Ever since I discussed the idea of following Jesus in his Ascension to Heaven in the way in which Beatrice scolded Dante for not following her to Heaven in living his life, I have discovered various other sources who defined the meaning of following Jesus. I thought it might be useful for me, and for any readers who are still with me, to include them here, because I noticed that most of them will lead well into the discussion of A Temple of the Holy Ghost and where that funny and profound story ends. I shall start with another relevant Biblical passage wherein we find the image of Jesus the Good Shepherd:
A reading from
the holy Gospel according to John 10:1-10
Jesus said: “Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever does not enter a sheepfold through the gate but climbs over elsewhere is a thief and a robber. But whoever enters through the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens it for him, and the sheep hear his voice, as he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has driven out all his own, he walks ahead of them, and the sheep follow him, because they recognize his voice. But they will not follow a stranger; they will run away from him, because they do not recognize the voice of strangers.” Although Jesus used this figure of speech, they did not realize what he was trying to tell them.
So Jesus said again, “Amen, amen, I say to you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. A thief comes only to steal and slaughter and destroy; I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.”
Ironically the passage begins with Jesus defining the wrong way to proceed, climbing the wall of the sheepfold, presumably to steal the sheep. In C. S. Lewis’ Narnian Chronicle, The Magician’s Nephew, there’s a nice gloss on this passage and image: the very evil witch in the story climbs the wall to that garden, to steal the apple that will ensure her immortality. Since she has entered the wrong way, the apple will work, but not to her pleasure. The right way into that Eden-like garden is through the gate. And as Jesus makes clear in his comment following the image here, Jesus is the gate and to follow him is to listen to his voice, and follow his words.
The introduction to the liturgy yesterday, April 22, 2024, provides a clear focus for what it means to follow the shepherd using the Psalmist’s image of “the face of God”:
Monday of the Fourth Week of Easter
“Athirst is my soul for God, the living God. When shall I behold the face of God?” This thirst for the vision of God is planted in us by baptism, a gift from the Holy Spirit. It leads us to hear and recognize Christ’s voice; it moves us to follow him with the confidence that “God has granted life-giving repentance.” Peter’s vision confirms the truth that only Christ’s saving sacrifice makes us clean. At every Mass we “go in to the altar of God” to eat his flesh and drink his blood. (The April Magnificat)7
The face of God is now understood as the face of Christ, our shepherd. He is the only one who can truly satisfy that desire that we all have for real fulfillment and meaning. The idea and image are the same as presented in the lovely Psalm 63 which begins with the acknowledgment: “O God thou art my God.” The Psalmist continues by revealing that each day in a sense begins with that pursuit: “early will I seek thee.” The nature of his desire is imaged immediately after: “my soul thirsts for thee, my flesh longs after thee, in a barren and dry land where no water is” [quote remembered from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer]. That barren and dry land is where we all live today and where there is only one source of life-giving, fulfilling water. Jesus makes that clear as he tells the much-married Samaritan woman at the well; the only source of that eternal, life-fulfilling water is himself:
9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” 11 The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” 13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” (John 4: 9-14)
The liturgy for April follows yesterday’s good shepherd image with a second account the following day, April 23 from later in the same chapter of John:
A reading from
the holy Gospel according to John 10:22-30
The feast of the Dedication was taking place in Jerusalem. It was winter. And Jesus walked about in the temple area on the Portico of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long are you going to keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.” Jesus answered them, “I told you and you do not believe. The works I do in my Father’s name testify to me. But you do not believe, because you are not among my sheep. My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish. No one can take them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.
With what seems like a bit of synchronicity at work in my life, I happened to be reading “Meditation 26” in Father PeterJohn Cameron’s A Brief Primer of Prayer. The entries are fairly short and this one happened to be based on the same image from John. I was going to choose quotes from it and then go to another source I had, but I decided to include the entire meditation since it is quite apt:
Meditation 26
Following is prayer and life is something we learn.
Prayer as a following is an asking for the Good Shepherd to pass on his own vitality and excellence to us.
Of all the apt images Jesus could have chosen to symbolize himself as Savior, he opts for the Good Shepherd. For a good shepherd is all about dedicating himself to the welfare of his sheep, even to the point of radical sacrifice and extreme personal risk. The greatest respect and “esteem” a sheep can show a shepherd is to follow him.
There is something distinctive and attractive about the shepherd—unique. Jesus speaks about the shepherd’s voice (Jn 10:3-5). Following is our response to the attractiveness, the singularity of the Good Shepherd. It is an outward act that expresses our desire to share in the life of the Good Shepherd so as to make our own the truths and values that set him apart. The closer we stay to him, following as his flock, the more we become our true selves.
Life is something we learn by following Someone who is fully alive. The following of prayer is an asking for the Good Shepherd to pass on his own vitality and excellence to us. Following means committing our whole self to the exceptional Shepherd, offering to him our personality, our intelligence, our freedom. Following changes us. Following is a way of acknowledging that things in our life need to change.
Cardinal Ratzinger wrote: “‘Following’ is something interior: a new direction for one’s life—surrendered to the will of another, so that being with this other and being at his disposal are now the really important content of a human existence. ‘To follow’ means to entrust oneself to the Word of God, to rate it higher than the laws of money and bread, and to live by it. Only in losing themselves can human beings find themselves. To follow Christ, then, means to enter into the self-surrender that is the real heart of love. To follow Christ means to become one who loves as God has loved. In the last analysis, to follow Christ is simply for people to become human by integration into the humanity of God.”
We can begin to follow by joining in this beautiful prayer of a 14th-century abbot, Venerable Raymond Jourdain:
O good Lord Jesus Christ, my sweet Shepherd, what return shall I make to you for all that you have given me? What shall I give you in exchange for your gift of yourself to me? Even if I could give myself to you a thousand times, it would still be nothing, since I am nothing in comparison with you. Although I cannot love you as much as I should, you accept my weak love. Give me your most ardent love by which, with your grace, I shall love you, please you, serve you, and fulfill your commands. May I never be separated from you, either in time or in eternity, but abide, united to you in love, forever and ever. Amen.
And then I found Bishop Baron’s “reflection” on today’s Gospel. He adds an interesting perspective on following Jesus—the nature of the end of the journey:
Fourth Week of Easter
John 10:22–30
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus explains why his sheep listen to him and follow him. They do so because he is leading them to eternal life.
He says, “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish.” The life of heaven, where we “shall never perish,” is that place where death and sickness have no power over us, where we see God face-to-face.
Heaven and earth are always connected in the biblical imagination; that’s true. But heaven should never be reduced to earth, as though religion is just about this-worldly ethics, social justice, or psychological well-being. No; the Christian faith is about a journey beyond this world to the heavenly Jerusalem.
Everything in the Christian life—from our ethical behavior, to prayer, to the liturgy, to works of justice—all of it is meant to conduce to that end. So listen to the voice of the shepherd and follow him wherever he goes.
Here is a final perspective on what it means to follow Jesus, the shepherd:
Following Jesus means nothing other than reproducing his virtues in ourselves, in order to do all things well. It is trying to assume his imprint on our bodies and our souls that we might be entirely transformed into him. He passed through this world doing good. He did all things well. He cannot see suffering without being compassionate. Wherever he finds pain, he consoles and brings sweetness to the suffering, as much in his earthly life as in the Holy Eucharist, because the heart of Jesus does not change. The Good Shepherd, he says, knows his sheep and he is pleased that they know him. “I have other sheep,” he says, “but that one grieves me and I want it to return to my fold.” He would welcome sinners and he would be all things to all men.
When one strikes a harp, it responds only with harmony. When petals are removed from a flower, it gives its best perfume. The good soul is both a harp and a flower. When it is wounded by criticism and torn apart by ingratitude, it can only respond with harmony and the perfume of goodness. How beautiful are the souls that seem to pulsate with self-sacrifice and with kindness.
Jesus’ obedience was even to the point of death on the cross in order to save us. His mortification subjected him to the grind of everyday work. His zeal moved him to go from town to town healing the sick, consoling, teaching—becoming all things for all men. That is our model. The one who went about doing good. People would say, “Goodness itself has appeared in our midst.” And we have that Goodness—that crucified Jesus—within our grasp in the Holy Eucharist and in our hearts…. Jesus here poses the spirit of self-renunciation and mortification as the indispensable condition for following him, for imitating him, for going through this world performing good works. He invites us to taste the sweet pain of a life of voluntary sacrifice, in union with him.
Blessed Concepción Cabrera de Armida
Blessed Concepción († 1937), also known as “Conchita,” was a wife, mother, widow, and mystical writer. She was the first Mexican laywoman to be beatified.
Coda: it occurred to me early this morning that if following Christ involves prayer, then it would be fitting to end with one. Thus, here is a prayer by Saint Thomas Aquinas:
Grant me,
O Lord my God,
A mind to know you,
A heart to seek you,
Wisdom to find you,
Conduct pleasing to you,
Faithful perseverance in waiting for you,
And a hope of finally embracing you.
Amen.
