Day: April 14, 2024

“The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep”

The image of the shepherd, as Fr. Crouse puts it, is “everywhere a symbol of divine and human government,” the latter in imitation of the former. The image of Christ the Good Shepherd is especially familiar to many Christians and to many others. It is frequently depicted in art and music down throughout the ages. There is something at once compelling and comforting about the image. Yet we forget, perhaps, its radical meaning and significance.

It is not by accident that it is read in the classical eucharistic lectionaries of the Western Church on the Second Sunday after Easter. It is read in the context of the resurrection and reveals its deeper meaning. Last week marked both the natural phenomenon of the solar eclipse and the end of Ramadan for the Islamic world. The fast of Ramadan ended with the Feast of Eid al-Fitr, much like Lent and Easter. Ramadan commemorates the giving of the Qur’an to Mohammed, a reminder about the various traditions of revelation in which God is made known. Easter, too, is about what is made known to us through the resurrection, the central doctrine of the Christian faith that opens us out to the radical nature of the divinity and the humanity of Christ and of the life of God as Trinity.

The Eastertide readings offer a kind of inverse of the eclipse. And so, too, with the readings for today. Simply put, the resurrection does not eclipse the passion; rather it makes visible what is hidden and present in the passion, namely, light in darkness, life in death. It makes wonderfully explicit an insight shared by a great number of religious and spiritual traditions about the primacy of the eternal life of God. In other words, the passion and resurrection of Christ witness to the powerful idea of the principle of life itself which is greater than sin and death, greater than suffering and evil which they, in fact, presuppose.

It means that we have to think the passion and the resurrection together. The Collect is very clear. God has given his “only Son to be unto us both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life.” Death and resurrection. The Epistle reading is from 1st Peter 2, part of the Mattins reading for Holy Saturday morning. It explicitly highlights Christ crucified, who “suffered for us, leaving us an example, that we should follow his steps” and “who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness.” The reading ends, too, with an image of the shepherd and sheep. “For [we] were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.” Such language reflects the double theme of divine and human governance symbolized repeatedly, albeit in different registers of intensity, in the Scriptures and in art and culture in terms of the shepherd, but most powerfully in the image of Christ the Good Shepherd.

(more…)

Print this entry