Christ Church

“For ye were as sheep going astray”

The Collect for Easter 2 captures beautifully the deep truth of these Eastertide readings. Christ is both “a sacrifice for sin” and “an example of godly life”. They are two of the three tropes of the atonement, our being at one with God. Christ is the victor – the one who triumphs over sin and death – but Christ is the atoning sacrifice for us and Christ is the example for us in our lives. Today is also the Feast of St. Philip and St. James the Apostles, and those Apostles, the readings for which equally complement the idea of the interplay of the Passion and the Resurrection particularly in terms of the Farewell Discourse of Jesus. But the image of the Good Shepherd is especially rich and poignant.

The earliest images of the crucifixion depict Christ as King, robed in royal garments and wearing a crown of gold. It is known as the Christus Rex, Christ the King who “reigns and triumphs from the tree” as the great Passiontide hymn of Venantius Fortunatus says (Vexilla Regis prodeum, c. 569). But Christ is “a sacrifice for sin,” as the Collect puts it, the sacrificial victim, the one who bears our sins in his body on the Cross in his Passion. That then leads to the images of the crucifixion that emphasize Christ’s suffering on the Cross, Christ as sacrifice who identifies with human suffering, and as such he is “an example of godly life.” Christ the Victor, Christ the atoning Sacrifice, Christ the holy example. These three images of the doctrine of the atonement are inescapably united and intertwined, inseparable from each other, in all the various images of the crucifixion. But they also belong to the image of the Good Shepherd. The images of the crucifixion and Christ the Good Shepherd go together.

In their interrelation they provide a strong counter to the fragmentation of our world, which is the true meaning of the Babel of our times. The image of Christ the Good Shepherd offers a true and great corrective to our brokenness, our fragmentation and divisiveness because it is the great image of our being gathered to God. For it is at once an image of the Passion as well as the Resurrection. We forget this since the image of Christ the Good Shepherd is so familiar, so comforting, so common that we take it for granted. We forget its radical meaning which Peter’s Epistle, which is part of what was read at the Matins of Holy Saturday, already hints at and which the Gospel so completely shows.

What does it all mean? Simply this. The image of Christ the Good Shepherd is at once an image of the Passion and the Resurrection that gathers us into the life of God. We overlook the significance of this story being read on the Second Sunday after Easter in conjunction with SS. Philip & James with its Gospel reading which highlights the Eastertide theme “because I go to the Father” and which connects to the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. It is inescapably a Resurrection image and story; that is its truth and its comfort. But it is centered inescapably on the Passion. “The good shepherd gives his life for the sheep,” Jesus tells us. In other words, the Good Shepherd is the Lamb of God who lays down his life for the sheep.

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“The same day at evening … Jesus came and stood in the midst”

It is as if time has stopped and we are gathered with the disciples in the upper room on the day of Christ’s Resurrection but we are behind closed doors, huddled in fear and uncertainty. The Resurrection accounts all seek to show us how the idea and the reality of the Resurrection comes to birth in us. It comes to birth in us out of our fears and uncertainties, like Mary coming to the tomb in her early morning grief seeking the body of Christ only to encounter the Risen Christ, like the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus fleeing Jerusalem on this same day in fear and confusion only to have Jesus coming alongside them to engage them and teach them. “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” T.S. Eliot asks in The Waste Land; the third is the truth that is always greater than ourselves.

“For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them,” Jesus says (Mt. 18.20). And that makes all the difference and changes everything. It changes our understanding of time. Here is the idea of kairos, time as rhythmic and circular, as gathered and concentrated into purpose and meaning as distinct from time as chronos, linear and extended, as a sequence and duration – one thing after another. This Gospel opens us out to the radical meaning of Christ in our midst.

Christ in the midst is a recurring image, especially in John’s Gospel both in terms of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. “They crucified him, and the two other with him, on either side one, and Jesus in the midst” (John. 19.18). “The same day at evening… came Jesus and stood in the midst” (John 20.19). As we have had occasion to remark, Easter is not the end of the story but its radical beginning, the radical beginning that has no ending because it is the awakening to the essential life of God which is always prior and yet always present; time is baptized and gathered into eternity. “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and for ever. His are the times and the seasons and the years,” as we heard at the blessing of the Paschal Candle at the Easter Vigil. The awakening to Jesus in the midst is what we contemplate both in the Passion and now in the Resurrection. The Resurrection is the event that awakens us to the greater event that is God himself. In media res.

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