Fourth Sunday of Easter 1997

The image of the shepherd

These are three fairly juicy readings and all kinds of sermons could be drawn from them, but I’d like to concentrate on this familiar passage from the Gospel. The image of the shepherd occurs again and again all through the Bible. The Hebrew Scripture regularly talks about God as a shepherd, the Kings of the Jews as shepherds, or prophets as shepherds, and the only Psalm that everybody probably knows, the twenty-third, has "the Lord is my Shepherd." So it is not surprising that the Gospel of John, which is clearly very Jewish in its inspiration, would put those words into the mouth of Jesus as well. But, because a lot of us have had difficulty with this notion of shepherding, we need to look at it very closely.

The word that we use in English, pastor, is literally the Latin word, pastor, for shepherd, we have simply changed the pronunciation. You can think about all the pastoring that you’ve had... I remember shortly after I was ordained, although I was eminently subject to a pastor myself, they kept telling us that we were responsible for all these people. I think there is a really profound and neurotic form of that notion of pastoring where you really do feel that you are literally responsible for everybody else and you have to take care of everybody else and make their decisions or make sure that they make the right decisions. In other words, you have to stand in the place of responsibility for these other people, and that’s supposed to be what pastoring is. That’s what I was told and that was, to a large extent, my experience as well.

The problem with that is that the upshot of that kind of behaviour is that it basically keeps those people that you are supposed to be in charge of infants. It ultimately infantilizes people: "I’ve got to take care of you." And as a father, and that’s one of the other great metaphors for God and it’s certainly Jesus’ favorite word for God, the Aramaic word of "Abba" means "daddy" and it’s a very intense and intimate form of address... As a father, and not a very good one, I see myself wanting to "save" my kid. "I don’t want you to have to go through what I went through," my own father used to regularly say to me. Of course the same thing is true there: if I do not allow people live their own lives, then they forever stay infants.

I think the solution to this notion of what is good pastoring is in the text itself. In one of the few places in the New Testament you have put into the mouth of Jesus the notion that he dies as an act of freedom: "nobody takes my life from me, I lay it down of my own accord." Of course dying for the people you are supposed to be caring for is, as we know, the great sign of love and real taking charge of people. But it is this notion of freedom that I want to take a look at.

To be a pastor is first of all a free decision, and to be a really good pastor is to freely be able to give one’s self to those in your charge. The point of that freedom is what? To keep people safe so that they don’t make any mistakes? No, the point of that freedom is to engender their freedom. The good shepherd is the one who precisely does not behave in such a way that his or her charges end up being infantilized, or protected, as it were, from their own freedom. That’s awful. And here too the notion of fatherhood becomes useful because it is the other great metaphor for God. How many fathers precisely circumscribe the freedom of their children thinking they are doing the loving thing, instead of enabling the freedom of their children? How many pastors do you and I know who we could say have as the hallmark of their behaviour the ability to somehow facilitate one’s growing into a freer human being? That is what it is supposed to be all about. The fact is that it doesn’t very often work out that way. That freedom is never the central concern, shows, rather, that obedience is of the essence, it seems to me. In other words, we literalize this notion of shepherd. Sheep are supposedly notoriously dumb and mindless critters so that if somebody didn’t watch over them they would go and commit suicide or some other weird thing. How often are we treated like that by pastors, by shepherds? But then we need to know what this freedom is for.

This freedom, of course, is supposed to be engendered, as we get it out of the figure of Jesus, as freedom from one’s own egocentricity. If I stand and look at the way that I regard the world, the world comes to me through this massive filtration system, and this filtration system is very easily described as my own instinct for self preservation: this is good, this is bad; this is safe, this is unsafe... And the criterion that I use for these judgments is not one of being free for the world, but precisely covering my own backside all the time. Real freedom, of course as we get it out of Jesus, is the freedom , - it’s best to put it in the briefest possible way - , to say, "I love you." That is supposed to be a free act, but I’m afraid it more often than not is translated into "I need you," which suggests that it is not free. Love is real to the extent that it is not "I need you," but rather, "I want to somehow enable your own freedom to enable your own life."

Finally, in the Greek text itself there is a clue to how this is all is supposed to work. The Greek word is not the word for "good", although this is the way it is usually translated, the Greek word is the word kalos which means beautiful: "I am the beautiful shepherd." Think about that. That is a really wonderful thing, and when I discovered it I was tickled pink. How does beauty work? Beauty captivates, but in a mysterious way, not by circumscribing our freedom at all, but by enriching. Beauty works in an utterly non-coercive fashion. Imagine somebody knocking on your head and saying: "that’s beautiful, by God, and you better react to that because that’s beautiful." That’s rubbish. Beauty is just there, just like that other great Johannine metaphor for Jesus as the light. The light doesn’t do anything except just be the light, and beautiful doesn’t do anything except just be the beautiful... And that’s why this text is talking about deepening the sense of what the Resurrection means. This is a vision of the way we human beings are supposed to work, this is a vision of the way God works with us, God as the liberating God who seeks my freedom, the God who, as John will say in the first letter, is love. That’s what it’s all about. And this notion of the beautiful shepherd is a great one to help try to get hold of that.

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RT 29/4/97