Author: CCW

“I am the good shepherd”

“I am the bread of life,” Jesus says, who also says “I am the Good Shepherd.” The two phrases go together and inform our understanding of what we do here today, an understanding of things spiritual and intellectual that were well known and understood by the very person who gathers us into that understanding.

We meet here at Christ Church for the Christian funeral of Helen Katharine Gibson. We meet in accord not simply with her wishes per se but her wishes in accord with the pattern and understanding of the Christian faith which she believed and to which she gave such eloquent testimony by her example and service, her commitment and generosity.

“O Jesus, I have promised.” They are the first words of one of the hymns which she wanted sung at her Requiem. Nothing captures more profoundly the character of Helen. Her whole life was about a promise to the Christ who promises salvation to all that seek his will. Helen knew this and knew something else. It is not a one-off moment of assertion but a life-long process of learning about “put[ting] on the Lord Jesus Christ,” about living with Christ in his body, the Church. For Helen it was essential, “the one thing necessary.” She combined in her approach to Parish and community life both the service qualities of a Martha, “busy with many things,” and the contemplative qualities of a Mary, “sitting at the feet of Jesus.” She knew that service and worship go together and belong to the nature of our life in Christ. It was not simply what she wanted; it was also what she thought was right and proper.

Though diminutive in stature, she was great-souled in character. There was a remarkable toughness to Helen. She was not one to give up and remained courteous and lively in heart and mind right to the end, undeterred by such minor things as broken bones! Those were only inconveniences. She was not one to complain. The major frustration for her was not being able to do all the things that she wanted to do. I am talking about her when she was in her nineties! For years upon years, she attended the 8:00am service here at Christ Church, nestled in the back Choir pew, often with Cecilia and Lynn Pascoe and rarely, if ever, did she miss a mid-week service at least until these last few years. Even then, she was always present either in her room or Aggie’s room at Kingsway Gardens, now Macleod House, with Bill and Wilfred and one of her Newfoundland Angels/caregivers for Holy Communion. She delighted in the worship of the Church. She had a strong sense of duty, duty towards God and duty towards neighbour. In both she was, I think, an inspiration to us all.

Helen had a strong sense of what was proper and right, not in a narrow and pedantic way but as alive to the things that matter. Shortly after coming to Christ Church some seventeen or eighteen years ago, I remember her speaking to me about two things. First, why had I omitted at the 8:00am Communion Service a part of the service commonly called The Comfortable Words? I assured her that I had no objection to The Comfortable Words but was only trying to keep the service reasonably short. Her reply was, “well, they surely don’t take that much time, do they?” She was right and needless to say I have never omitted them at the 8:00 Sunday service ever since and certainly not today!

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“Come and have breakfast”

An odd text for Evensong, I suppose, but then time and sense often seem no more when we are dealing with matters of eternity. It is one of the more delightful resurrection appearances of Jesus. It takes place on the seashore, “by the sea of Tiberias.” It is, I suppose, a fish story but one which goes to the heart of the proclamation of the Resurrection. St. John’s breakfast-with-Jesus-on-the-beach story is “the third time that Jesus was revealed to the disciples after he was raised from the dead.”

Two themes present themselves. First, that the Resurrection entails “the resurrection of the understanding” and secondly, that the Resurrection involves “the reconstitution of the human community” into fellowship with God after the disarray and disintegration of our humanity, individually and collectively, in the pageant of our betrayals of God made so heartrendingly visible in Holy Week.

In Luke’s Gospel, too, Jesus appears to the disciples and asks them whether they have any food before opening to them the Scriptures. “They give him a piece of broiled fish, and of an honey-comb.” Here Jesus-on-the-beach has a charcoal fire and bids them “bring some of the fish that you have caught”. “Come and have breakfast” means come and have bread and barbecued fish.

What’s with the fish, broiled or barbecued? Nothing, really, other than the remarkable ordinariness of the extraordinary thing. Nothing, really, except an aspect of the reality of the idea of the Resurrection. That, of course, is everything. The Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, themselves the fons et origo of the Gospels have a simplicity and unadorned directness about them. They compel, I think, by the quality of their quietly restrained narrative that remains remarkably understated.

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“For ye were as sheep going astray”

Sometimes known as Good Shepherd Sunday, the image of Christ the Good Shepherd is set before us today as part of the Easter season. It is, most tellingly, an image that connects the Passion and the Resurrection. As Isaiah says in a passage that belongs to our Good Friday liturgies, “all we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Peter picks up on this image in this morning’s epistle. “For ye were as sheep going astray,” he says, “but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls,” on the one hand, echoing Isaiah, and, on the other hand, seeing the image of sheep and Shepherd through the Cross and Resurrection of Christ.

God as the Shepherd of his people is a powerful Old Testament image. It is further intensified and made visible in the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. He goes “through the valley of the shadow of death” for us and with us, an image which in the Passion and Resurrection takes on a greater depth of meaning and suggests the greater gathering of our lives to God.

Christ identifies himself with the Old Testament images of God as the Shepherd of his people. “I am,” he says, “the Good Shepherd.” He makes explicit what that means. In other words, he teaches us who he is for us in this image. “The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep,” he says. We are the sheep; he is the shepherd. What that means is signaled in the events of the Passion recalled for us in 1 Peter. “Christ also suffered for us” and in his suffering we find ways to face the sufferings of our own lives, sufferings that arise from our own sins and follies or sufferings that happen to us as a consequence of the actions of others, sufferings that in some sense or another belong to the general disorder and disarray of our humanity, like sheep going astray, indeed.

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“They shall look upon him whom they have pierced”

Not again! Surely we have had enough of this text from Zechariah! But yes, and perhaps most appropriately so on The Octave Day of Easter. Why? Because it belongs to the teaching, the doctrine of the Resurrection. Because it shows the inescapable and necessary connection between the Passion and the Resurrection. As we have noted, no Passion, no Resurrection; and, even more paradoxically, perhaps, no Resurrection, no Passion.

The Passion According to St. John read on Good Friday ends with Zechariah’s text, “They shall look upon him whom they have pierced.” Now that text carries us into the Resurrection in the ways in which the idea and concept of the Resurrection comes to birth in the disciples and in us. “The same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut, where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews,” John tells us, “came Jesus into the midst.”

“The same day at evening.” What is that day? It is Easter. Holy Week began with Palm Sunday which marks the beginning of one long liturgy that ends with the Resurrection at Easter, and yet imaginatively and liturgically, Easter extends into the Octave and into Eastertide. Sorrow and joy are intermingled, each shaping our understanding of the other. There is something quite compelling about such a way of thinking.

Where are we? Behind closed doors, John says, and in that same Upper Room where Jesus had gathered with the disciples “on the night in which he was betrayed” and where he gave himself in bread and wine as body and blood anticipating his Passion and Resurrection and providing for us to be joined with him in Holy Communion. What happens behind closed doors is quite powerful and wonderful. The disciples were huddled in fear. All their hopes, it seems, had been shattered by virtue of Christ’s crucifixion and now they are in fear of persecution because of their association with him. Our minds, too, are like tombs, behind closed doors. We are dead in ourselves.

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