Christian Art | Jesus Christ The Good Shepherd
Office Of Readings | Week 25, Wednesday, Ordinary Time | From The Sermon Of Saint Augustine On The Shepherds | Do What They Say, Not What They Do
‘Do whatever they tell you, but do not follow what they do.’
Saint Augustine addresses the duty of pastors to speak the truth even when that truth provokes resistance, and he warns the flock to distinguish between authoritative teaching and faulty example. He draws on Ezekiel’s imagery of negligent shepherds and on the watchman motif (Ezekiel 3:17–21): a pastor who fails to warn sinners bears responsibility for their ruin; a pastor who speaks the prophetic word but the people ignore it has done his duty.
Two related points run through the passage. First, silence in the face of sin exposes the community to harm and transfers culpability to those charged with warning. The pastor’s role includes announcing God’s judgment when necessary; refusing that task risks the spiritual death of those neglected. Second, Augustine insists that the flock must obey the teaching even when the teacher’s life falls short. He formulates this as a practical rule: ‘Do whatever they tell you, but do not follow what they do.’ The words of Scripture and the instruction of God, mediated through ministers, retain authority independent of the minister’s personal conduct.
Augustine’s solution to the problem of bad leadership is twofold. Where leaders fail, God will reassign the flock to shepherds who will serve properly; meanwhile the people must hold to Scripture and the truth it contains. The distinction between teaching and example preserves both the authority of the apostolic word and the accountability of ministers for their lives. The passage integrates pastoral responsibility, the duty to warn, and the imperative for the faithful to live by God’s commands regardless of human failing.
From The Sermon Of Saint Augustine On The Shepherds | Do What They Say, Not What They Do
Shepherds, hear the word of the Lord. But what are the shepherds to hear? Thus says the Lord God: Behold I myself am over the shepherds, and I will claim my sheep from their hands.
Hear and learn, you sheep of God. God calls for an accounting of his sheep from the wicked shepherds and inquires into the death of his sheep at their hands. For in another passage he speaks through the same prophet: Son of man, I have appointed you a watchman for the house of Israel. You shall hear the word from my mouth and you shall point out the way to them in my name. When I say to the sinner: You shall die, and you do not speak to warn the wicked man from his wicked way, because of his wickedness he shall die, but you shall be held responsible for his death. If, however, you warn the wicked man to turn away from his wickedness, and he fails to do so, he shall die in his iniquity, but you shall have saved your soul.
Dear brothers, what does this mean? Do you see how dangerous it is to keep silent? The sinner dies and rightly so; he dies in his wickedness and in his sin, for his failure to heed you has killed him. He could have found the Lord, the living shepherd who says: I live. But he was heedless; and the one appointed for this task, the watchman, did not warn him. The wicked one then justly suffers death and the watchman rightly suffers damnation. But the Lord says, if you say to the wicked man: You shall surely die, and if he fails to heed the sword of judgment with which I have threatened him, that sword will overtake and kill him, and he will die in his sin; but you will have saved your soul. Therefore it is our task not to keep silent, and it is your task, even if we ourselves are silent, to hear the words of the shepherd from the Scriptures.
I have said that he will take the sheep from the bad shepherds and give them to shepherds who are good. Let us consider whether he does so. I see him taking the seep from the bad shepherds, when he says: Behold, I myself am over the shepherds, and I will claim my sheep from their hands; and I will turn away from them so that they may not pasture my sheep and the shepherds shall no longer give pasture. For when I say: ‘Let them pasture my sheep,’ they give pasture to themselves and not to my sheep. Therefore I will turn away from them so that they may not pasture my sheep.
How does the Lord turn away from them to keep them from pasturing his sheep? Do whatever they tell you, but do not follow what they do. It is as if he said: ‘The words they say are mine, but their deeds are their own.’ If you do not follow the example of the bad shepherds, they are not giving you pasture. But if you do what they say, it is I who am feeding you.
Christian Prayer With Jesus Christ
Lord God,
you call your servants to speak your truth and to care for your flock.
Give courage to those who warn and teach,
and grant discernment to the people that they may follow your word even when leaders fall short.
Bring to your Church pastors who will feed the sheep in your name,
and keep us all faithful to the instruction of your Gospel.
Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Glossary Of Christian Terms
Watchman – Scriptural image (Ezekiel 3:17–21) for a person appointed to warn others of danger; Augustine applies it to pastoral duty.
Pastor / Shepherd – Church leaders entrusted with teaching, warning and caring for the faithful.
‘Do whatever they tell you, but do not follow what they do’ – Augustine’s summary: accept the teaching given through ministers, but do not imitate their faults.
Turning away (of the Lord) – God’s removal of pastoral authority from those who serve self-interest rather than the flock (cf. Ezekiel 34).
Accountability – The obligation of pastors to give an account for their stewardship before God; failure to warn the wicked implicates the watchman.
Sometimes, when I read my Bible, I pause in the reading and say to myself: ‘This bit’s real.’ It would be fair to say, I have issues with Mary, because, contrary to what we are taught to say, Mary isn’t my mother. Rather: Mum is. One bit of the Bible-text says this: And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for people were saying, “He is beside himself.” … And his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside they sent to him and called him. And a crowd was sitting about him; and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers are outside, asking for you.” And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking around on those who sat about him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.” (Mark 3: 21; 31-35.) Here she comes. She is in considerable distress. I can imagine that. I can relate to that. To save her boy from whatever he’s got himself into this time. And you’re not telling me there isn’t something inside that. Her boy is beside himself. Radical. Radicalized. Radicalizing. A misunderstood word. /ˈradɪk(ə)l/ adjective & noun. 1 Forming the root, basis, or foundation; original, primary. 2a Inherent in the nature of a thing or person; fundamental. b Of action, change, an idea: going to the root or origin; far-reaching, thorough. c Advocating thorough or far-reaching change. d Characterized by departure from tradition; progressive; unorthodox. ‘He has a demon! And he is mad!’ – thus ‘the Jews’. (e.g. John 10: 20.) Come home! It’s all she wants. His family want him back now. But it is an exclusive cult: there is an inside and there is an outside; and on the outside, they are not meant to understand, lest they be converted. He has defined himself as different from anything she was. Only at the end does Jesus say to his Mum – and with savage, bitter irony: ‘Woman, behold your son.’ And then he dies. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. We ask that we might find Mary in our hearts as a Yes! place for Jesus. It is also recommended that we pray to Jesus that we may be further in oneness with Mary. It is self-emptying, such that we only exist insofar as we are responsive to God’s Word. * Last term, and put-out to pasture, the old Archbishop Emeritus came over to stay for a few days and did the odd class with us. He spoke of Yes! as the meaning of Mary’s virginity. And we were not very nice about him. One or two took umbrage. One or two got the hump. In a sense, his Grace, the Arch, basically wanted to move anyone he’d ever known from a high-place – a mountain – received theological ‘truth’ – to an imminent, human plane. Earthing the spiritual. Recalibrating metrics of life’s believability toward a spiritual sense of things. He might have asked the impermissible question: what happened? His Grace described it. God’s love as a cloud. This descended upon Mary – and subsumed her. Within the cloud, Mary capitulated utterly. She became only and purely a response to God’s love. As he spoke, the Arch cradled her. He carried her in his lap – in his hands. His Grace was a consecrated bishop. He was faith. He sat squat, a rounded man, hands cupped and ankles crossed, fingers interlocked, with parted thighs. Rumpled, washed, speckled. A lifetime’s skin… There could be no doubt His Grace spoke through long-term personal relationship with Mary. It was Julian went for him: ‘So are you saying Mary was a Virgin? Or are you not saying Mary was a Virgin?’ Nasty. No, it wasn’t pretty. Julian twisting his silver ring. For a moment, what Julian had said to the Arch simply failed to communicate. No, for a moment, that dumped on the air meant nothing. Then His Grace said: ‘There is a range of possible meanings we may understand in the question of Mary’s virginity. For example, there are understandings of the word virginity entailed in the action of giving birth.’ Julian said: ‘Duh! So had she had sex or hadn’t she?’ Trigger words. No, it wasn’t pretty. On that went for a little while. At length, Julian’s point seemed reluctantly conceded. Then the Arch told us a new story, an additionally human event, the more to baffle us. Controversially, he told us that Mary could not have been Joseph’s first wife, for this would not have been the way of things in the society of that time. His belief was that Joseph must have taken Mary into his household through pity. That would be normal, he said, for Joseph to bring a young, vulnerable girl, who is about to have a baby, within his protection, not meaning to enjoy with her marital relations, but through kindness. ‘And this story of the inn and stable,’ the Archbishop said, ‘it can’t have been like that really. Joseph has travelled with Mary to stay with his family, at home in Bethlehem, and they don’t want Mary in their house, for reasons which I am sure we can understand. It must have been there was considerable resistance to Mary. But Mary gives birth, and who can resist a baby? That’s what happened. It must have been. ‘I’m convinced that must have been how it happened really.’ Later that term, toward the beginning of Advent, we met boys who had been here before, in Valladolid, and now were in regular seminary. They had heard and recited verbatim all the Archbishop had said to them. Their spot-on impressions of each of the fathers were scathing. […]
Saint Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, was being transported to Rome under guard to face execution in the Coliseum, likely in the early second century. His letters, written on the way, reflect both his apostolic zeal and a deep concern for the life of the Church in its earliest decades. His correspondent, Saint Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, was himself a revered figure, a disciple of Saint John the Apostle, and later a martyr. Thus, this is a remarkable exchange: from one soon-to-be martyr to another, entrusted with the care of the flock in perilous times [ … ]
This reading is drawn from one of the Festal Letters of Saint Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296–373). Each year, the bishop of Alexandria would issue a letter announcing the date of Easter and offering reflections on its theological and spiritual meaning. These letters were deeply pastoral in tone and also rich in doctrinal teaching, reinforcing central truths of Christian faith [ … ]
