Pastoral Michael Morton explores how the metaphor of the shepherd and his sheep has been used to support both an ‘anti-establishment’ and an ‘authoritarian’ view of Christianity.
In English writing and drama, there was once a great fashion for the pastoral. It lasted from the Tudor age and the Renaissance until deep into the eighteenth century. All the same, it had little to do with real country life or with sheep-rearing. Its purpose was really to re-create the literature and the vanished rural idylls of Ancient Greece and Rome. It recreated the pastoral poetry of antiquity, as found, for example, in Virgil’s Georgics. So if you bought a pastoral novel or went to see a pastoral play, you knew pretty much what to expect – just as nowadays you more-or-less know what to expect when you buy a thriller. You would have had shepherds with names like Sylvus and Corin and shepherdesses called Phoebe and Corinna. Everyone would fall in love and there would be lots of music and lyrical verse.
It was also set apart from the noise, the crowding and the violence of the city. Shakespeare’s As You Like It is a good example of a pastoral play. So Duke Senior, even though he is exiled in the forest away from the court, praises the ‘sermons in stones, books in the running brooks, and good in everything’. It represents one of the great contrasts in human life and art: that of the town versus the countryside, even if it is often an affair of fantasy and illusion.
Although we have, or used to until very recently, similar kinds of fantasy drama in the cowboy western, a shepherd’s life seems to have a particular hold on people’s imagination. However in one famous context, that of the pastoral scene in the New Testament, it would appear that the life of a seminomadic shepherd was hard. In New Testament times, as far as we can tell, shepherds were consigned to the margin-lands and had to seek out rough grazing. Unwelcome, like modern travellers in a settled society, they had to fall back on their own style of life and customs. Some of their hardships are mentioned in the significant passage about shepherding in St John Chapter 10 with the everpresent dangers from wolves and thieves. The prophecy of Amos in the Hebrew Bible, in which the prophet appears as a rough, uncompromising character, reveals that there were dangers even from Judaean lions who might just leave a few bits of the carcass for the shepherd to salvage. Amos, as a country-dweller and part-time shepherd, also shows contempt for city living and the affairs of the religious sanctuary. All of the prophets are recognisable character-types, and Amos is the bluff, no-nonsense amateur who sees things that religious ‘professionals’ cannot. He is ejected from Bethel because his prophetic challenges and criticisms of social injustice are considered too close for comfort.
In St John, the image of the sheepfold and shepherd may well allude to a community on the margins. The community of St John’s Gospel was clearly regarded askance by the emerging mainstream church. St John’s Gospel was written for people who believed that baptism and the experience of eternal life, a life in the here and now but a new kind of religious consciousness, brought a radical religious freedom. In the Third Epistle of St John, there is a sideswipe at a certain Diotrephes, probably an early monarchical bishop, who ‘seems to enjoy being in charge of it [the church]’ (3 Jn 9). St John’s Community seem to have embraced the tradition of the prophets like Amos and such religious faith in the open air; unmediated and available to everyone.
Amos, as a shepherd looking after the flock on the hillside at night, praises God as ‘one who made the Pleiades and Orion, who turns the dusk into dawn and day to darkest night.’ (Amos 5:8) The imagery of the shepherd has, however, been put to another use. It is part of a debate, an Opposition really, within the New Testament itself which spills over to our world. For there appear to be two styles of religious faith. According to the first, Christian faith is assumed to be about creeds that are factually true, with sacred stories that are historical and accurate and values that are absolute. One of the latest of the NT texts to be written and circulated, St In St John, the image of the sheepfold and shepherd may well allude to a community on the margins.
Luke’s Gospel / the Acts of the Apostles, appeals to the logic and practicality of the Roman world by writing in this manner.
By contrast, another mode of Christianity presents it as a source of insight into reality, a way to live in the world at peace. it is something that is interior and open to all. Just as Amos could witness God in the open countryside, so St Paul could announce that God’s Holy Spirit has been poured into the hearts of all and has been given freely. Not by officials and the laying on of hands, as Luke would have it. It leads to a religious standpoint that expresses itself in reverence, awe, gratitude and humility.
Such religious faith is hard to ‘quantify’ and so there is always a temptation to create a system and that will lead to an order of power. Which is why, also in the pages of the NT, the literal account of the resurrection is important.
Not merely for its religious content, but also for its political function too.
For it endorses the authority of certain individuals who claim authority over the churches because of what they have seen and experienced.
Soon the Christian church developed leaders who called themselves ‘overseers’ (Greek: epi-skopoi) or bishops, and elders (Greek: presbyteroi). There were other images in the NT, that of a rock (kefa in Aramaic, petros in Greek) as a foundation for the church, or one of service as the Son of Man had come ‘not to be served but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many’. (Mk 10:45).
The one that seems to have prevailed is given in a kind of epilogue to St John’s Gospel when Jesus instructs Peter three times to ‘feed my lambs, look after my yearlings, and feed my sheep’. And although the pastoral image in the context of St John was antiestablishment, within 170 years of the crucifixion a three-rank hierarchy of bishops priests and deacons developed and gave the church a very different kind of ‘pastoral’ governance.
So the language of all things pastoral is very familiar to modern Christians, but unconsciously it can miss some of the limitations of what is really only a metaphor. After all, sheep are woolly animals that go ‘baa’ and people are individuals, humans. Nor is the pastor’s guardianship of the ‘flock’ two-way or in any sense democratic, which people demand as a matter of course nowadays. And thirdly, a hard notion for some, people do not necessarily need looking after or even saving. Human institutions work. Give people resources and opportunity and they will sort most things out.
So the appeal of Christian faith also needs its characteristics of unity-in-diversity, which values the individual talents and potential of everyone. This is to be linked to the radical freedom of ‘Christ-inyou’. More intriguing is that the situation of the people who read St John first – the Community of the Beloved Disciple as they have been called – made sense of their position of being on the fringe like the nomad-shepherds, like Amos. But Christian faith in the West is fast-becoming an example of that same position, on the margins and therefore less mediated, freer. In the city, the priests and officials from the fanum – the Temple or the Cathedral – are highly critical of the ‘materialism’ and rock music and shopping in the market place or the Mall. They disapprove and try to control it. However, informal or immediate religion, resembles religion sous les belles étoiles and, even if it is less visible or susceptible to control, reflects as strong a tradition in the Scriptures as in human aspiration.
Michael Morton is Catholic Parish Priest of StWinefride’s, Sandbach,and a SoFTrustee.