Christian Art | Jesus Christ Is The True Shepherd
Office Of Readings | Week 25, Monday, Ordinary Time | From The Sermon Of Saint Augustine On The Shepherds | Be Urgent In Season, Out Of Season
‘Welcome or unwelcome, insist upon the message.’
Saint Augustine confronts the pastor’s duty to seek those who stray and to call back the lost, even when that task is resisted or resented. He frames the obligation in stark terms: sheep wander; wolves and robbers threaten; the shepherd must go after the weak and the scattered. The passage presses a practical point about pastoral courage. The preacher must ‘preach the word; insist upon it’ (cf. 2 Timothy 4:2) whether the hearers welcome or reject it.
Two lines of thought run through the text. First, Augustine rejects any pastoral posture that prefers comfort or popularity to the care of souls. If a flock is neglected because its members are insolent or ungrateful, the danger is not to the pastor’s reputation but to the sheep themselves and, by extension, to the whole community. Second, he underlines the connective risk: neglecting the straying and the lost endangers even the strong. The moral contagion of wandering behaviour can spread; a shepherd who fails to act risks greater damage than the immediate cost of effort.
Augustine couches his insistence in the language of accountability. The pastor does his work before Christ’s judgment-seat; obedience to that summons takes precedence over human disapproval. The image of forcing through brambles and hedges conveys the persistence required: searching must be strenuous and thorough. This reading completes the Ezekiel motif that runs through the sermon On Pastors: pastoral office is service that seeks the welfare of the flock, not self-enrichment or ease.
From The Sermon Of Saint Augustine On The Shepherds | Be Urgent In Season, Out Of Season
The straying sheep you have not recalled; the lost sheep you have not sought. In one way or another, we go on living between the hands of robbers and the teeth of raging wolves, and in light of these present dangers we ask your prayers. The sheep moreover are insolent. The shepherd seeks out the straying sheep, but because they have wandered away and are lost they say that they are not ours. ‘ Why do you want us? Why do you seek us?’ they ask, as if their straying and being lost were not the very reason for our wanting them and seeking them out. ‘If I am straying,’ he says, ‘if I am lost, why do you want me?’ You are straying, that is why I wish to recall you. You have been lost, I wish to find you. ‘But I wish to stray,’ he says: ‘I wish to be lost.’
So you wish to stray and be lost? How much better that I do not also wish this. Certainly, I dare say, I am unwelcome. But I listen to the Apostle who says: Preach the word; insist upon it, welcome and unwelcome. Welcome to whom? Unwelcome to whom? By all means welcome to those who desire it; unwelcome to those who do not. However unwelcome, I dare to say: ‘You wish to stray, you wish to be lost; but I do not want this.’ For the one whom I fear does not wish this. And should I wish it, consider his words of reproach: The straying sheep you have not recalled; the lost sheep you have not sought. Shall I fear you rather than him? Remember, we must all present ourselves before the judgement seat of Christ.
I shall recall the straying; I shall seek the lost. Whether they wish it or not, I shall do it. And should the brambles of the forests tear at me when I seek them, I shall force myself through all straits; I shall put down all hedges. So far as the God whom I fear grants me the strength, I shall search everywhere. I shall recall the straying; I shall seek after those on the verge of being lost. If you do not want me to suffer, do not stray, do not become lost. It is enough that I lament your straying and loss. No, I fear that in neglecting you, I shall also kill what is strong. Consider the passage that follows: And what was strong you have destroyed. Should I neglect the straying and lost, the strong one will also take delight in straying and in being lost.
Christian Prayer With Jesus Christ
Lord Jesus, Good Shepherd,
grant to those who tend your flock the courage to seek the lost,
and the patience to call back the straying.
Keep us from indifference and from putting comfort before care.
May your ministers persist in the work of mercy,
and may every wandering heart find its way home.
You live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever. Amen.
Glossary Of Christian Terms
Shepherd / Sheep – Traditional pastoral imagery: shepherds are leaders (bishops, priests), sheep the faithful entrusted to them.
Straying / Lost – Those who abandon regular life in the Church or are separated by sin or indifference.
‘Preach the word; insist upon it’ – A summons taken from Paul (2 Timothy 4:2) that Augustine applies to persistent proclamation, whether it is welcomed or not.
Brambles and hedges – Metaphors for obstacles the pastor must penetrate in the effort to reach those who are distant from the Church.
Judgement-seat of Christ – A reminder of the pastor’s final accountability to Christ for the care of the flock (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:10).
Ezekiel 34 – Scriptural source for Augustine’s critique of negligent shepherds and his model of pastoral responsibility.
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‘Death,’ says His Grace, ‘throws it all apart. For we are not as we should be. Faith requires our adjustment to God’s truth. God’s triumph in a very real sense requires in us the loss of our everything. Which, as with Mary at the other end of Jesus’s life, is God’s truth.’ The Gospel reading is of John 11: 1-45, which is a long passage, and His Grace’s homiletic theme commences in textual wilderness. Our brokenness – in this place – a family home. Our faith, our doubt, our death… The irruption – death, doubt, fear – within our precious scenes and our most intimate places. Our domesticity. His Grace speaks from the chair, as is a bishop’s prerogative, and says: ‘So much is obscure in the Gospels. We’re always reaching through them. We’re never there. Really, we never are. Our knowledge, our understanding, of the Gospels is never complete, and with each reading comes a new revelation. There are always new riches there. Just as there are between all of us, between myself and you. The Gospels are living texts. This is a part of the conversation we have with our own Christianity. It is a part of who we are in our relationship with Jesus. We are in this sense always on the brink. ‘So yes, there is plenty that doesn’t seem to make sense. As one of the order of bishops, we would be lying if we said that weren’t the case. They are not easy texts to encounter, if by that word we may signify something more than a superficial glancing off against, but rather a profound search for the word of God. The Gospels are written by people who had their own ideas, and often didn’t know what had really happened. Luke is quite explicit on this point. His is an investigation, from the explicitly claimed point of view of an historian, rather than that of a first-hand witness, who attempts, so he says, to set out an orderly account, out of the chaos, the sheer muddle, that has been handed down to him. 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We are to ride into Jerusalem in triumph, and then we are to be utterly broken, all hope gone, our hope extinguished. And really, I suggest to you, it is only by inhabiting this thought, as if we don’t know Easter is there, that our new life can follow, just when we have given up all hope, when every promise that Jesus made to us seems to have been cancelled. ‘And here now we have the story of Lazarus. I should like to suggest to you that we have a very powerful call now. In our very comfortable space, our domesticity, with all this comfort, where so very little might seem to happen each day, so it might seem to you, there is a disturbance within all of this comfort, and that is a disturbance within ourselves, and that is our call to Jesus. I think it is correct to say that our most comfortable places break in the light of Jesus from the inside, in order that we may take the necessary steps to be with Jesus. ‘Faith is not comfortable. I think that we can all receive the message of the rolling away of the rock from the tomb of Lazarus to say something of vital importance to ourselves concerning our openness to God’s love. The rock we roll away can come in all sorts of guises, but we know when we are blocked, and I firmly believe if we are truthful then we know where those blocks might be. ‘Next Sunday, which will be Palm Sunday, we process as it were to Jerusalem, to begin our Holy Week. Now as I speak to you we are on the brink. Even now, I suggest it might be very good for all of us to lay aside what we think we know, to fall apart a little, and so […]
