“You can be sure there is joy in heaven’, he
said, over one sinner who repents.
To give the
same lesson he revived the man who, having fallen into the hands of the
brigands, had been left stripped and half-dead from his wounds; he poured wine
and oil on the wounds, bandaged them, placed the man on his own mule and
brought him to an inn, where he left sufficient money to have him cared for,
and promised to repay any further expense on his return.
Again, he told
of how that Father, who is goodness itself, was moved with pity for his
profligate son who returned and made amends by repentance; how he embraced him,
dressed him once more in the fine garments that befitted his own dignity, and
did not reproach him for any of his sins.
So too, when
he found wandering in the mountains and hills the one sheep that had strayed
from God’s flock of a hundred, he brought it back to the fold, but he did not
exhaust it by driving it ahead of him. Instead, he placed it on his own
shoulders and so, compassionately, he restored it safely to the flock.
So also he
cried out: Come to me, all you that toil and are heavy of heart. Accept my
yoke’, he said, by which he meant his commands, or rather, the whole way of
life that he taught us in the Gospel. He then speaks of a burden, but that is
only because repentance seems difficult. In fact, however, my yoke is easy, he
assures us, and my burden is light.
Then again he
instructs us in divine justice and goodness, telling us to be like our heavenly
Father, holy, perfect and merciful. Forgive, he says, and you will be forgiven.
Behave toward other people as you would wish them to behave toward you.
Saint
Maximus the Confessor
Reflection
– I have on my desk a
very precious gift from a directee. She is an iconographer, and wrote me an icon
of Christ the Good Shepherd (an image of this icon is the image of Christ I use
for this blog.
Christ is holding the sheep on his
shoulders, as Maximus describes here. In this particular icon, he is gripping
the feet of the sheep tight—so tight that the whites of his knuckles are
showing. The sheep meanwhile has a most contented look on his face. Clearly, he
is not going anywhere, and clearly, that is just fine with him.
His head is resting on the Lord’s
shoulder, so that if Jesus has anything to say to him, he has only to turn his
head and whisper into the ear of his lost sheep. And the Lord’s hands are
pierced—it is the crucified and risen Jesus who is bearing the lost sheep home.
The whole icon radiates tenderness, security, peace, strength, calm.
And this is the simple fact of Christian
life in the world. We may have an ocean of raging emotions. We may have dozens
if not hundreds of questions, things we don’t understand about our own lives or
the life of the world. We may be deeply unhappy about all sorts of things: why
the Church does this, why the world is like that, why this happened to me, why
that happened to the person I love. On the level of worldly life, our future
may be uncertain and our present most definitely disordered.
But the deeper truth is that we are the
little sheep in the icon of Christ the Good Shepherd, the son returning home to
the father’s house in the parable, the man who fell among robbers being tended
to by the Good Samaritan who is the Lord Himself. Our emotions may tell us something
quite different, but one of the key insights we have to learn in the spiritual
life is that it is precisely here that our emotions most let us down. Emotions
react and rise in us in response to direct sensory input; the deepest realities
of God and us, the life of grace in the soul, and what Jesus is doing on our
behalf and for our healing and salvation are all happening at a level far
deeper than the senses.
And so we are left with the Word of God,
as always the surest and truest revelation of the reality of things. And in
connection with this whole business of mercy and grace, repentance and
conversion, help and salvation coming to us by the tender love of the Father in
Jesus, the Gospels have given us this string of images and parables that are
unparalleled in beauty: the lost sheep, the lost son, the lost coin, the man
beaten by robbers… all of which captivate our imagination with their loveliness,
all of which are telling us the true story of our lives, hold up a mirror to us
of our souls and the Soul of God, all of which is summed up in the loving
shepherd carrying a little lamb on his shoulders back to the sheepfold, back
home, back where we belong and where our happiness lies.
Bless you. Thank you.
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