Monthly Archives: April 2026

How to Be a True Shepherd

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How does one know a good shepherd from a bad one? In the opening verses of John 10, Jesus says a good shepherd enters by the gate and no other way. The gatekeeper recognizes the good shepherd and opens the gate, while bad shepherds won’t be recognized so that their only recourse is to try breaking in by other ways. Jesus goes on to say that the sheep recognize the right shepherd’s voice and that is why they follow him through the gate. They will not follow the voice of a stranger.

John then says that the people did not understand this figure of speech, so Jesus tries again. This time he says that he is the gate, which actually seems to add to the confusion. The gatekeeper (whoever he or she was) disappears, no longer needed if Jesus himself is the gate. Through this gate, the sheep come in and out and by so doing, find pasture. When Jesus says that everyone who came before were thieves and bandits, the implication is that they pretended to be the gate but weren’t. What makes Jesus the true gate? Jesus says that he came so that the sheep can have life abundantly while thieves and bandits only come to kill.

Does this clarify things? Not altogether, but maybe it’s easier to understand this passage in John if we don’t try to put all the ducks in an ordered row. Throughout, we have an emphasis on the voice. The voice of another person is important to humans, but it is helpful to try to empathize with animals, the sheep in this case. Sheep get acclimated to a certain voice, or maybe several, and respond to those voices, but once habituated, don’t trust a strange voice. The tone of voice is important. The intonation of words is important to us humans, but comprehending the actual words can be distracting to the subtleties of the tone of voice. Animals have only the intonation to go on, so all of their attention is directed to that. This is why we talk to our pets with exaggerated tones to get our feelings across to them.

Jesus says that the right voice is a voice offering life, abundant life. He also says that the shepherd with the right, familiar voice, will lead the sheep out to pasture, which is where they feed. This promise of feeding echoes Jesus’ earlier promise, after he had fed the multitude in the wilderness, to give his people the bread from Heaven. Not only that, but Jesus discloses that he himself is the bread from Heaven that feeds them. This is an example of how a few basic themes in John’s Gospel keep circling round in different ways to enrich these themes.

The liturgical setting for this Gospel reading is the middle of Eastertide, which places the discourse of the Good Shepherd in the context of the Paschal Mystery. The Paschal Mystery is also, of course, the context for the whole Gospel of John. The crucified and risen Christ is now speaking to us when Jesus offers to shepherd us out of the gate to pasture. So the circling themes in the Gospel, such as that of feeding, are different ways of referring to the Paschal Mystery. In fact, just a bit further in this chapter, Jesus will say that a true shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The lectionary further accentuates the Paschal dimension of this Gospel by coupling it with these words from First Peter: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.” The reason given that Jesus had to suffer so is that we, the sheep, had been going astray, but we have now returned to “the shepherd and guardian of our souls.” (1 Pet. 2: 24–25) Here, the voice of Jesus is connected with what Jesus does.

The image of the Good Shepherd who feeds us by laying down his life may seem remote from our everyday lives, although in tense times such as these, it behooves us to look ahead to such possibilities. Meanwhile, the second chapter of Acts gives us a more everyday look at living the life of the true shepherd. The followers of the True Shepherd shared possessions and distributed to those in need. That is, they fed the sheep as Jesus feeds his sheep. (Acts 2: 45) To do otherwise is to be a thief and a bandit. If we feed others to give abundant life to them, we will also naturally speak with the voice of Jesus. We can all do as much as this. There is no other gate to life than this.

On Looking Forward to Easter

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In Matthew’s Gospel, the Resurrection starts off with a bang in the form of an earthquake. It’s the sort of thing that grabs our attention and makes us take notice that something of great significance has happened. After this bang, the narrative in Matthew, not to speak of the other three gospels, is surprisingly quiet. It’s sort of like one of those symphonies that starts with a bold statement and then subsides to build up musical ideas for the long haul. And the Resurrection, far from being over-and-done-with, is an event for the long haul. We’re still hauling, and so is God.

When Matthew tells of the earthquake, we get a sense of Jesus exerting a huge amount of force to break out of the tomb. That would not be surprising. The stone that Joseph of Arimathea put at the opening was heavy enough, but the Pharisees had put a seal on the tomb and posted a guard. One would think it would take something like an atomic explosion to set Jesus free. But that isn’t what Matthew describes here. What Matthew describes is the angel coming down during the earthquake and rolling away the stone to show that Jesus was already gone! Jesus had quietly slipped away to begin his resurrected life before anyone knew anything had happened.

St. Benedict’s admonition to spend Lent looking forward to Easter with joy and spiritual longing has haunted me many times over the years and I have commented on this before. This year, it haunts me more than ever. Does Benedict’s admonition mean that now Easter is here, we don’t need to look forward to it any more? I don’t think so. Benedict introduces his chapter on Lent by saying that a monastic should live a continuous Lent, which means we should look forward to Easter all the time as well. That means that even on Easter Day we also look forward to Easter. This circles back to the notion that Easter is for the long haul.

What are we celebrating in celebrating Easter, and what are we looking forward to in looking forward to Easter? There are many good answers to these questions, but the answer that keeps coming to me is gathering. By the time of his death, Jesus’s disciples had scattered. Only a few women and the Beloved Disciple in John were at the cross. After his Resurrection, Jesus began gathering the disciples, starting with the women who had come to the grave to anoint the body that wasn’t there. Matthew fast forwards to the disciples being gathered at Galilee where Jesus told the women he would meet them. There, he sends them on the mission of gathering all people of all nations. Considering the scattering of people occurring today, that job of gathering is still a work in progress.

The scattering that we see, both in the many wars occurring at this time, and the intensifying racial tensions in the US are much more like a continuation of Passiontide than a celebration of Easter, even when the calendar turns to that day. This should not be surprising because the Passion of Jesus took place on account of a severe resistance to Jesus’ life of gathering. We’re still trying to seal up the tomb to try and keep Jesus there and find ways to keep people apart. Although Jesus has proved to be the ultimate escape artist, Jesus continues to live the resurrected life as the Lamb slain since the foundation of the world, as the Book of Revelation shows us. (Rev. 5: 6) Just as Jesus allowed the religious and political authorities to crucify him rather than commit violence against them, the risen Jesus did not and does not come in violence or vengeance, but comes in self-sacrificing peace and forgiveness. That means that the risen Lord continues to suffer through his members everywhere who are persecuted by those who prefer to scatter. Jesus is the leaven in the bread and the fermentation in the wine served at the altar at every Eucharist to leaven and ferment our lives with his life of gathering.

Unfortunately, pointing out the ways other people try to reseal the tomb seems to be everybody’s blood sport. It is worth recalling that at the Last Supper, Jesus was still dealing with resistance from his closest disciples. It is also telling that, after the Resurrection, when the disciples met with the risen Lord, Matthew says that even then “some doubted.” (Mt. 28: 17) If some disciples still held back from the risen Lord’s gathering of all people, what about us? In the subject of racism, for example, I find myself having to peel away layer after layer of my own racism, as if it were an onion. I suggest that a helpful Easter exercise would be to examine ourselves for the ways we seal the tomb and set up obstacles to the Risen Life Jesus would have us lead. We need more earthquakes that send angels to roll away the stone and remind us that Jesus is alive among us, suffering every time we try to put the stone back. Meanwhile, Jesus remains with us for all time, strengthening us to gather with others and giving us much to look forward to in looking forward to Easter.

Jesus’ Legacy

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It is normal and laudable to think ahead to the legacy one might leave for posterity, hopefully a legacy to the good for others. In the case of Jesus, his sights for an enduring legacy must have been very high, high enough to cause much anxiety on account of the heavy resistance he had encountered, not least from his closest disciples. It seems highly likely that he had become conscious of being a messianic figure by the close of his life, made all the more problematic in that the Davidic model didn’t seem to fit the life he had felt led to lead. Given that he had reason to believe that there was no escaping the death close on the horizon, much as he would have wanted to, the model of the Suffering Messiah of Isaiah 52-53 seemed more like what was in store for him. But how could dying at the hands of the religious and political authorities lead to anything after his death? The need to firm up his legacy as best he could reached its climax at what has gone down in history as The Last Supper. On Maundy Thursday, we commemorate the two last things recorded of Jesus before his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane.

The first event is Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. The resistance he encountered from his closest disciple, Peter, could not have been encouraging. Jesus reacted to this resistance with a firm reproof that seems to have done its job, as Peter seems finally to have gotten on board with the notion of being a leader by being a servant. Jesus’ act is easy for anyone to understand provided one’s heart is not so clouded as to find such a humble act of service incomprehensible. The problem is, it is easy to let our hearts cloud over in such matters and it is very difficult to clear up our hearts when they have been so clouded. However, Jesus’ act of washing the disciples’ feet is about a clear a beacon as he could have given to his followers and to us.

Jesus’ second and last act is to host the supper, possibly a Passover meal, but not necessarily. In serving the bread, he says cryptically that it is his body for them, and when serving the wine, he says. just as cryptically, that it is his blood of the new covenant. (1 Cor. 11: 24-25). He then instructed his disciples to eat the bread and drink the wine in his memory. We have been doing this ever since with the conviction that in some mysterious way, Christ continues to give of his substance through the bread and wine. What was Jesus thinking at the time of making these gestures? He didn’t have a theological manual on sacramental theology to help him out and presumably didn’t need such a prop. A deep dependency on his heavenly Abba would have been enough. When I think of the stiff resistance Jesus was experiencing at the time, even from his disciples, I begin to suspect that the bread and wine was something of an escape hatch, an end run around the resistance. In many mysterious ways, eating the bread and drinking the wine not only teaches us more and more over the years what Jesus is all about, but these acts keep Jesus alive within us. It is of profound significance that the two disciples who walked the road to Emmaus recognized the risen Lord in the breaking of the bread.

When Jesus died on the cross, Joseph of Arimathea buried him and put a stone at the opening of tomb. This stone was just to protect the body. For Caiaphas, that was not enough as he did not want to take any chances that the dead man would get away. So he had the stone sealed just to make sure. Three days later, we’ll see how that worked out.