IN THE Bible, shepherding is nomadic. Shepherds travel in the hunt for protected pasture. It is an ancient lifestyle, affirmed by God from the start of human history (Genesis 4.4). After their expulsion from the garden, Adam and Eve provided the primary template for an itinerant existence in a mostly hostile environment. Deuteronomy confirmed the pattern with the words: “A wandering Aramean was my father” (26.5). This encapsulated the exodus experience of God’s people before their entry into the promised land.
The churches of our land appear to stand for a special way of referring to God: one which is expressed when it comes to stability and perpetuity. They strike us as enduring fixtures in landscapes that, throughout them, are changing over time. Their solidity, as stone edifices, and their size, as embodiments of the peak of heaven in solid form, incarnate the divine splendour that we associate with our heavenly Father.
I stayed within the village of Happisburgh, in Norfolk, recently. The church dominates the landscape round about. Yet coastal erosion is eating away metre after metre of the land between it and the ocean. A good looking medieval church crumbling into the North Sea and being lost for ever looks like a challenge to faith. Countless people have been christened, married, and committed to the earth there. Losing the church means counting the previous inhabitants as belonging to the category of those that “have develop into as if they’d never been born, they and their children after them” (Sirach 44.9).
The Bible bears witness to the human hunger to be remembered, whether through deeds or heirs, and to avoid the last word destination of “a land where all things are forgotten” (Psalm 88.12, Coverdale). This hunger is the shadow forged by our have to seek security in our earthly life, and to be remembered afterwards. So, we search for signs that oblivion shouldn’t be our destiny. That is true of each our natural selves and our spiritual selves.
I even have said before that churches are icons of divine eternity. They draw us to worship, because they surround us with the presence of the past: with memorials naming those whose memory and posterity have faded into the dust; with the “silent music” of wood that bears tool-marks made by long-departed hands; and with smooth depressions in ancient stones marking the forgotten feet that wore them down.
If even the best monuments to our devotion are passing shadows, mere flowers of grass in wood and stone (1 Peter 1.24), what can the Good Shepherd do to reassure us? This Fourth Sunday of Easter goes back into Jesus’s teaching ministry before his resurrection, to assist us to grasp that resurrection. This Gospel is supposed to show us what’s trustworthy and what shouldn’t be, as Jesus contrasts our everlasting refuge — himself — with two sorts of danger.
There is the wolf: an enemy by nature, not neglect or malice, representing existential threats equivalent to sickness or poverty. And there’s the hired hand, outwardly resembling the shepherd, but, in point of fact, inferior. The hired hand is the more insidious threat, representing a false version of the shepherd.
“Devouring time and jealous age”, the poet Ovid says, “destroy all things, gnawing and grinding down, slowly consuming totality in death.” If church buildings — often the oldest visible human constructions we all know — may be devoured by time, that doesn’t mean that they haven’t any value. If they’re icons, then, by definition, they will not be precisely the thing which they represent. No metaphor or analogy gives an ideal correspondence: we will not be at risk of seeing an actual shepherd and mistaking them for Christ the Good Shepherd!
Our true foundation is not any man-made edifice: it’s a being — a being begotten by love and, for love’s sake, willing to die. Instead of pondering of church buildings as everlasting, we must always see them as parables, standing for the “many dwelling places” in our Father’s house (John 14.2) and for the sheepfold (John 10.1). As parables, they provide us insight into true eternity, just because the Good Shepherd is a parable to show us of divine guidance and protection.
The Greek ho poimen ho kalos means “the nice shepherd”, but it could possibly even be translated as “the attractive shepherd”. Not even the world’s loveliest churches are more beautiful or more lasting than Christ, who, by his resurrection, has been “made the sure foundation”.
