"I Called The Ancient Shepherd, but He Hasn’t Come
"I Called The Ancient Shepherd, but He Hasn’t Come
The Lion of Judah, Christ the King, Jesus of Nazareth, will not be away from us for one night.
The feeble bleating of a wayward sheep: “I have called him, I have called him, I have called him. I called the ancient Shepherd, but he hasn’t come. Only the wolf-ghosts have woken up, the spirits of the vicious dead hunt me.”
What can we do? How do we find our way back to the fold? No skeleton of a ceremony, no to-do list, no expectation of what is going to happen next brings with it hope. “Someone should have warned me. I don’t know what’s going to happen now. Do I just keep staggering endlessly into the deep wilds? To do that would cheat me of friends, stress relief, sustenance. How will easy sleep find me? I cannot rediscover the well-worn path home.”
That’s when we know our suffering has nearly reached full capacity, when the confident path that points us homeward is hidden from view. And it’s this suffering that can herd a person into a blood-soaked stream, ready to slaughter ourselves rather than endure more pain, more grief. Only the wolf-ghosts, the spirits of the vicious dead, watch and wait to feast on our remains.
So what will lift us out of the river? Who will lead us back to the welcoming, restful fold? The warm words of the ancient Shepherd are all the guidance anyone needs. But some are so panicked by the wolf-ghosts, plunging deeper into deathly shadows, that they require endless, exhilarating talk of life. Stories that shine a light on the kind of life that has no literary plan, that bends one’s head for salvation. Then the path reveals itself again, and easy sleep comes. No more clenched toes, tensed limbs. At last, every contour of the body is relaxed. Wherever the ancient Shepherd finds us, we can lay our head down knowing we are being led back to good land, far to the east in Eden.
There’s nothing difficult or obscure about self-slaughter. No mystery to its corrupted effect. The spirit of death interposes itself between the worshiper and the divine. And this enemy we encounter many times over. It’s howl, it’s bite, it’s slender form is well known.
In the wild places it walks down endless, rutted tracks. In towns it lopes, no escort, huge, a terrible bite. We can dress the wound with a balm but we always carry a trace of the attack. It’s fur on the inside now. It’s blood in our blood. We are people of the bite. This is what causes us to run away from our Shepherd. It’s how we end up in blood-soaked streams, calling out, wailing, “I have called him, I have called him, I have called him. I called the ancient Shepherd, but he hasn’t come.”
But God’s wail is a different kind of calling song. It calms our troubled hearts. It causes a person to become ravenously hungry, eager to chew on every one of his words; fiery words that gather round our hearts. Then, satiated, we are guided by him with our distended imaginations into little country churches. We encounter his priests in the wilderness. We hear ancient, wondrous stories and teachings. We receive good news from the beginnings of the earth about the ancient Shepherd coming to us, our ancestors bearing witness to his blood that unites worshippers and the divine in full communion.
That’s us now. Human beings set upon by wolf-ghosts, wounds healed by the Lion of Judah. Heady stuff.
The howl of the wolf-ghost stops when the Lion speaks, a roar or a whisper. The emotional snow melts, the spiritual sun is high and happy when God speaks to us. We bend our heads. We follow him. We shuffle back into our homes. Our children stop and smile at us. We look right again. No longer stretched. No more fur on the inside. Gospel balm heals death’s bite. No more running away. We can laugh again. We can cry and mourn without stepping into a blood-soaked stream.
The Lion of Judah, Christ the King, Jesus of Nazareth, will not be away from us for one night. No long winters of the soul. No sleeping for him. From now on, whatever our predicament, he will never allow us to spend another night in a wolves’ den. So let out a long breath. It’s time to breathe again. We can lie down with our flank to the big, shaggy-maned God. No one can kill us when we do that, we cannot even do it to ourselves.
All of us, especially those who have bared their throat to death’s bite, can lie back on the mane of the Lion. It is only the Lion’s roar that can articulate the abundance of our life now, and it is only the howls of the wolf-ghosts that can articulate Gethsemane.
That is, out of God’s death comes our life!
That is today’s story, and tomorrow, and the day after, endlessly locating us with Jesus Christ in abundant life. It goes with us back to our homes and to wherever on earth we abide. And that is more than enough. He will see us through to the end.
