16th Sunday of the Year

Yesterday at the Cathedral we had the great privilege to witness the ordination of a new priest – Fr Joseph. At his ordination, our bishop spoke about meeting one of the Bishops of the Holy Land, who, in his youth, did work as a shepherd, and how this shepherd-turned-pastor reflected on how most of his time was spent not in leading from the front or encouraging the sheep from the back, but simply being among the sheep. Standing there, watching them graze.

I am sure that to some this may sound tremendously boring, and I am also certain that there is someone out there today in Big Tech who is thinking about the best way to use drones and artificial intelligence to replace shepherds…

As smelly and as tiring and inglorious the task is, this is the role that Jesus chose to take on for us. He left the splendour of heaven, and in the Incarnation chose to come to dwell among us, to be among us, to tend us, to look after us, to be the shepherd for us, scattered sheep.

There are times when we certainly lack direction, when we are lost, when we are in danger, sometimes even without recognising. It is in these times that we are in absolute need of someone greater, someone more powerful than us, who can see things we wouldn’t see, who has the power to do what we cannot do, someone we can turn to.

Humanity is not complete without God. The society that surrounds us encourages us to be on this never-ending journey of self-discovery and self-fulfilment. The difficulty however, and where it seems to go completely astray, is that it has the wrong concept of what the human person is. While we are trying to recover the dignity of the human person that was in many cases indeed degraded through sin, we seem to think that we can bestow that dignity on ourselves. We are trying to make ourselves into gods, but, as in the garden of Eden, without God. We wish to think of ourselves as all-knowing, all-powerful; the masters of the universe; as well as its saviours, not realising how partial our understanding is, and how, if we leave God out of the picture, we set our aims at something that is less than the ultimate good, and therefore will ever remain frustrated. Or sometimes quite the opposite: it is also rather fashionable to see humanity as a scourge, as a source of evil, exploiters of the world, that would be better off extinct.

Humanity without God remains to be like a flock without a shepherd: scattered. The original Collect for the feast of Christ the King speaks of this:

“Almighty and eternal God, who hast wished to restore all things through Thy beloved Son, the King of the universe, graciously grant, that all the families of the Gentiles separated by the wound of sin, may be subjected to His most loving dominion.”

The word for “separated” in Latin, “disgregatae”, is the word for when a flock scatters. When unity is broken, when the protection of the shepherd is no longer there, when care for each other, when a common direction, a common purpose, are all gone.

A few years ago I was watching the live stream from the Eucharistic Congress held in Budapest, Hungary – my home country – and I was in absolute awe of the Divine Liturgy the Eastern Catholics celebrated together. The Mass according to their rite was celebrated in about 4-5 languages; each of the Eastern rites contributing something of their ancient customs: it was a spiritual feast of the most beautiful melodies, ancient languages… a beautiful expression of true unity, in one flock, one shepherd, under the primacy of Peter.

When we wish each to re-make ourselves in our own image, what we get is isolation, hostility, disunity. When we start to dwell in the presence of Christ, who has come among us, each of us are gradually gathered into the one flock of the True Shepherd, and the result can be nothing short of heavenly: an expression on earth of the unity of heaven.

And no, it is not “flock mentality” that we are called to. Very often Christians, perhaps especially Catholics, are accused of just sheepishly following whatever is dictated to them; that we, supposedly, just blindly follow what the priests or the Pope “manipulate” us into. I always find this ironic, especially when it comes from people who entirely uncritically adopt whatever “spiritual truth” is being pushed from the great spiritual heights of daytime TV or the so-called “spirutality” section of airport bookshops. Christ’s grace perfects our human nature. To have someone stronger than you protecting you, someone wiser leading you, someone greater than you tending for you is not a sign of weakness and stupidity – quite the opposite. The small and seemingly weak tribes of Israel often struck terror into the hearts of their enemies – because they saw that the Most High God was their protector.

And ultimately, we are people, not sheep. While Christ does look after us as keenly as a shepherd looks after his sheep, that is not where the story ends for us. God became Man that men could become God – observed the Church Fathers. We are not just looked after by the Good Shepherd, but we are incorporated into Him; we ourselves are being formed after His Likeness: Christ is creating of us, the “disjoined”, “scattered” nations of the earth, “one single New Man” as we read in Ephesians; in our union to Jesus, effected by the sacraments of the Church, we become Him for the world. We also start to bear the image of the Good Shepherd; and so we each have a similar role to safeguard, guide, tend those who are as yet “scattered through sin”. For some of us this will mean a specific sacramental mode of ministry – please pray for more priests – but each and every Christian is shaped into the image of the same Good Shepherd. We each – whether in our families, workplaces, school, sports clubs, wherever – come into contact with those who are like sheep without a shepherd. If we act with the same compassion and mercy that we see in Our Lord, then we will also yearn to bring them to Jesus, in whom we found our safety, our healing, and our own true humanity restored.