Over the centuries many people have been tempted to separate out the spiritual from the everyday, the earthly from the heavenly.
Some have found it difficult to accept that the Doctrine of the Incarnation means quite literally that Jesus experienced every aspect of human life we do ourselves, from the wonderful to the mundane.
The first century Docetists took this furthest, by proclaiming that Jesus’ physical body was simply an illusion, and that he was in fact purely spirit and only appeared to suffer and die on the Cross.
Their heresy is strongly refuted in the Creed when we say together, “He was made Man.”
On the other hand, one continues to meet many people today who are prepared to see Jesus as a great human being, they will follow his example, his morals and his teaching, but draw the line at accepting that he was truly the Incarnate Son of God.
But the Christian understanding and belief has always been that he is both: the earthly Jesus, who went about among us, and the Risen Christ, who has ascended to his Father in heaven.
He is both fully human and fully divine.
Today’s Collect in the Prayer Book makes it quite clear that in the aftermath of Easter, we are still to remember and to emulate Jesus’ human presence on earth, and not just remember him in terms of the sacrifice and victory of the Cross.
We are reminded that he was given “to be unto us both a sacrifice for sin, and also an ensample of godly life”, and the Collect reiterates that we should “daily endeavour ourselves to follow the blessed steps of his most holy life.”
It is always a risk during Eastertide that we fix our eyes on the glory of the Risen Christ, waiting to ascend into the clouds to his Father, and begin to forget the more earthly character who shared our joys and sorrows, and who taught his followers using the most ordinary language, and images taken from familiar everyday life.
Our Gospel reading this morning, is an example of one such image – Jesus relates himself to the role of the shepherd – a familiar figure in first-century Galilee.
He uses the example of the hired shepherd who flees, abandoning his flock when danger approaches, in contrast with the shepherd who owns the sheep and so stays to care for them and protect them no matter what.
No doubt the unreliability of hireling shepherds would have been a familiar conversation amongst farmers, along the lines of “you can’t get the staff these days”, so in comparing himself with the real shepherd who was truly responsible for his sheep, Jesus would have been tapping directly into an image which evoked immediate recognition.
This is not the spoken imagery of someone who was entirely spirit, but of someone fully engaged with the real issues of everyday life.
But I was struck by another example of this divide between spiritual and earthly when I read the King James translation of the final verse in our Epistle reading:
“For ye were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.”
When my mind registered my image of the Bishop of London, resplendent and awe-inspiring as he preached at the Royal Wedding, and set it against the somewhat grubby and sullen shepherds we saw on the hillsides in Greece last year, and who reminded me strongly of Biblical shepherds, there seemed to be a disconnect between the two terms.
When I checked the Greek, Peter does indeed use the word “episkopos”, generally translated as Bishop or overseer, but more modern Bible translations tend to offer the phrase “shepherd and guardian of your souls.”
Is this because we have turned the spiritual office of Bishop into something so removed and unrecognisable from its original function that we would no longer recognise the imagery Peter is trying to use?
The shepherd’s crook, though retained as a symbol of office for a Bishop, is generally ornate and gilded, and much of the connection may no longer be evident.
Perhaps, like those who originally refused to accept that Jesus was fully human, as they preferred to keep their deities in a more spiritual realm, so people became reluctant to identify the Bishops who led their church, and represented the authority of Christ and his Church, with the everyday image of the shepherd.
And yet, we are reminded by this older, more literal translation, that the term episokopos does signify someone who is responsible for his flock, in the same way that the true shepherd, as opposed to the hired one, remains responsible to the end for his sheep.
In Christ, these two images are drawn together: the splendour of the Bishop, who represents Christ’s church, with the everyday care and responsibility of the good shepherd.
We are reminded that the Incarnate God is present with us in every aspect of our lives, even those which seem mundane or insignificant, and we are called in all these aspects to follow his “ensample of godly life.