I’m glad we’re not yet being kept away from church by fear of the swine flu. How quickly this threat came to dominate people’s minds this week. Even the Church of England which is not known for its swift responses sent round its emergency procedures briefing on Friday afternoon. But I have to admit I remain sceptical about whether they will be necessary. It may be that this episode won’t be like the other false alarms we’ve had recently: CJD, SARS and bird flu. Perhaps this will turn out to be a proper pandemic (there must be one sooner or later) and that’s obviously nothing to be trivial about, particularly for the young and elderly.
But I can’t help feeling that we get so carried away with this kind of scare because it taps into some of our more deep-seated fears about the fragility of social order and more particularly about the threats posed to us by encountering other people in a large and complex society like ours. It encourages that isolationist instinct within us to think that the best means of self-preservation is to stockpile and batten down the hatches.
And that’s an instinct our society has, not just in relation to health scares like this, but in a more generalised fear of the Other, as we live our often atomised lives, avoiding encounters with our neighbours and practising the general principle, to quote the Parable of the Good Samaritan, of passing by on the other side of the street. Swine flu just adds to our sense of fear about others and our sense of the risk involved in encountering them. One philosopher puts it like this:
Today’s liberal tolerance towards others, in respect of otherness and openness towards it, is counterpointed by an obsessive fear of harassment. In short, the Other is just fine, but only insofar as his presence is not intrusive, insofar as this Other is not really other… (Slavoj Zizek, Violence, 2009)
The words of Jesus we heard from John’s Gospel, describing himself as the good Shepherd, point to a very different way of relating to people. Our empathy within the parable is probably for the hired hand who represents a great deal of our contemporary mode of relating to others. He has a strong sense of professional distance; they’re not his sheep, he’s there to do a job. He’s not got a stake in the situation so he’s not going to stick his neck out when things get risky. He is, no doubt, very good with the sheep when everything is going fine. But when the wolf comes along, they can fend for themselves.
That sense of alienation from other people has become very normalised in our culture and can be seen in many ways from the very minor antisocial discourtesies like the tinny music emanating from other people’s headphones on the bus, to the more serious absences of compassion, such as the shameful neglect of elderly people in need of care by relatives, neighbours and professionals. It’s very usual for people to really go out of their way for others who they don’t know well and it’s always so touching when strangers are kind in that way. Thank goodness we all probably have some examples of that too.
The Shepherd has none of this distance. He’s there with the sheep through thick and thin. In this parable the good Shepherd begins to value the flourishing and well-being of his flock as much as he values his own life. And he is prepared to stake everything on their survival, even lay down his own life. His mode of relating is totally selfless; it’s one of radical self-giving.
The good Shepherd, of course, is Jesus. So perhaps we needn’t get to carried away here. Doesn’t Jesus, after all, lay down his life for rather more complex metaphysical reasons than we need be concerned with in our own relations with other people? Well, John the Evangelist doesn’t think so. In his subsequent letter he refers back to these verses about the good Shepherd:
We know love by this, that he lay down his life for us – and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?
So following Christ does mean engaging with others at a deeper level than has become usual for our society, particularly in terms of sharing the world’s goods, material and otherwise. And that begins with a shift in thinking, a shift in relation. It involves the shift from being a hired hand to becoming a good Shepherd. In other words, baptism, as I hope Xavier and Kalyan will grow up to discover, does involve shifting out of our comfort zones of isolation into that risky business of engaging with other people. The reason for that is in this passage too: baptism is the sign of God’s desire that there should be one flock. That’s not just a statement about Church unity. It expresses the will of God that, for all of humankind, difference should be the basis of a fundamental unity and not a fragmenting division. As well as an aspiration for the Church in its own order and as a basis for sharing its own resources, that is the driving ethos behind the whole life of the church: to gather people together, not on the basis of their sameness but through an engagement with the Other as truly other, that is as irresolvably different from ourselves. That is the challenge and the risk of baptism, not to shy away from people who we find difficult and strange, or (more commonly in church life) people who we think are wrong, but to recognise our own stake in that person’s flourishing and well-being.
That is always a risky business. It is unlikely to be risky for our health. Although, if we did see a flu pandemic over the next few months, there would be some real and challenging questions about who would be prepared to minister to those people and put their own health on the line. But more commonly, the risks involved in engaging with others who are different are the more banal ones of irritation and frustration, boredom and disinterest, in the sense that our time is being wasted or we feel we ought to deserve better.
But as we patiently and prayerfully get on with that baptismal task of seeing all people as our neighbours (even our sisters and brothers), I believe that we are challenged in our prejudices and given radical glimpses of glory. I know that in my years as an active member of the church, the encounters I have had with some of the least likely people have proven to me the enduring wisdom of the prophecy that Peter quotes to the high and mighty of Jerusalem, that “the stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone”. That’s the scriptural equivalent of saying “don’t judge a book by its cover”. And I thank God for the privilege of being a baptised Christian and for being a member of this glorious and sometimes crazy institution into which Xavier and Kalyan are received today: the Church of Jesus Christ, in which difference leads to unity, and strangers are made into a family.
Thanks be to God.