“The
Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing I shall want”. We have just sung this
refrain many times over. But do we really believe it? Because, if we did, we’d
be the most blessed and happy of people already at the center of our souls,
regardless of what else might be happening in our life or in our world. Today’s
readings reveal to us Jesus as a true and good shepherd, not in theory but in
action. By extension, these passages the Church addresses to us today teach us
what it means to exercise the ministry of a shepherd in the Church at any level.
An irate Jeremiah denounces all evil shepherds—that is, kings, presidents and
all political, military and especially ecclesiastical
leaders of the people who have made their position of power an occasion not for
service but for exploitation. In its positive aspect, this denunciation demands
the necessary conversion of power into
service on the part of all in authority. God himself will judge and
vindicate the wrongs committed by unworthy shepherds, and he will raise up an
authentic shepherd. In the gospel, Jesus appears as the shepherd who quenches
the thirst for firm and trustworthy guides of a people that is now as lost as
are “sheep without a shepherd”. And, by his reference to the blood and the
cross of Jesus as instruments of reconciliation, St Paul reminds us that Jesus
is a shepherd willing to “lay down his life for his sheep”.
The
gospel portrays Jesus first of all the shepherd
of his disciples, the small community gathered around him. Returning from
the mission on which Jesus had sent them, the disciples surround him and tell
him what they have accomplished. Jesus unites the community and gathers his
disciples together, unlike the evil shepherds who “scattered [the Lord’s] sheep
and drove them away”. He listens attentively to the stories the apostles tell
him concerning all they have experienced in the concrete during the course of
the mission. This exchange between Jesus and his disciples shows that authentic
Christian mission cannot consist only in “doing and teaching”. The experience
of the mission also needs to be communicated, narrated in detail and listened
to. It is via this process of intimate dialogue (of prayer really) between Jesus and those he has called to himself,
that the disciples’ pastoral and existential experiences find an opportunity
for both consolation and correction, both confirmation and rectification by
Jesus. Proclaiming the Gospel, bearing living witness to Jesus the Lord, is a
laborious process that has to be learned, like everything else, by patient
trial and embarrassing error.
And
so we should delight in seeing how the disciples are welcomed and listened to
by the very one who sent them forth. Jesus does not show himself interested
simply in the fulfillment of the mission. Jesus is no pragmatist; first and
foremost he cares about the persons
of those he has commissioned. Jesus, the good shepherd who knows his sheep by
name, shows himself to be in fact more
attentive to the missionaries themselves than to the mission and its possible
success. “Success” or “failure”, as the world defines them, are matters of
indifference to Jesus. As he listens to the stories recounted by the apostles,
Jesus is tenderly sensitive to their fatigue and their need for rest. So he
invites them to go off with him to a place away from it all so he can tend to
their weariness.
It’s
evident that Jesus’ disciples already at this time are suffering from what we
think of as a typically modern phenomenon: the tyranny of activism, of never having enough time. “There were many
crowds coming and going, and they [the apostles and Jesus] no longer even had
time to eat,” says the text. Jesus, the good shepherd, gives his disciples the
right and the command to rest, and by
so doing he gives them the responsibility to give themselves time, to stop, to
inhabit and enjoy the silence and solitude in his company that he is giving
them as gift. In other words, Jesus wants his collaborators to stop their
frantic activism in order simply to “be”
and not become alienated from their own true being by sheer force of “doing”, thus neglecting the more elementary
needs of human and spiritual life.
Let
us remember in this connection that earlier in Mark (3:14-15) Jesus had called
the apostles to himself, for the purpose in the first place that they should
wholly be with him, in
the strong, ontological sense of this expression. Only secondarily does he also
command them to preach and cast out
demons. The categories of being and
doing, the difference and the
hierarchy between them, are hugely crucial to all healthy human life. Perhaps
the most important thing the apostles need to learn in their eagerness to
accomplish great feats and prove themselves, is that they can and must find
their rest in their relationship with
Jesus, who in Matthew exclaims: “Come to me, all you who labor and are
burdened, and I will restore you” (Mt 11.28), as we heard Jesus tell us in last
Thursday’s gospel.
When
Jesus disembarked to go to a deserted place with the disciples, he saw the
large crowd that had preceded them on foot and “he felt compassion for them
because they were like sheep without a shepherd”. Compassion is clearly the foundation of Jesus’ pastoral action.
Just as he had seen the need of his disciples for contemplative rest, now Jesus
sees the need of the crowds to be shepherded, and he does not reject them, does
not send them away as if they were an obstacle to what he himself had previously
planned. No, it is precisely for this compassionate caring and shepherding that
he had come from the Father! This is the substance of Jesus’ life as Incarnate
Word: to give himself eucharistically as gift to a starving and wretched world,
above all to the marginalized whom all the powerful seem to have abandoned.
Jesus
sees the hunger the people have for God’s Word, and “he began to teach them
many things”. Far from being a possible annoyance that keeps the group of
apostles from enjoying the rest the Master had planned, the crowds become in a
sense a teacher for Jesus, precisely by
virtue of their manifest need and poverty. Jesus accepts changing his own previous
project. Graciously, he allows himself to be disturbed and commits himself to
the arduous task of preaching. Jesus here teaches his disciples that generous availability to the needy,
without advance warning, is a primordial Christian virtue. In the face of a
neighbor’s need even our fondest (and, indeed, our most pious!) plans and desires must give way: the true disciple must be
wholly malleable and accommodating. “Eucharistic availability”, I would call
it—becoming bread for others. Indeed, the basis of all evangelical preaching, teaching
and service can only ever be compassion,
according to the very rich and physiological biblical term esplanchnísthê used
here by Mark. It denotes a compassion that moves with pity, not only a person’s
mind and heart, but his very viscera
at the sight of human misery and want. Without the primacy of this kind of
compassion, even the supremely Christian and ecclesial activity of preaching
and teaching will turn, at best, into an academic exercise and a haughty demonstration
of power.
The
gaze of Jesus the shepherd is indwelt by the light of the Word of God: in this
light he sees in the crowd not a hindrance, but an opportunity to obey the word
of Scripture which demands that God’s people not be a flock without a shepherd,
but that it should have sure guides and tender caregivers. And it is this
obedience that demonstrates an important aspect of the Word’s Incarnation:
namely, that Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Mary, is himself in a real sense a sheep amidst the lost sheep. He is, in
fact, the Lamb faithful to the God
who is the “shepherd of Israel”.
Yes,
the Lamb is also the Shepherd! And Jesus, the sacrificed Lamb of God who takes
away the sin of the world, will shortly give himself to us, too, from this
altar of sacrifice, as our nourishment, healing and illumination, for we are a
hungering flock no less than the rest of fragile humanity. He wants to be our
life if we will let him. As St Paul teaches us today, “he came and preached
peace” and even “became our peace”, our rest, “for through him we all have
access in one Spirit to the Father”.