“Shepherd” is a word that, in its original sense, belongs to the field of animal husbandry. Applies to those who care for small livestock such as sheep and goats. They are animals to be guided to pasture and water; to be gathered at night in the corral; to be protected from predators and thieves. That is the image that since Old Testament times the prophets chose to designate those who were responsible for the welfare of God’s people: kings and other rulers. When the prophet Jeremiah complains about the evil shepherds who scatter the people of Israel, he is referring to the kings and rulers of the house of David who ruled in Jerusalem guided by political calculation rather than as God’s lieutenants. For the supreme shepherd is God, as the responsorial psalm says: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; he makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters.”
The image, however, has as a counterpart that the people are compared to sheep in a flock. The comparison is uncomfortable for us today; the image hurts our sense of autonomy, self-sufficiency, independence and freedom. We can tolerate the image if the shepherd is God, especially if he is God as we imagine him, as it suits us and as we like him; not so much if it is God as he is. But today many question the authority of the pastor, if he is a human being who represents God and acts in his name. Therefore, a starting point for today’s reflection is in what Christian sense we human beings are dependent on God’s shepherding, including the shepherding that God does through the men whom He appoints as shepherds.
The purpose of God’s shepherding is that we men may have life. The Old Testament was about life in this world in peaceful coexistence, in justice and truth. God is the shepherd who will guide his people instead of negligent rulers. Human beings still live today affected by multiple temporary shortages. Many suffer from hunger and disease, poverty and exclusion, lack of opportunity and frustration. The solution to these deficiencies and needs lies in the hands of man. Politics and economics are the sciences and the art that allow us to at least mitigate them, if not solve them. But we need the ethical and moral motivation to solve them.
But there are two other needs, which affect our temporal life, which we cannot solve and which do not allow us to live in fullness; they are temporal needs, whose solution is transcendent, because it comes from God. Death as the inexorable end of life questions its meaning. Why live if we have to die? In our times, in many places, people suffer from the meaninglessness of life to such a degree that, when the amenities that make it tolerable, such as health, work, affection, are lacking, they choose suicide as the end of a life that is no longer worth living. We need a shepherd, we depend on a shepherd. It is Jesus Christ who, by becoming man, suffers our death and overcomes it by resurrection, and thus opens for us horizons of hope. Those of us who unite ourselves to Him through faith and the sacraments can glimpse that we will also overcome our death thanks to Him, and from that horizon of eternity we give meaning to our temporal life. “Though I walk through dark glens I fear nothing, for thou art with me.” Only in openness to transcendence does human life have a consistent meaning and a firm purpose in the face of death.
There is a second need that only God can solve. We are free, but our freedom in this world needs lights to guide us to make constructive choices and decisions. We often discover that we have acted destructively against ourselves and have harmed our neighbor, our family, our society. How can someone rectify their past so that it does not mortgage their future? Only the love of God, the forgiveness of God, manifested in the death of Christ on the cross, is capable of healing, remedying, deactivating a more or less iniquitous past, making it possible to live in a constructive way a future open to eternity in God.
But Jesus Christ exercises this shepherding through men whom he has constituted in the Church as his representatives. A constitutive element of the Church is the sacrament of Holy Orders. By that sacrament Jesus Christ established that men would communicate the life-giving Holy Spirit, transmit his word and the doctrine of the faith, celebrate the life-giving sacraments and govern his Church. The pastors of the Church, bishops and priests, are fragile, sinful, limited men. We may fail to fulfill our mission as much as the ancient kings of Israel failed to fulfill theirs. Therefore, again and again we must look to the shepherd Jesus Christ who is our model and correct ourselves and grow in order to exercise this ministry that has been entrusted to us in such a way that our actions make transparent the shepherding of Jesus Christ.
Today’s Gospel passage offers us a profound reflection. Jesus has sent his apostles alone, two by two, to do what they have seen Jesus do, in a kind of supervised professional exercise. They return happy with their experience and tell Jesus all they have done. Jesus then invites them to a rest: “Come with me to a solitary place, that you may rest a while.” But when they arrive at the supposedly solitary place, they find it full of people who, sensing where Jesus was going, have gone ahead of him to get there before him. One would expect Jesus to reproach the people for not having a little consideration to let them rest a little. No. And when Jesus came ashore, he saw a great multitude waiting for him, and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and he began to teach them many things. On the one hand, the evangelist highlights how these people and we too long for the word that illuminates our lives, the grace that strengthens our steps, the love of God that opens horizons of eternity; but, on the other hand, he also highlights the patience of Jesus, his compassion and dedication, who sets aside his personal plans of rest, to attend to the multitude that demands his attention. A model for us pastors today, and for all of us who have a mission in the Church in the name of Jesus.