Dr. George Parsenios is an Assistant Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. He delivered this sermon at the opening communion service in Miller Chapel on September 15, 2004.
To read the Gospel of John, scholars have noted, is to stare into a kaleidoscope, in which the same images and phrases are often recast so that, when seen in a new context, they look somehow the same—and yet very different. As he prepares to depart from the world, for example, Jesus tells his disciples, “You know the way, where I am going” (14:4). But then the kaleidoscope shifts, and suddenly, instead of speaking of the way on which he travels, Jesus insists “I AM the way” (14:6). So, too, in the passage before us today, Jesus tells his disciples that he is the Good Shepherd, and that the Shepherd enters the sheepfold through the gate (10:2). But with a turn of the kaleidoscope, although he is still speaking about shepherds and sheep and a gate, Jesus no longer says that he enters through the gate, but instead insists, “I AM the gate” (10:7). That the imagery of the Good Shepherd is so elastic and adaptable is what I would like to reflect on for the next several minutes, not for what this tells us about the Gospel of John, but for what it suggests about the adaptability required of any Good Shepherd.We could understand pastoral adaptability to mean various things, such as the obvious need to conform to different cultural realities when moving within this country or around the world, in the style of St. Paul who became a Jew to the Jews and a Greek to the Greeks (1 Cor. 9:19-23). But closer to what I would like to discuss is Paul's comment a little later, where he adds that he has become “all things to all people” (9:22). All things to all people! An unsympathetic reader might take this to mean that Paul is a flatterer who tries to please all of the people all of the time for personal gain. Such a reading is not only unnecessarily negative, but does not account for the fact that Paul very often tries not to please his communities, as when he addresses them with such expressions as, “You foolish Galatians” (3:1).
For a very different way to understand Paul's claim, John Chrysostom is instructive when he writes that Paul “varies his discourse according to the need of his disciples.”1 In his commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, Chrysostom evaluates Paul's impassioned and disapproving tone by noting, “Always to speak to one's disciples with mildness, even when they need severity, is not the character of a teacher, but it would be the character of a corrupter and enemy.” Chrysostom adds that, like a careful physician, Paul knows when to prescribe to his patients soothing balms and medicines, and when to apply the knife in painful, but necessary, surgery. Paul, then, is the adaptable and elastic Good Shepherd.
Ancient moralists often relied on medical imagery similar to Chrysostom's as they discussed the best way to guide their pupils to greater heights of virtue. We refer to these thinkers as “moral philosophers,” because they were less concerned with the grand metaphysical schemes of previous times, and more interested in how best to meet the vicissitudes of every day, wisely and rightly. (My colleague Gordon Mikoski has reminded me of the claim that, although Seneca, Plutarch, and Musonius Rufus are the heirs of Plato and Aristotle, they are just as certainly the forerunners of Dr. Phil and Oprah.) As these philosophers reflected on how best to meet the variable needs of daily life, a valuable tool was the posture of parresia, which we translate either as “boldness” or as “frank speech.” The Platonist Plutarch (AD 45-125) says of frank speech that it is a “most potent medicine in friendship.”2 And, as the ancient moralists see it, frank speech is intimately connected to pastoral adaptability.
Extolled as a political asset in Athenian politics, frank speech was the basis of a democratic city that relied on the open and full participation of its citizens in government.3 But speaking openly and boldly soon developed into a useful tool for those who would guide others in the philosophical life. As the philosophers understand it, frank speech does not settle for the status quo; it seeks another level of performance. In some cases it reaches for increased maturity or, if the person in question has ventured onto a dubious path, it calls for a change in direction.4 This is frank speech as a pastoral tool. But such a thing requires tremendous adaptability. “A life's problems come in all degrees of difficulty, from the most minor to the seemingly earth-shattering, so…[parresia] varies in degree from gentle to harsh.”5 The task of the deliverer of frank speech is to hit the right note, so that the pastoral response is appropriate to the behavior and disposition of the hearer.
For us, as for the ancients, such adaptability is not easy to achieve because our responses are often habitual and instinctive. Some of us might react aggressively to every crisis even when something milder is required. Or, we might always meet problems with a passive response, even when awful behavior needs to be curbed sharply. Beyond our particular personalities, political or social calculations can also impede frank speech. Stern severity is easy with people we do not like, just as kind compassion comes effortlessly with those we do. But in such cases, frank speech and adaptability have become something less noble and less transformative.
The ancient monastic communities of the Egyptian desert provide helpful models for the proper use of frank speech and adaptability in a Christian setting. From the collected sayings of these ancient communities, I would like to hold up two things as especially instructive. The first is silence. Knowing how to talk begins with knowing how not to talk. The school of silence instructs us in the art of speaking. But here, silence does not simply mean the absence of conversations, which produces a superficial silence. What is needed is silence as a preparation for speech. Abba Poemen notes, “A person may seem to be silent, but if his heart is condemning others he is babbling ceaselessly. But there may be another who talks from morning till night and yet he is truly silent; that is, he utters nothing unprofitable.”6
Those of you who are students here will find yourselves, quite rightly, talking from morning till night. You are required to speak and are learning how to speak theologically, perhaps for the first time in your lives. This is not the time to tell you not to speak. But you can temper your words, with a view to how they affect others, and how they make you appear. Be careful when you feel compelled to correct someone by saying, whatever the topic, “No, it isn't So and So, but So and So.”7 In even such small matters, if you pause to reflect on the motives behind your speaking, you will have begun to cultivate the spirit of silence, where you no longer speak in order to assert yourself upon others, but have begun to discern when it will hurt to speak, and when it might help.
To do this requires freedom from fear: fear that you will not be seen as the smartest person in the room; fear that someone will “get away” with making you look foolish and that you won't be able to “get them back” in the next conversation.8 You may be insulted many times, wittingly or unwittingly, by your fellow students. Be careful how you respond. Because you will also be insulted in your parish some day, and you will do more good in the long run for knowing how to hold your anger than you will for firing back with a good one-liner. And, even more generally, you will be better equipped to see clearly in a murky situation how best to respond if your passions are in check before you speak. The spirit of silence, then, does not imply never speaking. Total silence, too, hinders the work of the shepherd. The spirit of silence means judging when and how best to speak. In this way, paradoxically, silence breeds frank and bold speech.
The second source of frankness is similarly a paradox. We might think that bold speech originates out of a prophet's righteous indignation or that people who speak frankly are those who do not suffer fools gladly. But in the desert, frank speech was cultivated from the seeds of mercy and from the same impulse that might lead one to clothe the naked and feed the hungry. A young monk, for instance, approaches Abba Lot, because he is unable to come to grips with his shortcomings, and Lot encourages his younger companion by inviting him to pray and confess, and by telling him as they pray, “I will carry half of your sin with you.”9 In a similar way, three young brothers went to Abba Achilles and asked him to help them in making fishing nets. He refused the first two, because he was busy, but the third had a very bad reputation among the monks. With him Achilles agreed to work. When the others whom he had refused asked for an explanation, Achilles responded, “[I]f I had not made one for him, he would have said, 'the old man has heard about my sin, and that is why he does not want to make me anything.'…” This would have disheartened the brother, and separated him from Achilles. “But now,” Achilles adds, “I have aroused his soul.”10 In the desert, fools are suffered gladly. Not only, then, does silence teach one how to speak. Mercy teaches one how to correct.
We can move in a slightly different direction by looking at a fictional character who, without being a desert ascetic, experienced his own form of deserted isolation: Robinson Crusoe. Incidentally, discussing Crusoe in an ascetical context seems especially appropriate to me, because I bought the rather large book in early August when I also began to prepare for the semester and I had to force myself each day religiously to find time to finish it. But I liked the novel so much that I tracked down some interpretive articles discussing the story. One critic was especially provocative as he discussed the novel's emphasis on Crusoe's “displaced self.”11 Shipwrecked alone on an uncharted island, Robinson has an excessive concern to preserve his “self” from being consumed by external forces—by the waves that threaten to swallow him in his initial shipwreck, by the earthquake that makes his protective cavern a possible tomb, and by the cannibals who frequent his island and threaten, literally, to devour him. A remarkable thing happens, though, when Crusoe comes upon an isolated footprint on the beach. He is at first terrified by the thought that cannibals are near, but as he reflects on the possible cause of the print, he soon imagines that his own foot made it. And so, in a sense, he sees himself in the footprint of his enemy. This is part of a larger set of themes in the book, in which Robinson slowly comes to see the humanity of the islanders whom he fears, as well as see more clearly his own inadequacy. As he learns to stand outside himself and judge his place in his world, at the same time he sees himself in the footprint of those over whom he assumes superiority.
I mention this by way of corrective, because I have followed Greco-Roman writers in using medical analogies to discuss pastoral adaptability, but this description has its limitations. The image of the all-powerful “gaze” of the physician who identifies and clarifies other people's infirmities might suggest that we can assume the physician's health. If we're honest with ourselves, we know that this is a fiction and that no one leaves clean footprints. Indeed, a necessary step in acquiring the art of frank speech is the ability to allow oneself to be the recipient of it. And this means surrounding oneself with friends and advisors of a certain kind. Recall in an earlier quotation where Plutarch claimed that frank speech “is a most potent medicine in friendship.” The word friendship here is not casual. Ancient discussions of friendship, like that in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, recognized several types of friendship. People might call their friends those whose company they enjoy, or perhaps those whose association is useful for advancement. But at the highest level are those friends who want nothing but what is just and noble and good for each other. A recent book on Abraham Lincoln demonstrates the obvious fact that these gradations of friendship continue to define relationships in the modern world.12 The biographer uses Aristotle's categories of friendship to understand how Lincoln wove a great many people in and out of his life under the name of friend. As president, he relied especially on those who wanted nothing from him, and wanted for him only the best outcome in his decisions. This is the kind of friendship in which frank speech flourishes. Parishes need such frank speech from their pastors, but pastors, like presidents, also need to be spoken to frankly.
I want to offer one more corrective before closing. It would be wrong to suggest that cultivating the demeanor of the Good Shepherd is entirely moral or psychological. Theology matters. Though Jesus is the Way, and he leads us on the way to the Father, the history of Christianity is littered with people who lost the path, and through a false sense of God's identity, developed a false sense of their identity, and behaved accordingly with tragic consequences. One must have a clear sense of who Christ was and is to lead people to him and into him. This requires close study as well as silence. Speaking about God is always bounded by the silence of inexpressible awe. But, some of us might think that we can ignore theological questions altogether, though this is really just to answer them in a less explicit way. Some larger purpose will always guide our activities. Without theological moorings, pastoral adaptability can become a mockery of Paul's warrant to become all things to all people, and the Shepherd can become so elastic as to lose a firm identity. In the Good Shepherd passage, Jesus insists that “I know my own and my own know me” (10:14). All pastoral adaptability and all frank speech are intended to provide a more fertile field for this knowing to increase. Again, theology matters.
To summarize and conclude, then, the Christian Shepherd stands as a bridge between the sheep and the sheepfold, or perhaps it is better to think less in terms of a bridge, and more along the lines of a ladder. In his dream in the book of Genesis, Jacob envisions the angels ascending and descending on a ladder between heaven and earth (Gen. 28:12). The Fourth Gospel opens with Jesus claiming that the angels ascend and descend on him, indicating that he is not only the Way, and the Good Shepherd, but also the ladder of divine ascent (1:51). To guide the sheep to this ladder of divine ascent is the task of the Christian pastor. Doing so will require a lifetime of climbing ourselves and of recognizing that we cannot climb on our own. But this place is where you begin to climb. To the continuing students, good strength in resuming your study and your focus! To the new students, welcome to the Seminary!
1…St. John Chrysostom, Commentary on Galatians, 1.1. Translations of Chrysostom in this paragraph are taken from volume 13 of The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 1.
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2…Plutarch, How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend, 74D. In volume 1 of Plutarch, Moralia. 15 vols., trans. Frank C. Babbitt, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949-1976).
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3…David Konstan, “Friendship, Frankness and Flattery,” in Friendship, Flattery and Frankness of Speech: Studies on Friendship in the New Testament World, ed. John T. Fitzgerald (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 9.
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4…J. Paul Sampley, “Paul's Frank Speech with the Galatians and the Corinthians,” in Philodemus and the New Testament World, ed. John Fitzgerald, et al. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2004), 296.
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5…Ibid., 296-97.
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6…Poemen 27, PG 65:329A. Translation from Douglas Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 144.
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7…For this insight, see Tito Colliander, The Way of the Ascetics, trans. Katherine Ferré (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1994), 26.
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8…Paraphrasing Burton-Christie, Word in the Desert, 283.
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9…Lot 2, PG 65.256B. Translated from ibid., 283.
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10…Achilles 1, PG 65.124BC. Translated from ibid., 284.
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11…See Homer O. Brown, “The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe,” English Literary History 38 (1971): 562-90.
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12…David Herbert Donald, .”We are Lincoln Men.”: Abraham Lincoln and His Friends (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003).
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