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

After Christ’s death, the Apostles’ experience and conviction that he was alive translated concretely in their having the feeling that it was his Spirit that was guiding them in their adventure of building the new community. They felt strongly about this to the extent that in contrast with the old Peter, in Acts we read today about a new Peter addressing the crowd “with a loud voice”.

John, author of the mystical gospel, gives account of this same strong feeling in the first communities of Christians through the imagery of the Good Shepherd. This imagery, which is mainly about the leadership model that was to characterise the Church in time, contrasts strongly with other forms of leadership the people had experienced since old times in Judaism.

In Chapter 10 of his gospel, synonymous with the shepherd meta­phor, John creates the paradigm shift in Christian leadership that was to contrast strongly with the experience of all other forms of leadership Judaism had. Jesus, the true shepherd, unlike the false leaders compared to thieves and brigands, leads through care of the whole person. His is a leadership of service, not of power, of serving, not being served.

Already in the Old Testament the prophet Ezekiel uses the metaphor of ‘shepherd’ to reflect on the kings Jerusalem had. The prophet comes to the conclusion that exile had actually come about for Israel because of corrupt kings in Jerusalem.

Bad leadership always brings disaster. The shepherds of old had been self-indulgent, coveting the flock’s riches instead of giving heed to its needs. Bad leadership is always a disservice, particularly to the most vulnerable. The Easter journey inevitably brings us to talk about good and bad leadership. This was obligatory for early Christian communities to thrive in the midst of challenges from within and without.

It is the same today. The question of governance, particularly in these times, is crucial for the Church. The Church and society alike are at a point when we seem to be quite confused as to what really suits human dignity and what does not. We boast of specialised and abundant caring professions perceived to some extent as the backbone of society. Yet, are we really a caring society?

We do everything possible to be as inclusive as we can be. Yet we breathe a climate that is so confused and where people are still excluded, exploited, and marginalised. As today’s gospel attests, the early Church saw in Jesus someone who engaged in restorative leadership. John’s text invites a focus on leadership, for we are in an acute leadership crisis. In this general climate, can we really speak of the Church as being a truly caring Church?

We are still struggling hard to exit from a tragic and stagnant socio-political, economic crisis. That crisis did not come down from heaven taking us unawares. It was only consequent to bad politics, whereby the ‘fat and strong’ prospered at the expense of the ‘hungry sheep’.

As the biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann affirms, regulators have been deliberately asleep while the banking community and the insurance companies, in collusion with the powerful media, appropriated for themselves the maximum of resources. The result is here for everyone to behold.

In all this, even the Church, in a myriad of situations and places, has been in collusion with systems that exploited, instead of protected the most vulnerable. The Church was many a time alienated with its own survival and self-aggrandising leadership. The imagery used by Ezekiel in the Old Testament to condemn bad leadership has been perpetuated in time by a Church which struggled to save face while people were lost and disoriented in their fragility and vulnerability.

The pastoral care of people as whole persons, the cure of souls, the cura animarum, as it has always been called, has been the great task of generations of Christian leaders, be they bishops, priests or lay ministers. We need badly to recover that, because when that is lost we lose everything and the Church becomes self-referential, as Pope Francis loves to say. A Church itself disoriented is not in a position to offer orientation.

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