Have we ever noticed how many
Biblical passages are based on images of shepherding? These shepherding images
may be easier to identify with in a culture like that of Israel, the Holy Land
of Biblical times or of the present day, for that matter, than in a culture
like ours, especially in a major city like Edmonton. When was the last time
anybody here saw a shepherd or sheep? It has been a long time since I have seen
a shepherd or sheep. And yet our Church dedicates one Sunday a year to a kind
of celebration of shepherding, Good Shepherd Sunday, which coincides with the Fourth
Sunday of Easter. Today, both our first reading, from the prophet Jeremiah, and
our Psalm focus heavily on images of shepherding.
If we were to hear no more
than our reading from Jeremiah today, and since the Church already celebrates a
Good Shepherd Sunday, we might want to call today “Bad Shepherd Sunday.”
When I was in seminary, I took
a practicum class on how to preside at Mass and other liturgical occasions like
baptisms, weddings, and funerals. The textbook for the class, written in a
humorous tone, especially considering the subject matter, by a Jesuit, Fr.
Dennis Smolarski, was called How Not to
Say Mass. The part of the Book of Jeremiah we hear today might as well have
been called, “How Not to Shepherd,” although it would seem that Jeremiah was
not in as humorous a mood in writing and preaching to the people of Israel of
his time as Fr. Smolarski was in writing How
Not to Say Mass.
Speaking through Jeremiah, God
denounces the bad shepherds; the bad leaders of Israel of the time: “Woe to the
shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture”! But what made these
shepherds so bad, and why, in our time, do we need a “Bad Shepherd Sunday”? How
is Jeremiah’s denunciation of the leaders of Israel of his time relevant to us
today?
Even if many of us may not identify
as well as people of Biblical times with the shepherding metaphors found
throughout the Bible, do we not still have some idea of what qualities a good
leader would have, whether that leader is in government, a religious leader, an
educator, a leader in the workplace, in society, in local community, or another
kind of leader? Maybe we look to our leaders to unite our country; our society;
our communities around common causes or a shared sense of what is just and
right, socially if not also morally. A good leader leads by kindness,
forthrightness, and gentleness, without losing anything of the strength of his
or her leadership. In the words of St. Francis de Sales, “there is nothing so
strong as gentleness and nothing so gentle as real strength.”
Do we not also have a sense of
what characterizes a bad leader: One who divides a country; a society; a
community; our world, and then plays on those divisions and the vulnerabilities
of the people for personal or political gain? A bad leader can become so self-absorbed
that this person no longer understands him or herself as a servant of a greater
good, much less of our salvation but, at an extreme, as a kind of god distant
and unyielding to the needs of the people he or she is leading.
Today we hear Jeremiah
responding prophetically to precisely this kind of self-absorbed,
self-righteous, self-deifying but ultimately false and bad leadership by the
“shepherds who destroy and scatter,” whether in his time or in ours. Bad
shepherding; self-absorbed leadership, Jeremiah and the other Biblical prophets
say time and again, is a form of idolatry, of replacing the one true God with
oneself or somebody or something else created as a god. For Jeremiah and the
other Old Testament prophets, idolatry was the worst sin that could be
committed. This is most critical to understanding the Old Testament prophets:
They would never chastise the people or their leaders so harshly as we hear
Jeremiah do today unless they were committing some form of idolatry, of making
themselves equivalent to gods.
In contrast, a good and
righteous leader; a godly leader; God himself always puts leadership at the
service of unity; at the service of legitimate diversity and free will so that
those the leader serves may grow as leaders themselves. For a good leader,
leadership is never about them; it is not
about me. Any leadership, especially in our Christian way of life, is about
another and ultimately about God and leading one another in love toward God;
toward salvation.
This is the kind of leader and
leadership; the kind of shepherd and shepherding God, through Jeremiah,
promises the people: “The days are surely coming… when I will raise up for
David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king, and shall execute justice
and righteousness in the land.”
As Christians, we believe that
the shepherd, the righteous servant-leader of our salvation whom Jeremiah once
promised has already lived among us as Jesus, the Christ. And we believe that
Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd, will return at the end of time to complete
God’s work of our salvation. And yet there has never been a time when the LORD
our God, the ultimate good shepherd, has not been with us in history. For God,
shepherding has always been for our good. God’s shepherding us has always been,
as our Psalm says, for the restoration of our soul. And so we may pray with
confidence, even and perhaps especially in times of hardship, “in the presence
of [our] enemies”: “The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Still, our God
has chosen not to shepherd us alone and impersonally (although God could have
done so), but to give us “shepherds after [his] own heart,” in another of
Jeremiah’s great shepherding metaphors, to live among us and to lead us to God,
to salvation. Can we not almost hear God saying about his way of shepherding, “It is not about me, but about my beloved
people; my beloved created universe.” God has chosen to make each and every one of us, by virtue of
our baptism, responsible for one another’s salvation. We are all the sheep of
God’s flock, but also in a way all one another’s shepherds.
And so how are we to shepherd,
to lead one another toward God; toward our salvation? History has constantly
given us examples of good, godly servant-leader shepherds; of saints; of the
strong yet gentle Christ-like figures most if not all of us have experienced.
And yet history has also provided us many examples of how not to lead; of
people for whom leadership is about them and less if at all about God. I am
heartbroken whenever I hear of people in positions of power, especially in the
Church (often, but not always, ordained people) who have become self-absorbed more
than God-absorbed. Emotional, sexual, physical, or other abuse of vulnerable
people; legal rigidity to the point where the law, whether of Church or state,
becomes like a god and becomes abusive: These are the symptoms of idolatry,
left in the wake of bad shepherds. “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and
scatter the sheep of my pasture,” says the LORD! And please allow me to beg
forgiveness for the times when I, as an ordained leader of our Church, have put
myself in the place of God; when I have failed to serve God’s people and our
salvation; when I have sinned; when I have been a bad shepherd.
I, we all, our Church, and our world need from
time to time the jarring reminder that Jeremiah and other prophets give us. We
need this Bad Shepherd Sunday as much as we need a Good Shepherd Sunday in our
Church. We need reminders like our readings give us today in order to lead one
another more effectively to the salvation God promises us; in order to seek,
reach out to, and welcome the people most vulnerable and most in need of God’s
presence; those in need of rest; those in need of firm yet still gentle and
kind guidance; those whom Mark’s Gospel describes for us today as “like sheep
without a shepherd.” We need reminders like those we hear today to live up to
the calling, the responsibility for one another’s salvation that we have
received in baptism, to be shepherds; servants; leaders after the saints, and
after God’s own heart.
