Sunday, May 7, 2017

God calls us by name – Jn 10:1-10, 1 Pet 2:20b-25

Easter, Week 4, Year A; Holy Infant.

Many of you know that before I entered seminary I worked as a prison teacher.  When I first started working there, a lot of the other helping professionals in the prison recognized that there was something about the culture of that place, the marbled unity of grotesque beauty and darkness in search of light, that I needed to understand to be fruitful there, and the only way they could explain it was through stories.  This story’s from a prison chaplain.  I never knew the inmate the story’s about, but it’s a pithy way of getting across in one short graced conversation what I saw so many times, on a much slower scale.  He was young, but a hulk of a man, apparently, intimidating.  By which, I learnt, the chaplain meant both that he looked intimidating, and that he often went out of his way to intimidate people.  He’d stand at the back of the chapel throughout Mass, defiant.  After several weeks of this, the chaplain approached him and asked: “What’s your name?”  “Striker,” came back the answer.  “That’s not a name, that’s a committal offense, a claim, a front.  What’s your name?”  “González.”  “OK, but I’m not going to call you by your last name. That’s not how you were baptized.  What’s your name?  What does your momma call you?”  The next answer, I won’t repeat in church.  That’s what his mother called him, something I won’t repeat in church.  “She’s mad with you a lot, huh?”  “Yeah.  I’m bad.”  It wasn’t a confession, it wasn’t a boast; it was just a flat statement of fact.  “But, I bet that wasn’t what she called you when you were a baby, huh?  What does your momma call you when she’s not mad with you?”  “OK, my first name is Napoleón.”  “Nice name.  But that’s not what I asked.  What does your momma call you when she’s not mad with you?”  Out of a face, I came to know so well that was about to erupt in something, you just didn’t know what, came: “Well, sometimes… she’d call me Napito.”  “Napito.  Can I call you that?”  I wonder how long since he’d heard that. He didn’t say. He just replied, “Sure, padre.  That would be chido.” 


To be called by the name our momma uses when she’s not mad with us… isn’t that what we all want?  To feel that safety, that care and concern, that loving intimacy, to feel known and loved not for who we are or what we’ve done (maybe even despite those things), but because of whose we are.  God is the Good Shepherd who calls each of us, his sheep, by name, and leads us out.

In the ancient world, there was a name for shepherds who named their sheep: “poor.”  It actually wasn’t that unusual for a poor shepherd who only had a few sheep to give them names, and call them by name.  That’s how Jesus is identifying himself here.  He’s putting himself squarely in the company of the poor shepherds, the ones who valued each sheep with immensely personal care and attention, who knew them by name.  But, he’s not a poor shepherd.  We read in Acts about one day when three thousand sheep were added to his fold!  On a universal, grandiose, cosmic scale, the Creator of the Universe, the pre-existent Word of God cares for us all, cares for each of us, with the personal, loving intimacy of a poor shepherd with just a few sheep.  He calls us each by the names our mommas use when they’re not mad with us.


But Christ has an intimacy to offer us that no shepherd, no matter how caring, could offer his sheep. For while an expert shepherd might know a huge amount about sheep, sheep in general, and through attentiveness, to their own sheep in particular, their knowledge is knowledge from the outside. Close outside, perhaps, but outside, still. No other shepherd has ever been a sheep. The call of Christ, being called by our own name strikes us as revolutionarily intimate, and we’re changed by that, just as Striker melted when called Napito.  We hear that call not to statically bask in our Father’s love, but to be called out of our fear, our isolation, to leave behind the stone wall of the sheepfold that was separating us from darkness and follow behind the shepherd who calls us and leads us out, beyond the fold.  As Peter’s letter puts it, he left us an example that we should follow in his footsteps.


What Christ does, by bringing God’s powerful shepherdly love to intimate union with human sheepish flesh, is to forge a path that we can follow him on, back to the lives of loving integrity that we’ve strayed from. Think of a child following behind a parent through deep snow, too deep for the child to walk though alone, but as the parent walks, the footprints clear the way for the journey home. Following in Christ’s footprints aren’t some kind of trade (put up with this much suffering and you get heaven); they’re pointers to a life-line, to acts of love, intimate and powerful, in which we are called to participate, to be formed for the kind of love that heaven is. Called to participate, called by name, by the name our momma calls us when she’s not mad with us.

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