In Christian churches, it is almost inconceivable to admit a new member, celebrate a wedding or bury the dead, without the intervention of ordained ministers. Not only because they have greater acquaintance with the word of God, but because of the symbolic role they perform, these leaders are invariably asked to act in the crucial moments of the life of communities. As if the effectiveness of the acts then practiced would be withdrawn or diminished, if they did not intervene in some way.
We may feel uncomfortable with this way of thinking, but the fact is that dependence on traditional leadership is based on very deep reasons. Building the cohesion of groups by the intrinsic eminence of their leaders is an ancestral human habit. The words leader, leadership and authority are true euphemisms in this matter. They conceal much cruder realities and obscure the fact that the cohesion of communities is often kept by the mere power of a leader over all other people.
It is not different in the church. Throughout History, Christian unity has always depended on the power wielded by three types of leaders: the hierarch, the pastor and the icon. The first one is the typical Catholic or Orthodox clergyman, who is moved by the weight of the ecclesiastical structure he is part of. The second one is the Protestant leader, whose main function is to teach and preach the word of God. By working more with the word, the pastor has a kind of power which is more symbolic than coercive. Finally, the icon is a charismatic figure, around which a splinter group of autonomous believers is formed within or without formal Chistianity. The most outstanding Augustinians, Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, Salesians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Mormons in History are examples of this last kind of leaders. While the power of pastors springs from the position they hold, the authority of the great icons springs from themselves, their personal history and predicates.
It cannot be denied that the action of these leaders is what prevents the church from disassembling into a multitude of disconnected cells. This shows that, while recognizing the word of God as its only foundation, the church lives in constant contradiction with it. If the word were the church's sole support, in practice as it is in doctrine, it would not tend to dissolve in disconnected cells, because its leaders fail to exercise their traditional roles. So, at a time, the church is based on the word of God and maintains its cohesion through traditional leadership.
This contradiction is a tremendous dilemma, in which the church is immersed. It may be said one of her most prominent historical problems. In the parable of the good shepherd, Jesus addressed the dilemma bluntly and without mitigations. It seems the parable was uttered to show that Jesus introduced a new kind of authority (that of the good shepherd), which has little in common with the three types of regular religious leaders.
Jesus first compared the behaviors of the shepherd and the thief of the sheep. While the former promotes the cohesion of the flock by his voice, the second does his works by violent means. The pastor goes to the watchman, who opens the door of the corral to him, but the robber scales on the other side, in search of an opening through which he enters to steal the sheep. As he cannot lead them by his voice, the thief needs to beat the sheep to remove them from the fold. And in doing so, he comes to kill some. Still other times, he destroys corral in order to remove the sheep. That is why the text says the thief comes to kill, steal and destroy.
However, among all the differences discussed so far, the one that reveals the intrinsic character of the relationship of the shepherd with the sheep is the voice he directs to them and through which he commands them. This voice is heard and recognized by the sheep. The talk of the robber is not. When entering the fold, the thief tries to lead the sheep with his voice, but they not recognize it.
By this observation about the voice, Jesus wanted to show that the essential function of the pastor of souls is to speak the word of God. The pastor is not obeyed by the use he makes of the stick, but by his handling of the word. This particular timbre, that he and only he delivers, is unmistakable. By it, the parable indicates that, in the kingdom of God, something different takes place: the aggregation of the flock of God starts to depend more on the echo of the divine word in the hearts of people than on the mechanisms of cohesion based on the three types of traditional power (coercive, symbolic and personal).
No statement could express this better than "All who came before me are thieves and robbers" (John 10:8). The words "before me" do not have a chronological meaning. Otherwise, all leaders of the Old Testament should be considered thieves. The words point to a subjective experience. They really mean “before meeting me” in a personal way. No matter they are leaders of other religions, hierarchs, pastors or Christian icons, those who guide the sheep without being guided by this experience are not good shepherds.
However, we should not understand the good shepherd only by the ideal of love he represents. The ancient figure of the herdsman did not represent only love, but also physical might. Revelation 2:26-27 gives us a good description of this aspect of the shepherd: “He who overcomes and he who keeps my words until the end, to him I will give authority over the nations; and he will shepherd them with an iron rod, as vessels of pottery are broken in pieces”.
These verses refer to the ancient ideal of the king-shepherd, of the king who exercised authority by shepherding. They show very strongly that the idea of a shepherd was not of an ever peaceful person. In Revelation 2, authority and shepherding are parallel words with parallel meanings: “I will give him authority over the nations”, and: “He will shepherd them”. How will he shepherd? The verse says he will break them into pieces with an iron rod.
A surprising feature of Jesus’ words to the angels of the seven churches, in Revelation 2 and 3, is not that they contradict those of the loving Jesus of the Gospels, but that they show the demanding face of such lovingness. “As many as I love I reprove and discipline” (Revelation 3:19). Love is not only love. It is also discipline and correction. Therefore, shepherding is not only caring, but also breaking in pieces.
It is true that sheep do not need to be broken in pieces, but nations do. So, Christian leaders must learn to be shepherds in both senses. They must not be fools, but know that the two kinds of sherperding are one in principle, and that the difference between them has to do only with the degree in which each one shows the mild and the stern faces of love.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche accused Christianity and Christ himself of disseminating such values as love and compassion, which imply the praise of weakness. He thought those values would bring civilization to collapse. But he did not see that Christ’s love is a two-faced animal. It has an aspect of tenderness and another of discipline and force.
But starting from verse 12 of John 10, Jesus referred to yet another symbolic character: the mercenary. "The hireling and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them" (John 10:12).
The hireling does almost everything the good shepherd does: addresses the doorman, enters the sheepfold through the door, talks to the sheep and is recognized, leads them to the pasture and collects them back at the end of the day. The difference between the two is manifested only when the wolf comes. On that extreme occasion, the hireling flees, the good shepherd gives his life for the sheep.
The pair shepherd-mercenary shows that the first one is not only different from those who lead by power, but also from those who lead by the word, but based on the wrong reason. Such is the attitude of the mercenary. His problem is not what he does to the sheep, but the motivation by which he leads them. The mercenary does all he is supposed to do, but he does so with a view to the money he receives. All the time, he thinks in himself and not in the sheep. When the final proof comes, the money he gets is no sufficient motive for him to protect the sheep. So he abandons them.
The parable of the good shepherd encloses and besieges all kinds of misconceptions on traditional leadership. Unfortunately, we usually read it as if it made reference to a problem of Judaism or of heretics. It is difficult for us to acknowledge that traditional Christian models of authority also follow the exact pattern the parable combats. And it is even more difficult to cut relations with that pattern.
The traditional and the new leaderships are rooted in the hearts of individual Christians, as well as in the church. In the hearts, they stare one another, as two Titans before battle. One of the Titans wants to guide the sheep by his stick, the other by his voice. The first one directs the sheep, but is himself directed by an ancestral habit of power. The other guides them because his infinite love has freed him from that very habit. And the saying entirely applies to the impasse thus formed: "No one can serve two masters."
