On the Christian & Politics
Fourth Sunday of Easter
By his wounds you have been healed. Saint Peter in today’s Second Reading borrows these words from the book of the prophet Isaiah — from the fourth Suffering Servant song in Isaiah chapter 53, which we hear read every year on Good Friday. Today, this middle section of Isaiah is considered to have been written not by the prophet himself but by his disciples a century later during the Babylonian Exile. Deutero or Second Isaiah proclaimed during a time of great tribulation and division Israel’s liberation and unification through the coming of the promised Messiah. God’s chosen people had lost their land and their temple and had been taken captive and held prisoner in a land not their own. Psalm 137, composed during the same period, laments: By the waters of Babylon, there we sat and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? (vv. 1-4). It is to sullen Israel’s comfort that deutero-Isaiah proclaims: Behold your God!… He will feed his flock like a shepherd, he will gather the lambs in his arms, he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are young (40:9, 11).
Peter, writing around the year 64 AD, quotes deutero-Isaiah in much the same breath. At the conclusion of his first letter, Peter sends his greeting to the scattered children of Israel from Babylon, which is likely a pseudonym for Rome, where Peter is a prisoner and where soon he, with Paul, will face martyrdom. Peter, writing also in a time of great tribulation and division, a time in which God’s chosen are yet again oppressed by a hostile political force, does not speak of a unification and redemption still to come but that which has already been wrought by Jesus, God’s suffering servant: Christ… suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his footsteps. Peter does not prophecy that Babylon — that Rome — would fall. Neither does he paint any rosy picture that life for Christians will be other than what it is. Rather, he commends them: Beloved, if you are patient when you suffer for doing what is good, this is a grace before God. He offers no foolish optimism nor pious escape but, on the contrary, the perspective and encouragement God’s people need to endure the sufferings they bear.
Babylon has stood down the ages for the oppressive force d’jour. You may substitute whichever regime, party, politician, or ideology you fancy, as may I. It is not a partisan matter. It makes no difference on which side of the aisle we fall. For any of us who bear the name of Christian will need to grapple, if not now then later, with the tension intrinsic to being a Christian in the world — a world that Christ promised will hate us (cf. Jn. 15:18). Each side has its prophets who cry that Babylon is falling and its Cyrus who promises to deal the fatal blow; and we throw our support behind those who promise us liberation, only to find that when our champions have taken the throne that they are no better than the tyrants they displaced. No matter our political allegiances, playing the political game will always leave us dissatisfied; and our battle against Babylon will be ever against the Hydra, whose heads multiply as they are cut. I probably don’t pay as close attention to the news as I should, but I hear enough confessions to know my soul isn’t the worse for it. The never-ending news cycle feeds upon itself and gives the strong impression that there is no way out of the political tug-of-war in which we are entrenched. Babylon will ever reign even as her throne room is a revolving door.
In this light, Peter’s words to the Church in the 1st century are a refreshing perspective and provide a way out. Peter does not take part in the political game. He does not rally the Christians to throw their weight behind any politician or conqueror, but rather, to put their faith in the king whose kingdom is not of this world. Peter orients us toward the Lamb who healed our wounds by bearing them in his own body. What Christ has done in reconciling us with the Father is given us a ladder — a means of being drawn up out of the pit in which we find ourselves hopeless trapped within this world that leads out to abundant life.
Politics, at its best, is concerned with real people who have real problems. Christians cannot be ignorant or dismissive of them. But Christians should be animated by the conviction that these problems are not solved by politics alone. True and lasting healing, reconciliation, justice, and peace among humans is only possible because of our true and lasting reconciliation with God brought about through the sufferings of Christ, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. The way forward toward unification and liberation is not ahead but behind, not in a future Messiah in whom we place a fool’s hope but in the true Messiah who has bore our offenses. Only Christ — God and man in one person — can bring about our unity with God and with each other.
Christ gives us a disposition, an orientation of the heart, that carries us through the concerns of the present with the confidence that we have been reconciled with God, and this makes all the difference for the rest. Christians are called to be in the world, not of the world; and what carries us through the world without becoming one with it is the faith that this world is not all that matters, that we of ourselves cannot fix this world’s problems, and that it is not good for us to be convinced that we can. How differently we would live if we took even 10 minutes of the time every day we spend worrying about what is going on in the world and instead thought about what Christ has already done in it and for it.
There is an expression — one that I, admittedly, use quite often — about the monkeys running the circus. But perhaps on this Good Shepherd Sunday we might shift the metaphor to the sheep leading the flock. Either ends in disaster. Only the Shepherd can save the sheep, and he already has. Our path forward, to the pasture that is our eternal home and to a world in the meantime better than what it is, is not a path that has not yet been trod, but that on which our brave Shepherd has gone before. The Christian way of being in the world is to follow the Good Shepherd and none other, to put our faith in his wounds by which we are made whole and nothing else, so that whoever our oppressors may be, we will walk securely along the path of life. Behold your God, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, who feeds his flock as a shepherd, who gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them safely home.
Homily preached April 30, 2023 at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen