Our Lovely Oblivions, A Life Beautifully Laid Down
Below is an excerpt from a piece on the Gospel passage on Jesus’ Good Shepherd discourse, published by the Evangelical Alliance’s Ethos (readers might also know EA through its more popular magazine Zadok). I had the chance to write for Ethos back in 2015 on Silence as a Luxury Item, and I am glad to have another piece up there. My thanks to Armen Gakavian who codirects the neighbourhood resilience resource Neighbourhood Matters with his wife, Karina. You can read the whole article by clicking the link at the bottom of the post.
Pop culture is strewn with the dead. Its consumers do not seem to have enough of them. These deaths range from the gratuitous deaths of extras in horror movies, to heroes who die saving someone in distress, to ordinary souls who become heroes by facing up to the awful reality of their death. The question we must ask is why we place such cultural investment with death. Does death hold something we wish to tap into over and over again?
We can find a hint of an answer in John 10, where we read Jesus’s discourse to the Pharisees on the characteristics of a shepherd that a flock is willing to listen to, and the places through which the sheep should go to be assured safe passage and protection from those who kill and destroy. In the first ten verses of this chapter, we see Jesus speak of himself as that place that assures safe passage and lives lived to the full.
When we get to verse 11, the procession of pastoral allegories reaches its crescendo. Jesus identifies himself with the shepherd and — so we read in the English translations — a good one at that. Not just any good shepherd, but the good shepherd. The definite article in the English translation adds a subtle yet provocative edge to Jesus’s claim. His goodness as a shepherd is the gold standard that defines the goodness of other shepherds. Furthermore, the defining characteristic of the goodness of a shepherd is found in the next clause in the verse: the capacity to lay down his own life for his sheep.
For readers of the English translation, it is very easy to read this verse of the Good Shepherd in moral terms. Goodness is defined in terms of right behavior, and the behavior expected is the selfless laying down of one's life for others. The reader might hear the imperative to stop thinking of oneself and do something for others, even if it kills you, just as Jesus would have done. (This imperative would probably be brought home with varying degrees of intensity.)
This moral reading of the Scripture passage is valid, but alone it does not capture the full breadth of its meaning. In particular, though this reading could give some direction to the reader in terms of reorienting his or her actions away from the self towards the other, on its own, at least from the standpoint of this reader, it might not supply the incentive that would motivate the reader to take that all-important first step out of oneself towards the other.
I propose that another reading of the Good Shepherd discourse is possible, one that might address the limitations of a purely moral reading. It takes as its starting point the Greek reading: poimen kalos, where the ‘good shepherd’ is read as the ‘beautiful shepherd’.
It must be noted that this turn towards beauty does not negate the goodness of the shepherd. Rather, pivoting the reading towards beauty…
