The Good Shepherd abandons their flock for any sheep...

Eric Gill: The Good Shepherd

It was the first real supervision with one of my field placement supervisors in seminary. To be clear we had met before but this was the first time when we had built up enough trust that he could start being honest and I would listen.  The conversation was about preaching in specific, but ministry in general. My supervisor explained how week after week the gospel presented a reality that struck home to their reality as a parent in a mixed-race household. That it was more often than not that it was in this place the pertinent questions and movements of the Spirit would first be recognized.  My supervisor then looked at me and noted that it was very easy to confuse the movement of the Gospel with what it initial stirs up in oneself. The challenge then, to me, was to learn to differentiate between what the Gospel stirs up in me, in my context as a gay male struggling for an end to the oppression of the LGBTQ+ community, and the actual primal universal movement of the Gospel. This is, in the end, the difference between being a hired hand and a good shepherd.

The Gospel sets the prisoner free. Any one caught up in the process that frees an individual or group from the prison of oppression and abuse is caught up in the Gospel Work. The trap, however, is that it is too easy for all of us to not see beyond the walls of our own prisons. We mistake the work of the Gospel to be the freeing of ourselves and those like us from the prison in which we find ourselves… and not recognize that our own liberation, and those like us, is only the small place where we encounter the Gospel Work that is so much greater than any one specific struggle, no matter how pertinent and requisite it is for our time.  

Any struggle we are taking up, be it our own or that of another, is an icon into the reality of the Gospel Work towards the full harmony of creation with the creator. The difference between an icon and an idol at any point is a tenuous one at best. Too readily we can make a specific struggle the begin all and end all of our considerations of the Gospel and forgo the actual alpha and omega, Jesus Christ. Too readily we can be interested in saving our own skins and letting the wolf take the sheep.  Too readily we can fail to see how our flight to safety leaves other shepherds and other flocks ready prey for the wolves. Too readily we can seek to trip up other shepherds and close the gate on other flocks to ensure the safety of our own. Too readily we can mistake another shepherd or flock as a pack of wolves.

The hired hand abandons the flock for personal safety… the Good Shepherd abandons the flock to stand between sheep, regardless of flock, and wolves. Too readily we become hired hands, seeking to save our own skin, or shepherds seeking only to save our own flock. Too rarely do we model the Good Shepherd and place aside our own skin, stand for more than our own flock, and are truly prepared to place ourselves on the line for any sheep caught in the sight of any wolf.