The Intimate Shepherd
Christ is risen! On this Fourth Sunday of Easter, the Church invites us to contemplate the Risen Lord through the image of the Good Shepherd. But today we hear only the first third of Jesus’ long discourse on this theme in the Gospel of John. Our text ends just before Jesus’ declaration: I am the good shepherd. Instead, what we hear is: I am the gate for the sheep. Before speaking of the close relationship he wishes to create between himself and his sheep, Jesus presents himself as the gate through which every sheep must enter; that is, he wishes to establish the conditions that must be accepted by us so that he, Jesus, may become the very source of life for us, who aspire to be his faithful disciples.
This gospel evokes, with vivid realism, the presence of impostors all around us, who claim to be shepherds but are not. These impostors have only their own interests at heart, and Jesus calls them “thieves and robbers”. No doubt he is literally thinking of the very Pharisees to whom he is speaking; yet what Jesus says applies to impostors of all times, all those who loudly claim a spurious authority and want to bend people to their own purposes by exploiting their fears, insecurities and lusts, and by seducing them to the worship of false gods by holding out fantastic promises that can never be fulfilled.
Now, while the Good Shepherd desires the life and well-being of the sheep, these others seek rather their ruin, for their own gain and the sinister ends of their own privileged class and party. This discourse of the Lord is, therefore, much more than a mere poem of consolation that uses the quaint image of a shepherd to cheaply manipulate our emotions and our need to be looked after. The parable is above all a robust and sober instruction through which the Lord wishes to teach us fundamental criteria about how to follow him and only him, with our feet firmly planted on the ground, so as to receive from him the abundant life he came to give us.
The Good Shepherd discourse follows immediately as Jesus’ response to the Pharisees’ question: Are we then also blind? And the Evangelist John comments: Jesus used the image [of the shepherd] to speak to the Pharisees, but they did not understand what he was saying to them. As always, the Lord strives to reveal both the reason why he came into this world (that is, our salvation) and the way in which he wants to save us (that is, by sharing with us the life he brings, the Life which he is). But we see that there is great opposition in the world both to the salvation he brings and to the way he shares his own life, and this opposition is embodied in the attitude of the Pharisees. It should be obvious, yet still worth stressing, that the Pharisaical attitude is far from being merely a historical quirk of that time, religion and geographical region. In actual fact, as experience shows, it concerns us all since the Pharisees’ gut reaction toward Jesus only exhibits the instinctive, default attitude of natural man before our conversion to Christ.
What, then, exactly is at stake in these passages of John’s Gospel? Nothing less than the conflict between Law and Grace. The human ego always insists on saving itself by its own means and devices. Self-sufficiency and extreme individualism are among the hallmarks of original sin. Natural, fallen man yearns at all costs to become enthroned in a reckless freedom. Consequently, to the Pharisees’ unredeemed ears, there are at least two fundamental elements in Jesus’ teaching that are scandalous to their brand of piety. One is Jesus’ revelation that he personally brings us salvation, while they, the Pharisees, were convinced that salvation comes rather through the correct observance of the Law of Moses. And the other scandalous element is precisely that it is solely Jesus—an ordinary man and Jew, in appearance like all other Jewish men, their neighbors—who brings this salvation, as he himself declares today in crystal-clear fashion: I have come that the sheep may have life, and have it abundantly.
‘How can a human being’, the Pharisees of all ages murmur, ‘make such declarations without claiming to be God?’ In the eyes of the Pharisees and in our own eyes, when we insist on our own self-righteousness, Jesus is necessarily the great Violator: he disrupts both the rock-bottom psychological principle of human autonomy and the infallible dogma of theistic rationalism, which dictates that there exists only a distant and unknowable God. To boot, this conceptual Deity is above all not incarnatable, that is, utterly incapable and unwilling to put on human flesh and human nature.
In tremendous contrast to this Pharisaical outlook, Jesus’ Good Shepherd discourse takes up the doctrine of spiritual childhood familiar to us from the Synoptic Gospels. Truly, I say to you, we hear in Matthew, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven (18:3). In place of the Pharisees’ doctrinal rigidity and fierce self-sufficiency, Jesus offers us this wonderfully pastoral and engaging earthly image of the intimate bond that exists between a shepherd and his sheep. Here Jesus invites us to come down from the clouds of our pride and false intellectual rigor to abide with him and his plan of salvation within the sheepfold, where we can smell the sweet scent of the earth seasoned with all the elements of tangible human and animal life.
If it is true, as Pope Francis liked to say, that “the authentic shepherd must smell like the sheep”, it is also true that the sheep must humbly accept their condition as earthly creatures—limited, dependent, vulnerable—fragile and often wayward creatures that have an absolute need to belong to their shepherd, to find their home in his arms. Here, within the sheepfold, there belong only the pure of heart, the poor in spirit, who yield to God’s surprising ways, who know how to rejoice and flash sudden smiles, and who give themselves freely to the great Adventure of Grace, following in the footsteps of the one Great Shepherd of the sheep.
Now, any call to intimacy such as this, even at the purely human level, has something subversive about it, since true, human intimacy always urges us to leap beyond all secular structures of power and all social conformity. And this is all the truer in the case of the call to divine intimacy, to familiarity with God in Jesus, because here love takes on an absolute, eternal character that transcends all the limits of this world. If I had to summarize Jesus’ complete answer to the problem of salvation and how to obtain it, I would say that the solution Jesus offers is quite simply this: to enter into intimacy with him in love and trust. Only through the experience of an intimate love shared with Jesus can we be freed from all false autonomy, which in fact slits our soul’s throat and causes us to perish because it severs the roots of our being. Only such intimacy, as well, can free us from a monolithic and tyrannical conception of God, which excludes from his nature any possibility of humanity and love.
Intense communion with himself is the answer to the human plight that Jesus proposes in today’s Gospel. Let’s see some of what this implies.
The key image of the sheepfold seems to me a metaphor for the Church—the place par excellence where intimacy with the one Shepherd and Savior is cultivated. Everything in the Church is intended to lead us to Jesus and to strengthen our knowledge of Jesus and our communion with him. Here, in the Church as embodied in our local Eucharistic community, we should find a safe, familiar, warm, and communal home. Here we should enjoy a deep sense of belonging. Here our own personal identity should merge quite naturally with the ecclesial identity of the Body of Christ. The Shepherd enters through the main gate and is that gate, because he is the Master of the house. It and all it contains belongs to him. His sheepfold is his kingdom! We can be sure that he will care for those who belong to him. The Master alone is responsible for the whole; he alone understands of what the salvation of all consists.
In this ambiance there should reign an atmosphere of family intimacy, seasoned, as we’ve said, with all the smells of earthly life, both the pleasant and the unpleasant. As well, Jesus places the main emphasis of intimacy with him on listening: The sheep listen to [the] voice [of the shepherd], he says. He calls each one by its name. He walks ahead of them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. They will never follow a stranger, but rather will run away from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers. This harmonious correspondence between the Shepherd’s voice and the instinctive way in which the sheep recognize it goes beyond being a simple metaphor. Such harmony between voice and recognition already forms a central part of human communion and communication.
Only the mysterious bonds of love can explain this phenomenon. To recognize, without a second thought, the tone and quality of the voice of someone we love, reveals a whole inner world of shared experience, of mutual trust and the journey we have already traveled together. This means that these sheep dwell both in the “fold” of the community and in the Heart of their common Shepherd. We have entered here, at the Master’s invitation, into a dimension that is, strictly speaking, mystical yet remains at the same time ecclesial. There is no contradiction between these two aspects.
In the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles we saw that, in the voice of Peter, who proclaimed to them the crucified and risen Christ, calling them to conversion, the Jews recognized the voice of Christ himself, and those who accepted Peter’s word were baptized. Yes, after the Resurrection and the Ascension, it is the Apostles at the head and the entire Church along with them, who become the mouth and the voice of Jesus to the world.
Let us conclude with a very practical point: The sheep, that is the faithful ones who recognize the voice of their beloved Master and Shepherd, must follow him: he goes ahead of them, and the chief duty and activity of the sheep is to actually follow him. In other words, it is not enough to simply take pleasure in the intimacy of Jesus’ presence and find comfort in it, as we have seen throughout Paschal time in the case of Mary Magdalen. Jesus, you see, is not static. We must actively follow Jesus, that is, share in his mission, live out his destiny with him, and obey the Father by doing with Jesus the works that the Father has given him to do. This is exactly what St Peter exhorts us to do in the second reading, when he writes: If you endure suffering for doing good, it is a grace in God’s eyes. This is indeed what you have been called to do, for Christ himself suffered for you: he left you an example so that you might follow in his footsteps.
Brothers and sisters: The Lord of the world and the Shepherd of our souls bore our sins in his body on the cross, thus becoming a sacrifice of atonement, the Lamb of God who was slain. By the same logic, his sheep are called to become so united with their Shepherd that they will no longer be able to separate their personal identity from the redemptive mission of their Lord, who will be at work in and through our own joys and sufferings, until the end of time. Just as Jesus did, we too must offer ourselves each day to the world and each other as Eucharistic food, through both hidden prayer and visible works of charity. We cannot possibly keep for ourselves the abundant life with which he has filled us. Alleluia! Christ is risen, and his rising empowers us to live his very life!
