Christ Church

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.

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Touch me not … Touch and see

The twentieth chapter of John’s Gospel contributes greatly to our understanding and thinking about the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. It complements the idea of the interplay between ontology and epistemology that we talked about last week in the story of the Road to Emmaus. We learn about the reality of essential life through words and deeds, through different forms of knowing. That, too, is highlighted in this remarkable chapter.

The first part of the chapter is read as the Gospel on Easter Day and continues on the Evening of Easter Day; then the story of the Risen Christ appearing to the disciples (minus Thomas) behind closed doors is read on the following Sunday, the Octave Day of Easter, with the scene of his appearing again behind closed doors to the disciples (now with ‘doubting’ Thomas) read on the Evening of the Octave Day of Easter.

How do we deal with disappointment, with sorrow and loss, with fears and anxieties, with suffering and death? This is especially important in a week that concerns the death of Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh, as well as a former chaplain, Rev’d James Small, and, very sadly, Josh Baker (Class of 2013). Do we run away like the disciples on the Road to Emmaus? Do we go and hide in the bathroom? Or do we face things honestly and thoughtfully? This chapter speaks precisely to such concerns and in ways that belong to the educational project of the School. In Chapel on Monday and Tuesday, we heard part of the beginning of Chapter Twenty. It is the powerful and, dare I say, ‘touching’ story of Mary Magdalene coming in her early morning grief and sorrow to the tomb of Christ a second time. On Thursday and Friday, we read the second half of the Chapter about Jesus appearing twice to the disciples huddled in fear behind closed doors. In the first part, Jesus tells Mary Magdalene, noli me tangere, touch me not. In the second part, Jesus shows the disciples his hands and his sides and later tells Thomas to touch and to see and believe. Don’t touch and then touch! Two completely contrary commands in the same chapter.

In both cases we are being made aware of the Resurrection as belonging to the being of things, to reality. It is all about essential life, the essential life of God which is the principle of all life. Such is ontology, our knowing about being. But we come to that in different ways each accord to the capacity of the knower to know, we might say with Augustine; in short, by various forms of epistemology, the different ways of knowing

There are things that are known to us through the operation of our minds independent of things outside our minds which becomes known as rationalism. But there are things that are made known to us through our sense perception of the world which is empiricism. It is not simply a matter of one over and against the other but a matter of recognising both ways of knowing as belonging to our grasp, albeit in a glass darkly, of reality.

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