Sermon for the Second Sunday after Easter

admin | 14 April 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.

The passage from John’s Gospel crystallizes a whole series of images about God as the shepherd of Israel, about the prophetic longing for a redeemer who will “lead his flock like a shepherd and gather the lambs into his bosom,” about the Lord as Shepherd who goes with us “through the valley of the shadow of death,” in whom we “lack nothing” and fear nothing “for thou are with me;” to mention but a few of the passages in the Hebrew Scriptures which undoubtedly have shaped the Christian imaginary about Christ the Good Shepherd. “The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.”

The radical message is that the Good Shepherd is the Lamb of God. What we see is really the radical love and care of God for us, the divine life poured out for us and made known to us through the passion and resurrection of Christ.

It is profoundly an image of gathering, of our being returned to who we are in the sight of God, our being “returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls.” The imagery is a profound counter to all of the partial, incomplete, and destructive forms of governance in the world, past and present. The image of Christ the Good Shepherd is “the paradox of the shepherd,” as Michael Foucault (of all people) puts it. What is the paradox? The idea of “the sacrifice of one for all, and the sacrifice of all for one” summed up as “omnes et singulatim, all together and each one individually.”

“To govern is to serve,” as the medieval historian Jacques Dalarun says in his book by that title. He reflects on some remarkable experiments in governance among certain 12th and 13th century monastic communities, principally those influenced by the charismatic figures of St. Dominic and St. Francis. They sought to embody the radical idea of Christ the Good Shepherd in terms of governance as service. This stands in complete counter to the problem of governance as power and domination over others, what Augustine, following Cicero and, in turn, Plato, called libido dominandi, “the lust of domination” which he saw in terms of the city of man in contrast to the city of God. In other words, the image of Christ the Good Shepherd is about sacrifice and service which reveal the true nature of God’s own life, the life which gives itself in creation and redemption.

This is the profound counter to all of the forms of human disorder, destruction, and disarray through the mistaken and disastrous idea of power as domination over others. That is the folly of the Fall in which we presume to be God and leads to the pretensions of human power in its various forms of tyranny, past and present. It is captured in Nietzsche’s phrase “the will to power,” in Tennyson’s “nature red in tooth and claw,” in Darwin’s “survival of the fittest”, the dog-eat-dog world of endless conflict and division, and in Foucault’s analysis of all forms of institutional order as systems of power and domination; his insight into the paradox of the shepherd notwithstanding. All these tendencies belong to a one-sided and incomplete view of nature and our humanity, to a mistaken understanding of God’s providential power and rule.

In the face of such things, the image of Christ the Good Shepherd remains compelling. It belongs to the life and ministry of the Church to reclaim its meaning for itself and for its witness. It is there in the liturgy, in the readings of Scripture, and in our hymns. It is also there in the windows of our churches and, intriguingly, in the great icon of Christ Pantocrator, Christ the ruler of all, not Christ the all-powerful. The icon we have is a copy of a Russian icon.

It depicts Christ with one hand raised in blessing and the other holding an open book. Other images of Christ Pantocrator show Christ with a closed book signifying Christ as the merciful judge of all creation. The open book is The Gospel according to St. Matthew in the passage of one of the so-called “comfortable words” used in our liturgy. Written in Russian in the Cyrillic script it reads: “Come unto me all who labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest” or refresh you, and bids us “take my yoke upon you and learn of me. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” In other words, Christ the Ruler of All is the servant of all. He has come “not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.” To govern is to serve. The passion and resurrection of Christ makes known the eternal life of God “whose service is [for us] perfect freedom.” Such is the radical care and love of Christ the Good Shepherd, “both a sacrifice for sin and an example of godly life.”