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February 22, 2024Today’s readings present to us an image of synodality that Pope Francis has been trying to promote. It is ironic, since these same passages on the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter are often evoked as stoking clericalism, or hierarchism, as Congar put it, or better: hierarcholatry. Yet, the idea of giving someone power over the members of the church that these misconceptions reflect is not the same as calling them to shepherd the church, as the readings clearly show. We are all familiar with the pastoral/romantic images of shepherds that many a Holy Land-sick preacher has shared with us. Today’s first reading presents in an image all that we need to know: to be the shepherd is to have the same attitude toward the flock that God does, and that is one of tender love. The shepherd’s duty is to tend the flock, not to lord over them; to serve them, not to have them serve him.
This image is reinforced in the Gospel. Jesus gives Peter the position in the church that he does, not because he is a brilliant scholar of the faith, but because he gets Jesus. Peter has brilliant insight into the relationship between God, the One who bears the image of the perfect Shepherd, and Jesus, sent to fulfill God’s love for the flock. Peter is allowed to share this great mystery and to guard it, not because it is some holy grail that cannot be stained by human contact, but because it is a saving truth for all the beloved flock of God to come to.
The charge that Jesus gives to Peter is clearly not to take power in the church and do with it what he will. It is to continue to lead the beloved ones of God on their journey to realizing and embracing for themselves the same saving truth that Peter, almost despite himself, was graced to discover: That Jesus Christ was sent to us by God, that he and God are one, and that the self-emptying love he expresses, like that of the Good Shepherd, is a saving truth for each of us to embrace for the fullness of life. The church continues on its way to work out that Truth for itself, with the grace and the guidance of the Good Shepherd, and those who get the Good Shepherd.
[click here for the readings of the day]
