When Sister asked the children in her class what they wanted
to be when they grew up, little Tommy said he wanted to be a pilot. Elsie said she wanted to be a doctor; Bobby,
to Sister’s great joy, said he wanted to be a priest. Then Mary stood up and declared she wanted to
be a prostitute.
“What was that again, Mary?”
“When I grow up,” said Mary with the air of someone who knew
exactly what she wanted, “I shall become a prostitute.” Sister was startled beyond words. Mary was immediately segregated from the rest
of the children and taken to the parish priest.
Father was given the facts in broad outline but he wanted to
check them out with the culprit. “Tell
me what happened in your own words, Mary.” “Well,” said Mary, somewhat taken
aback by all this fuss, “Sister asked me what I wanted to become when I grew up
and I said I wanted to become a prostitute.”
“Did you say prostitute?” asked Father,
double-checking. “Yes.” “Heavens!
What a relief! We all thought you
said you were going to become a Protestant.”[1]
Even the worst Catholic is better than the best Protestant
(and vice-versa)! Religion seems to be
about sorting out “we good people” over and against “those bad people” as
defined by divine sanction. Something like this appears to be going on in
Peter’s confrontation with the high priestly aristocracy, defending his actions
by invoking the name of Jesus, saying, “There
is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given
among mortals by which we must be saved."
In the mouth of
Peter, Jesus’ name appears to become yet another basis for the age-old dynamic
of defining “us” vs. “them.” This raises
the question: “Is it possible to have a form of religious (or for that matter,
any form of human) togetherness that is not defined by the creation of a
non-religious (or less than fully human) other?” Does our justification depend upon the
condemnation of others?
If Jesus came
simply to redefine the terms of the “in-group,” then it seems to me that our
spiritual evolution has not advanced a wit.
The revelatory power of the Jesus-event lies in its subversion of this
whole dynamic; creating a new and expanding sense of “we” that does not rely
upon the exclusion of anyone.
Jesus himself is
working this out as he plays with the metaphors of shepherd and sheep. Here, he is drawing on a well-known biblical
image from Hebrew scripture, but improvising on the theme in such a way that
the meaning of this figure of speech eludes his hearers. His interlocutors are unable to grasp the
point of the picture Jesus draws for them because he is stretching the shepherd
metaphor to the breaking point: “I have other sheep that do not belong to this
fold. I must bring them also, and they
will listen to my voice.”[2]
It requires an imaginative
leap to grasp this truth. We are not the
only sheep in town. We know that. But do we know that we can relate to those of
other folds without defensiveness, rivalry, or scapegoating? Can we imagine one flock, one shepherd coming
together without coercion or homogenization?
I believe Jesus is inviting us to imagine just such a possibility and,
in fact, realizing that possibility by walking through the gate that he opens
for us.
The stretching of
imagination that the Good Shepherd evokes moves through a series of
interpretative steps.[3] Behind Jesus’s use of this image lies the
prophet Ezekiel’s fierce
denunciation of the corrupt leadership of Israel’s rulers, asserting God’s
sovereignty as the true shepherd of Israel.
Israel’s leaders had exploited the public for their own benefit: they
fleeced the sheep rather than feeding them. The weak, the sick, the injured,
the marginalized had been treated with harshness rather than justice. This
failure of leadership led to the complete disruption of the bonds of social
life that held the community together, leading ultimately to the destruction of
Jerusalem and the exile of the Jewish people in Babylon.
In
the midst of this corruption and chaos, God speaks through the prophet Ezekiel
saying,
I myself will be the shepherd of my
sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God. I will seek the lost,
and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will
strengthen the weak, but the fat and strong I will destroy. I will feed them with
justice.[4]
One way to imagine
the Good Shepherd image is at what I would call a pre-critical level. It is a common interpretation in Christian
tradition that sees Jesus as the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy. God has condemned these wicked Jewish leaders
and come Himself in Jesus to become our shepherd. In being killed by those wicked leaders,
Jesus became the foundational sacrifice of a new religion, and those sheep that
hear his voice are no longer led astray.
The Jews are now the wolves of the parable, from which Jesus gave his
life to protect us.
This pre-critical
reading is an idolatrous reading, because idols demand sacrifices. The death of Jesus becomes the justification
for the sacrifice of Jews to shore up Christian identity and goodness. Today, we might replace Jews with Muslims,
but the dynamic is the same. What in
Ezekiel was a self-critical moment in Israel’s life becomes an unreflective
preoccupation with identifying the wolves outside the gate that must not be
allowed to enter.
With a little stretching
of the imagination we might capture something of the intent of Ezekiel’s
prophecy and move into a self-critical reading of the Good Shepherd. It is
an interpretive move beloved by good liberals.
Here, we understand the Good Shepherd coming to deliver us from the bad
faith of our own leaders, providing an internal critique of the status quo of
our own community, transposing the Jewish critique to a Christian setting.
In this case, the
“we” is the victims of Church and society.
It is our own leaders who have “have abandoned their sheep (that is to
say, us), they have scattered their sheep (that is to say, us) by their harsh
doctrines, making it impossible for us to gather together in a safe space.”[5] In their focus on reputation, power, and privilege
our preachers and moralists have proven themselves to be hired hands, who
abandon the true point of religion, which is the practice of justice and mercy,
the moment it threatens their security.
Jesus as the Good
Shepherd is clearly on our side as the friend of outcasts and sinners, who
reserves his harshest words for cynical, religious hypocrites. The bishops covering up sexual abuse and the
televangelists fleecing the vulnerable are the “them” against whom “we” are
defined. This self-critical reading
strikes me as an improvement on the pre-critical reading, capturing something
of the compassionate concern of Jesus and the prophets before him. Yet, in its preoccupation with the hired
hands, it “is utterly dependent on there being another over against whom my
protest has its validity and dignity.”[6]
There is yet
another, post-critical, way to read the Good Shepherd, focused entirely on the
transformative encounter between shepherd and sheep. In this reading, we no longer focus on
identifying wolves and hired hands.
Jesus no longer is the accusing gatekeeper we can invoke against those
we condemn. Rather, he becomes what he
has been all along: the gate itself, through whom we pass on our way to
becoming part of an all together new way of defining “we.”
As James Alison
notes, Jesus says that he is the gate or door, and this in a special
sense. The purpose of gates is to define
what is inside and what is outside.
Jesus as gate, however, marks an open passage – a following of Jesus
through the death of our old identity as insiders or outsiders – into a new
freedom to move in and out between pasture and shelter so that we can be fed
without needing to be confined or defended against others. Our identity defined by insider vs. outsider
collapses.
The preoccupation
with hired hands and wolves recedes as we come to realize that they, too, are
just sheep of another fold. As we begin
to embrace our freedom to move in and out, we find ourselves being transformed from
sheep into good shepherds or models for others, as well as open gates through
which others can discover for themselves the responsible freedom and dazzling
diversity of the one flock that the Good Shepherd is gathering.
To follow the Good
Shepherd is to embrace a life of self-giving love and forgiveness that encompasses
this expanding sense of “we.” It is to receive a new identity that is entirely
gratuitous, no longer dependent upon “them.” This is what it means to believe
in the name of Jesus and love one another.
To affirm that his is the only name,
by which we can be saved, is to affirm the universality of the gate through which
all are invited to pass on the way to abundant life. Amen.
