EASTER IV          May 2, 2004

(Acts 13:15-16,26-39; Psalm 100; Revelation 7:9-17; John 10:22-30)

I wrote in the May issue of our parish newsletter about my sense of the importance of images for our religious faith. What we’re about here isn’t covered by logic, or hard fast rules. We need to open the whole of our life to the spiritual quest, and that includes our imagination and feelings as well as our thoughts and actions.

There are a number of images of Jesus that we inherit from the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The first of these is the idea of the "Messiah". The word messiah means "the anointed one", and this, in turn referred to the king who was anointed with oil as a part of the coronation ceremony. The word "Christ" – Xristos in Greek -- is a direct translation of the word messiah and means, again, "the anointed one". For Jews this royal reference always hardened back to David, who was seen as the ideal king. It was the return of the king (to borrow a phrase from the Lord of the Rings movie) that would mark the divine triumph over evil and sin on earth.

As the image of the king carried actually even more biblical authority then that, since there is much Old Testament reference to God as the true King -- a point that wasn’t lost on the developers of the later Trinitarian Christology.

Jesus is also called the Son of God. That term too had been applied to David through interpretation of some of the psalms, and it certainly resonated with the Greeks for whom such a divine filial relationship was typical of heroic figures. But it is a little hard to know exactly what the original Jewish Christians might have meant by it with their sensitivity for radical monotheism. Nevertheless, such a title, such an image is at least as majestic as that of King and Lord and Messiah. King and Lord and Messiah and Christ are earthly categorizations, worldly images. The highest a human being can reach, the pinnacle of human power.

With the image of Son of God that flow of power is reversed, coming down to earth from the heavenly courts. No one had made that journey before except God. Moses and Elijah had been "taken up" but no one had been "sent down" until Jesus. Only the Torah, only the Law, only the commandments on Mt. Sinai, only the Word had come down from heaven. It is in that Word that we encounter the next image.

In a way, understanding Jesus as the Word of God elevated him to an even greater majesty than the image of the Son of God, just as the image of the Son was greater than the image of the King. Where King was earthly, the Son of God was heavenly. But both are specific, personified, bounded images. The image of the Word is universal. The Word – logos, in Greek – is the universal Torah or law of creation. It is like the concept of the Tao in Chinese philosophy. It is how things are the way they are. It is why things work the way they work. It is the divine pattern imprinted on all reality. That Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Now, what we see here is a kind of "inflationary Christology", with the projected power of Jesus growing from the human national scale of the Messiah/Lord/King, through the position of divine representative and Son of God, to the position of the co-creating central figure in the universe.

Today’s image, the image of the shepherd, is nearly opposite that pattern.

The shepherd is not a king – even for the sheep. The shepherd is a gentle guide. The shepherd is a caring watcher, who allows the sheep to graze, and when the pasture becomes grazed over the shepherd knows of places of more abundance still, where grazing can continue. The sheep know the shepherd’s voice and they go where the shepherd guides them, not by constraint but willingly. No royal power needed, no divine intervention necessary.

And, as if this image of the shepherd weren’t contrast enough with the image of King and Son of God and Word of God, the image of the Shepherd bleeds into the image of the Lamb – the most gentle of the gentle, the most powerless in the wild world of survival of the fittest.

And the lamb was slain. The King was crucified. The Son was forsaken. The word breathed out its last.

The central images of the early church, and the maturing church, and maybe even our own church were and are images of power. The central images of Jesus’ own life were images of powerlessness.

This is a really important distinction, and it relates to a spiritual and psychological process known as compensation.

When we sense a lack of something in ourselves we tend to try to compensate for that lack by appropriating something outside ourselves. When the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt, or struggling for their identity against the Canaanites, or sought return from exile in Babylon, they compensated for their weak political, social and psychological condition by developing especially strong and powerful understandings of God.

The Christians early on and in their formative years did the same thing with Jesus. First against the dominant Greco-Roman civilization, and then against the politically dominant and very frightening forces of the Germanic tribes. (You can see the same process today as images of power continue to dominate a marginalized Moslem society.) The problem is that the basic spiritual dilemma for human beings arises not because we are too weak, but because we are too powerful.

We think (maybe not consciously, but certainly) that the world revolves around us. In our egotism and self-centeredness we demand that life cater to our needs. We stand back and judge everything and every one else by values that ultimately serve our purposes. We want sovereignty, but we are not sovereign. Only God is sovereign.

I think very often even people who suffer from a social or psychological "inferiority complex" are only feeling inferior in comparison with an habitual grandiose self-image. (And I humbly say that from personal experience.) Spiritually we need to go the Cross, before we will be light enough to rise up to God. The image of the Shepherd is meant to allow us to let go into that weakness.

In the Second Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul says God told him that spiritual power is made perfect in weakness. In the letter to the Philippians, he says that in Christ "God emptied himself, taking the form of a servant". Just so, spiritually, we need to empty ourselves of all pretensions to power and strength. It was only by following this path of weakness, powerlessness, emptiness, and death that Jesus entered the resurrection where he could be seen as Messiah, Son of God, and Word.

It is only by following the Shepherd in letting go of our own power, letting go of our own defensiveness, letting go of our grasping of life, that we too will find our own exaltation.

Thanks be to God.