Following in freedom

Today’s readings: Acts 2, 14.36-41; 1 Peter 2, 20-25; John 10, 1-10.

The imagery of the shepherd and the flock, coupled with what Peter writes in the second reading about the feeling of being lost defines succinctly dominating features of our being.

Life can be pointless for many. When this is the feeling, hearing a voice you can recognise may give reassurance or a sense of belonging. The good shepherd does not preach, but is there for those who go astray, to make him or her re-connect.

Peter writes: “Through his wounds you have been healed”. When life is pointless, when belonging is lacking, when one is wounded, it’s healing that is needed.

The metaphor used by Jesus as shepherd, speaking of sheep that hear his voice and follow him, may sound anomalous in a culture that puts individual autonomy above everything else. There were times when this metaphor found literal application in Church life, leaving no space for individual freedom, and making our being Christian tantamount to being stupid.

Christian life in the light of the risen Christ is something radically different. As Peter said with a loud voice on the day of Pentecost, we have received the gift of the Holy Spirit, and that is absolutely the gift of interior freedom.

It is not a gift of fear and false submission. It is a gift of courage and foresight. It pertains to the present and the future. It is about vision.

The Scripture readings today help us to harmonise submission and freedom, which are not necessarily opposites. Today’s reading from John’s gospel is far from suggesting a sort of herd-instinct for the followers of Jesus. Following Jesus is discipleship, and discipleship is absolutely not about slavery.

We live in a culture where everything seems geared towards emancipation but which is increasingly violent and enslaving where true emancipation is concerned.

In The Winner Stands Alone, Paulo Coelho writes about the importance of paying a price to follow one’s dreams. Many have been led to believe that fame, money and power are the only values worth pursuing, unaware of the real, behind-the-scenes manipulators.

Jesus refers to these manipulators when he speaks of the “thief”, “brigand” or “stranger” who “do not enter the sheepfold through the gate”.

Today many leave the sheepfold. When something loses meaning, you search elsewhere. Our communities at times become heavy, even hindering growth and maturity. When this happens, the temptation is always to highlight the great divide between Jesus and the Church.

As adults in the faith, we do not follow a diktat or doctrine. We recognise a voice and a face we already know. That makes all the difference.

I am not for a simplistic identification between Jesus and the Church. That doesn’t work. The way of being Church, and Church belonging has rapidly eroded during the latter part of the 20th century.

The Church in Acts which was made up of vibrant and energetic faith communities that had just slipped into Christendom, in which sacred and secular combined to legitimise Christianity as a state religion and almost an ideology. That is now collapsing and in ruins.

As Loren Mead writes in The Once and Future Church, in late modernity we may be witnessing the birth of a different way of being Church, though the path we must follow remains obscure. Our society is not in need of just another organisation or party or institution.

In the Song of Songs from the Old Testament we read: “Tell me then, sweetheart, where will you lead your flock to graze, where will you rest it at noon? That I may no more wander like a vagabond beside the flocks of your companions.”

On the footsteps of the risen Christ, the Church people need is one that has the wisdom to understand and grasp the sense of being lost in many people’s heart and to be there as a remedy to the pointless wandering that many times devoids life of a true focus.