Ave Maria!
Second Sunday after Easter—6 April AD 2008
“You were as sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the shepherd and
guardian of your souls.”
[Ordinary of the Mass]
[English Text of Today's Mass]
[Latin Text of Today's Mass]
When I was a youngster, the cinema, the movies were just
coming into their own as a medium of entertainment. In my father’s time,
they were without sound, the story being told by written words that flashed on
the screen every so often, and the silence of the theatre being filled by the
music of a live piano or organ player, with music intended to sustain the mood
of the production. By my time, the movies all had sound (although the
words were sometimes poorly synchronized with the actors’ lips), they
were experimenting with color movies, wide screen movies, and even 3‑D
movies where everyone had to wear polarized glasses.
One of the perennial themes of the movies was the life of
our Lord Jesus Christ. Ay least as early as 1905 the Pathé Company in
France produced a movie—a collection of images, really—called the Life
and Passion of Jesus Christ.
It was translated into English. It and a baker’s dozen other movies are
still available on video recordings.
The first movie I remember was careful never to show the
face of the actor who played our Lord. That seemed to work a lot better
than picturing Jesus as a blue-eyed man with a British accent, and much better
than the one with the thick German accent. Whatever the artistic reasons
might have been, not photographing the face of Jesus was a marvelous way
for the director to recognize the fact that no actor could properly play the
role of our Lord—in film it acknowledged the divinity of Christ, for according
to the Old Testament, “no man can see the face of God and live.”
Another movie came out a few years ago that went to the opposite extreme—Jesus
was a very normal and likeable fellow, who for most of the movie seemed a bit
confused by his role in the eternal scheme of things.
The vast majority of these movies were reverent attempts to project the
personality of Jesus Christ onto the “giant screen.” Just as there are
four Gospels and many other Lives of Christ, it took a number of movies to get
in all of the aspects of our Lord’s life, death and resurrection. Nor
can we assume that Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ will be the
last. Our Lord’s life is an inexhaustible treasure.
The parable in today’s Gospel is somewhat like one of
these movies. In it, our Lord chooses to point to His warmth and kindness,
rather than to the divine side of Him that cannot be seen, or to the Judge
before Whom all must pass on the Last Day. Our Lord’s audience knew that
the shepherd, “whose sheep were his own,” lived a life quite devoted to
them. He was their guide and director. He was their constant
traveling companion, directing them from one place of pasture to another, living
out of doors with them for all but the coldest months of the year when they were
kept in shelter. He protected them from the hyenas, jackals, wolves, and
even bears which sought to make dinner of them—not to mention the two legged
beasts. He nursed the sick and those that were hurt, and still managed to
keep the rest from just wandering off. He would lead them to water to
drink in the morning, the shepherd uttering a shrill cry by which his sheep
would know him from other shepherds and flocks that sometimes came together.
The “good shepherd” of ancient Israel sometimes literally did give his life
for his sheep.
By analogy, we might think of the shepherd as living a live
so intertwined with the lives of his sheep that he became one of them.
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, whom some of you will remember as one of the early,
prime-time, stars of the “little screen,” pushed that analogy even further
in applying it to our Lord (although, for some reason he used dogs rather than
sheep). Bishop Sheen suggested that the incarnation was something like a
man who loved dogs, actually becoming one of them, so that he could reach
them, and communicate with them, and teach them on a level that they could
understand. This man’s love of dogs was so great that he was content
with eating his food out of a bowl, giving up his ability to speak in exchange
for barking, sharing their unheated living quarters, and even sharing their
fleas. What Sheen was getting at was that in becoming one of us humans,
for a lifetime, until He was brutally put to death, our Lord was content to
leave the divine splendor of Heaven, limiting Himself to the infinitely lower
existence of mankind. It was as though the Jesus‑actor who never
showed his face, threw aside his robe and sat down on the grass to serve the
sheep and cuddle the little lambs.
With varying degrees of success, animals can be conditioned
to behave as human masters command. The parrot can be taught to ride a
tiny bicycle, the dolphin to jump through a hoop, the dog can be taught to fetch
and to roll over. But this is nothing more than the very limited
conditioning of response and reward. Some animals do better at
conditioning their masters, then the other way around (like the cat). But
none of this prepares the animal to understand the desires of the master—not
even when those desires are completely for the well-being of the animal.
“You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot convince him to drink”—or
as Bishop Sheen used to say in another of his parables, your words cannot
convince the birds that they should come into the warm barn on a freezing wintry
night. Out of concern for His creatures, our Creator became one of us in
order that we might know and understand His desires for our eternal well-being.
You may recall that, back on Palm Sunday, in Saint Paul’s
epistle we read that “Jesus, though He was by nature God, did not consider
being equal to God a thing to be clung to, but emptied Himself, taking the
nature of a slave, being made like unto men.”
It is only because our Lord “emptied Himself,” taking up our humanity that
He could be the “Good Shepherd,” and that Saint Peter is able to refer to
Him as the “shepherd and guardian of your souls.”
The metaphor of Christ as the “Good Shepherd” is an
appropriate one. God, whose face is never seen by the living, did indeed
“empty Himself” in order that we might learn from Him what is in our best
interest according to His eternal plans. However, we would be wrong to
forget that He is, nonetheless, the divine Judge and Ruler of all things—that
our nature is so far below His that our very existence depends upon Him—that
it is our paramount duty to respect, honor, and worship Him. There is an
element of truth in that movie which portrayed the good natured and likeable
Jesus—indeed it is hard to believe that our Lord would be anything else in the
company of His friends—but our Lord was never confused or unsure of what to do
in this life.
The Gospels, the biographies of our Lord, and even the
movies tell us various things about the personality of our Lord and about His
mission. He is the mighty Creator, the humble Carpenter, the obedient Son
of Mary of Nazareth, the Good Shepherd, the wise Teacher—Truth Itself, He is
the suffering Savior, “He sits forever at the right hand of God the Father
Almighty, He will Judge the living and the dead,” He is Christ the King over
both Heaven and Earth. We would be remiss if we thought of Jesus Christ in
any one of these roles to the exclusion of the rest. It is hard for the
human mind to take in all of those ideas at once—perhaps that is why the
literature is so diverse.
But for today we can be content to think of Him as the Good
Shepherd, and we can be content to learn from Him the things which are for our
good that we would never have known or appreciated if He had not emptied Himself
and cared for us as “His lost and straying sheep.”
“You were as sheep going astray, but now you have
returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.”
