Nothing to lose

Today’s readings: Acts 4, 8-12; 1 John 3, 1-2; John 10, 11-18.

Security and safety are more than ever felt as basic needs. We feel threatened and vulnerable in the deepest of our emotions just as much as in our finances.

Fear is endemic to the human condition, but there are phases in history when it is accentuated. What on these Easter Sundays we continue to celebrate is our faith that the resurrection story is larger than our fears and vulnerabilities.

Lesslie Newbigin, a Church of Scotland missionary in India and Christian theologian, once wrote that “The true understanding of the Bible is that it tells us a story of which my life is a part, the story of God’s tireless, loving, wrathful, inexhaustible patience with the human family, and of our unbelief, blindness, and disobedience.”

This is what the image of the good shepherd is basically about on this fourth Sunday of Easter. The remedy to our sinfulness and blindness, to our restlessness and impatience, as well as to our fear and anxiety is a patient God who is concerned and cares, who never runs away whatever our doings, and who even lays down His life as a gift for all.

The Second Vatican Council, in one of its major documents, states that whatever touches and influences humanity, touches and influences in like manner all those who claim to be disciples of the Lord Jesus. We are in no way immune.

Jesus as the good shepherd respects our fears and anxieties. He opens our imagination to a God who is not narrowed down to fit the rigid concepts of doctrine but who remains hidden in the mystery of our future. Faith is hope. When it is simply nailed down to doctrine it loses its grip and inner strength.

It is this inner strength of our faith that is focused on throughout Easter time till Pentecost. Pentecost stands for a most major U-turn that marked the early days of Christianity as represented in the 12 Apostles. It is about the change we are called to bring about in our whereabouts. But much of who we are now, as it was then at the time of the Apostles, will depend largely on the quality of our discipleship.

Faith is more an act of courage than it is an act of knowledge.

Martin Luther King once observed that “the only real revolutionary is a person who has nothing to lose”. Taking Peter as a case in point, when he had much to lose he did not take Jesus seriously. But in Acts we read about a Peter who had nothing to lose.

The same could be said of a Nelson Mandela in South Africa or a Gandhi in India. The more we have to lose and to rely on, the less we can be free spirits of change. Jesus as the good shepherd had nothing to lose and everyone to gain.

But today we seem to belong to a Church that still seems to have much to lose. So it is driven by fear and is reluctant to let go of its false securities. Unfortunately, it can even afford to lose people along the way because the institution comes before the people.

The times in which we live and as we live them make us constantly repeat the mistake of rejecting the stone “which has proved to be the keystone”. Rejecting the keystone creates in society at large as well as in our churches a void that generates fear and anxiety.

The imagery of ‘pastor’ and ‘shepherd’ takes us back to similar phases in Israel’s story when God’s people was disoriented and estranged from God.

The New Testament characterises the leadership of Jesus as tender and tough at the same time, mainly seeking out the lost, the least, and the last.

Today we’ve probably lost this ‘welcome’ characteristic. We tend to become more and more exclusive, forgetting that what makes the good shepherd who he is for us is the fact that he lays down his life.