comfort and coziness as if God is a teddy bear. It is about the far more radical teaching of the Passion and the Resurrection. We forget this in our folly and at our peril.
A year ago, only the Headmaster and I were here for Zoom Chapel, as it were, in the early stages of the Covid-19 lockdown. Like everyone else in Nova Scotia we were in “the valley of the shadow of death” owing to the mad rampage of evil in Portapique that resulted in the worst mass shooting in Canada’s history. The question in Chapel over the last several weeks has been “how do we face dark and difficult things like suffering and death, like sin and evil”? Then and now. And that is very much about how we face ourselves and one another.
The image of Christ the Good Shepherd is located within a tradition of reflection in the Jewish Scriptures and in the cultures of the Middle East, as we now term them, but also connects to a philosophical tradition about the ethical. In a way, the image has become for us quite paradoxical. The paradox is that the image of the good shepherd is comforting only because it is challenging. It opens out to us the essential life of God which is greater than all sin and evil, greater than all suffering and death. Such is the Passion and the Resurrection.
Care and compassion easily become the kindness that kills which is the very opposite of what Psalm 23 teaches and what Christ means by identifying himself as the good shepherd. The image is about sacrificial love, the love which gives of itself and is never exhausted. In relation to the image, we are not merely passive beings. The image challenges us about what moves in our hearts and minds in relation to our commitments and responsibilities towards one another. It is in that sense profoundly ethical.
