Sermon for Pusey House: The Good Shepherd

The Lections (from the Authorised Version) Ezekiel 34.11-16a  1 Peter 2.19-25 John 10.11-16

The Third Sunday after Easter, 23 April 2023 

1 Peter 2:25 The shepherd and bishop of your souls

Audio here

The reason we find it difficult to understand the Bible is dry stone walls. Dry stone walls create enclosed pastures. Despite the enormous work that has gone into building them, dry stone walls are a labour-saving device. Once built, you can release your sheep into the area bounded by the wall, and then let them get on with it. The Shepherd can zoom around on his quad bike visiting and dealing with the issues that the sheep may have, but he does not actually have to stay with them. The biblical Shepherd on the other hand pastured his sheep in the vast areas of the Palestinian wilderness. With relatively small amounts of grass creating fields was a nonstarter. The Shepherd must lead the flock, gathering them in when they stray and taking them from pasture to pasture. ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, he leads me beside still waters he brings me to green pastures.’ The Shepherd of Israel remains with his flock.

This is an image of constant protection and unfailing care which would have been obvious to the people to whom Eziekiel prophesied, and would have resonated with those who heard Jesus speak. There is so much of which we are afraid, there are so many wolves, so many difficulties. Our lives are complicated, and there are times when we can feel very alone with our problems. I remember the first time my car broke down. Always before when the car had broken down my father had been there to know what to do. Now I had to work it out for myself. In all sorts of aspects of life, trivial and significant, we need a Shepherd: someone to tell us what to do, to help us work it out, to be our guide and our strength.

In the Old Testament the Shepherd King of Israel is the Lord himself. Now Jesus says, “I am the good Shepherd.” He is the one who guides and directs us who helps us in the way.

There are lots of other shepherds, lots of other possible leaders, but Christ is the only Good Shepherd. The world offers fame or wealth or power. Influencers suggest personal gratification, those philosophers who propose the the power of human will, those scientists who assert we may only look only at the surface of things and not at their reality. When we follow these shepherds we come not to a place of safety, but to further complications, to greater distress, to darker fears.

Our experience is that if we truly seek God’s will, although we may often fail and fall into sin and wrongdoing, nevertheless He will guide and direct us gently bringing us back into his way. By attention to Scripture and the teaching of the church our reason is directed, and in the sacraments Christ Himself comes to us, the Shepherd of our souls, guiding conscience and will, that we may walk in the narrow way that leads to salvation.

This doesn’t mean that life gets easy, or that the complications fall away, but it does mean that we are guided and strengthened in the Way. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you are with me your rod and your staff they comfort me. This is a matter not so much of proof as of cumulative experience, our own and that of others.

For we do not do this on our own. The Christian life is a corporate endeavour. S Peter reminds us that The Good Shepherd is the Bishop of our souls. The 1611 translation is striking: the work is episkopos, which can mean overseer, but is the word used in the early church for Bishop. Our faith is not about the individual and the heterodox, but about the communal. There is a commitment to each other which flows from the commitment which God has to us. We have just kept the Easter Triduum and the Mass of the Lords’ Supper when, on the night that He was betrayed, He gathered to a meal which would normally have brought together the whole household, women, men, and children but to which He called just the Twelve, only those men on whom He would confer the oversight, the episcope, of His church.

Now of course we know only too well that the church is, viewed from one angle, a failed and failing organization, whose Bishops come in for a lot of criticism. I have myself recently had some trenchant things to say across the floor of the General Synod, opposing the Bishops’ proposals on human sexuality. But this is nothing new and does not prevent the whole church looking to Christ, the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls, and does not mean that amidst the battles of church debates we are not being led by the Good Shepherd to green pastures.

FrGeorge Congreve, who has been for me in so many ways a sure guide, wrote about of the controversies of his own day. He wrote about the early church that,

The Catholic Church was a seething mass of intellectual difficulty and conflict in the very best ages...  Even while they were laying down their lives for Christ there were intellectual questions of the greatest depth and perplexity arising every day. But the primitive Christians never waited till all the questions were decided. Holy Church will decide them at the right time. There was always for them something more immediate and really important still to consider, viz. the soul’s personal relation to God in love, worship, duty. The controversies of other days are passed through and left behind, and when we examine them there seems to be much that was unsatisfactory in the circumstances under which those great questions were settled. But many of those who lived through those times of conflict got built up and established in God. All their life was a battling with perplexity, moral and intellectual doubt and weakness, and the result was perfection. ‘These are they which came out of great tribulation (not physical difficulty, merely, but every kind, intellectual and spiritual), and have washed their robes... in the blood of the Lamb.”  There were often times for them of ruin, disaster, failure, agony of doubt, and they came out of it made perfect. Their perfection was a perfected reliance upon God in the midst of the most hopeless imperfection.  

 …The perfect man sees the weak points in the views of his age about God, or sees them not, and goes on to God himself.

We cannot live the Christian life alone; the Good Shepherd calls us into His flock, the church. and it is sometimes precisely in her imperfections that she leads us most fully to simple dependence on the one who is the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls.