Sunday Sermon 4/29/12

Today's is the Good Shepherd gospel. It is a strange one that implies that the world of the sheep with the Good Shepherd is one without the sacrifice or the slaughterhouse. The sheep, usually destined for someone else's belly, is immortal.

Many victims of violent crimes or accidents  are taught to create a mental distinction between their body, abused or damaged, and their person, their selves. They often speak with the peculiar distance of "the leg was damaged," or "the man then attacked the body." It is never "me" or "my", but rather the corporeal has been made abstracted from the personal, as if the victim is remembering it in an uninvolved way, from afar.

This, of course, is unreal; it is a learned psychological trick to distance the person from his wounds, to protect him in a sort of set-aside integrity. What Christ says in the gospel today is even stranger and more powerful. He says His life was "put down" and could be "picked up." Like a separate thing. Life is a separate thing, like a tool or a cause to be shouldered or not, to be adopted or not. He is not separating the corporal from the spiritual, He is defining life as an aspect of the many facets of human experience and existence. Amazingly, life is not integral to us.

Anymore than the slaughter is integral to the sheep.