Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Easter 4 C - May 8, 2022
This fourth Sunday of Easter is known as Good Shepherd Sunday. Even though, in our three-year lectionary, it’s only in Year B, which we had last year, that Jesus actually says “I am the good shepherd,” the gospel lectionary for this Sunday always centers on the image of Jesus as the shepherd of the sheep. He knows his sheep; he calls them each by name; he lays down his life for them; and they—that is, we—follow that voice, leading us ever onward to our home in God.
I’ve always found the moniker “Good Shepherd” both puzzling and attractive. What does Jesus mean by calling himself the good shepherd? Remember, in Matthew he denies the adjective “good,” and reminds his followers that no one is good but God. Biblical scholars also remind us that his contemporaries might have seen Jesus as the foolish shepherd who leaves his entire flock to search for the one missing sheep—an act that would actually endanger the 99 left behind in the hopes of gaining one insignificant little ewe.
And what is this voice that we know, and that calls us each by name? How do we hear it?
I heard a sermon on Good Shepherd Sunday several years ago that pointed out that the word we translate into English as “good” carries in both Greek and Hebrew a double meaning. It means “good” as we understand it—meaning both desirable and morally sound. And it also means “beautiful,” as in pleasing, attractive, excellent.
Taken in these layers, the image refracts Jesus' image like a prism refracts light. Not only is Jesus good but he is also beautiful, lovely, attractive, captivating.
Now, it’s dangerous to talk about beauty in our contemporary context, obsessed as we so often are with the so-called beautiful, young things. So often we mix up beauty with glamor. Glamor distracts us. It’s always shiny, new, and seemingly flawless. Think of the gym-toned bodies the advertisers promise us if we’ll only buy this or eat that. Glamor is always rotten at the core, no matter how lovely it seems on the surface, because it is really ugliness papered over with a symmetry and order that speaks to our desire to fly away from these impoverished human bodies.
Beauty, by contrast, conveys us to ourselves.
John Galsworthy writes of beauty that, “Where Beauty was, nothing ever ran quite straight, which, no doubt, was why so many people looked on it as immoral.” (from The Forsyte Saga) Beauty often covers itself with seeming ugliness, disorder, or disarray, because it elevates the ordinary, the human, the flawed and draws out the line of holiness crouched therein.
The most beautiful face I ever saw was that of a very old woman at a museum. Her face was so wrinkled it folded in on itself in crags and valleys. Her skin was dappled with brown, like a forest with the light poring through. Her nose was a bit hooked, and her lips thin and drawn. But as I gazed on her, a deep knowing emerged from within, a knowing that drew me more fully into myself. I became more whole in the moment of my gazing.
Such is the power of beauty to convey us to ourselves. True beauty reveals itself to those who have the patience to wait and to watch. It requires something of us. And rather than inviting us to betray ourselves, as does glamor, beauty repays us with a deepening sense of the holy within and around us.
Perhaps you know the poem called “The Bright Field” by the Welsh poet and Anglican priest R.S. Thomas:
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
Perhaps, as so often happens, the wisdom of language precedes us. Maybe “goodness” and “beauty” are not two different meanings of one word. Maybe they’re shades of one another. Maybe Jesus’ goodness is his beauty, lying hidden in the field we pass on our morning walk. Perhaps his voice is the glint of the sunshine, whispering to us to slow down, to pay attention, to allow the radiance of our life to emerge around and within us.
Perhaps the shepherd who leaves the 99, foolish though he may be, understands that wholeness is worth the risk, that wholeness is worth everything, because that is where love lies.
If true beauty emerges in and through the contrast of the ordinary, human flotsam with the radiance of divinity, then of course Jesus—fully human and fully divine—is the icon of a beauty that is moral, good, and attractive to both body and soul. And in reconciling the human and the divine—or, rather, in showing that there is no contradiction between them, that, like light and darkness, the human and the divine illuminate and boundary one another—Jesus shows us the way to deeper wholeness and reconciliation in God.
We need this vision of a reconciling beauty now more than ever. Dostoevsky famously wrote in The Idiot that “beauty will save the world.” And how, we might wonder?
Well, look around. War, yes. Plague, yes. Devastation, yes. But also the crabapples in their peerless bounty, and the love of our families and friends, and these fragile precious eyes we have.
The light of Jesus’ resurrection does not banish totally and completely the darkness that fills our world. But it does provide us with the contrast to see that world more fully, to know its beauty and in that knowledge to be known as God’s hands and God’s feet and God’s beating, broken heart in this world.
In her book Hope in the Dark Rebecca Solnit writes that “someday all this may be ruins over which pelicans will fly, but for now it is a place where history is still unfolding. Today is also the day of creation.” (Hope in the Dark, p. 114) I would add that not only is today the day of creation. But it is also good, and it is beautiful. We may not be able to end the atrocities in Ukraine, or stop the resurgence of fascism throughout the world, or mend the broken hearts of those struck down by addiction and despair, but if we ourselves are more whole, then the world is, too. If we love more, then the world is that much more loving. If we can turn away from violence and death within us, then world is that much more alive.
Each time we hear the voice of our good and beautiful shepherd calling us by name and choose to turn homeward, Christ is risen within and around us, and Easter dawns once more.
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
No comments:
Post a Comment