Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbon - 11 May 2014

Holmes Co Amish buggy - Wiki

Fourth Sunday of Easter May 11th 2014

Last week I was busy working in the USA but took a bit of time out one day to visit the Amish community of La Grange County Indiana, I do this each year and so have begun to appreciate the complex nuances of these communities, both old order Amish and Mennonites. They certainly strike a counter cultural note in the land of the free, but I sense that though many of the tourists admire their vision and way of life (almost but not quite as ‘utopian’), not many could accept their religious teaching. But that’s what holds them together, without that the communities would have long disintegrated!

I’m not blind to the dark side of their community life, nor to the contradictions found in their interaction with the ‘world’, but I do sense a very deep commitment to key biblical values especially that of non-violence and non-retaliation! This theme is central to that early Christian hymn from 1 Peter which forms part of our Sunday readings.

The early community loved the image of Christ as shepherd, catacomb art often shows him as a young man carrying a lamb on his shoulders with other sheep beside him. Shepherd and shepherding has very deep theological roots in our Christian life, for all, not only those ordained, are called to act as shepherds. But the flock that is Christ’s and ours is no ordinary group, it consists of those who are outcasts and oppressed, the poor and prisoner, the neglected and unwanted, the sinner, the little ones of God. It is a radical community in which all are equal and the powerful are to be the least!

The values of this community are not those of the world, in 1 Peter the key to what we are being asked to do is found in that simple two-fold action of Christ our true shepherd. We like him are never to retaliate and like him we have to put our trust in the one just judge whose law is love and forgiveness not revenge. This is not about accepting, condoning or making sense of suffering, it is about transforming everything in God.

The heart of the message of the cross and resurrection is to relinquish revenge, to hand it over to the one just judge and so healed, enter with Christ the door of the sheepfold!

Fr Robin Gibbons is an Eastern Rite Chaplain for the Melkite Greek Catholics in Britain.