The Good Shepherd Teaches The Habits Effective Leadership

Fr Dexter Brereton, CSSp

Today, along with the rest of the Universal Church, the Gospel of this Sunday leads us into a reflection on the gift of leadership, in the church and in the world. The Church looks at the mystery of leadership, chiefly under the metaphor of the “shepherd.” – one charged with the care of small ruminants, goats or sheep. The backdrop to this exquisite reading is Ezekiel chapter 34, where the prophet, giving voice to divine wrath, excoriates the “lousy” shepherd-leaders of his own time.: Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy and say to them, “Shepherds, the Lord Yahweh says this: Trouble for the shepherds of Israel who feed themselves! Shepherds ought to feed their flock, yet you have fed on milk, you have dressed yourselves in wool, you have sacrificed the fattest sheep, but failed to feed the flock. You have failed to make the weak sheep strong, or to care for the sick ones, or bandage the wounded ones. You have failed to bring back strays or look for the lost. On the contrary, you have ruled them cruelly and violently. For lack of a shepherd they have scattered, to become the prey of any wild animal.; they have scattered far. My flock is straying this way and that, on mountains and on high hills; my flock has been scattered all over the country; no one bothers about them and no one looks for them.”(Ezek 34: 1-6)

At the heart of the metaphor of the shepherd then, is the notion of God’s exquisite care and concern for each human person, a care which is unique to each of them. As shepherd, God never sees the human being as some kind of ‘dumb animal’  she is never a number, never a cause which we can wave like a flag, but always a being with a name, a personality and a unique history. Someone who has been called into existence by the surpassing love of God and whose great dignity resides in the fact that he or she was created for loving communion with God.

For too many of the leaders of our world, the human being is reduced to a cog, a wheel in a political system. For Catholic Social teaching, the human person, the individual member of God’s holy flock lies always at the summit of the political and social order so that economics and politics are meant for the service of people and not the other way around. A leader in the Catholic understanding, defends PEOPLE and not interests. There is a particular way of speaking of the church’s interests in our time, our powerful institutions of learning, our hospitals, our schools, our orphanages, Catholic media and so forth as if these were the things that truly matter. At the heart of it all, is the human person who, for the ideal shepherd is never reduced to a state of bland anonymity but a precious child of God, co-heirs with us to the promise of the Kingdom of God whose dignity and safety may never be compromised.

Even for example as we serve the poorest of the poor, Pope Benedict in his letter Deus Caritas est,  writes: Christian charity is not a means of changing the world ideologically, … but it is a way of making present here and now the love which man always needs. Furthermore, he says: Those who work for the Church’s charitable organizations must be distinguished by the fact that they do not merely meet the needs of the moment, but they dedicate themselves to others with heartfelt concern, enabling them to experience the richness of their humanity. The act of Christian charity is a moment of encounter, a moment when the richness of our own humanity encounters the richness of another.

Today I am also moved by another metaphor in the reading that Jesus uses for the leader. He speaks of the leader as the “gate. “I tell you most solemnly, I am the gate of the sheepfold. All others who have come ae thieves and brigands.”To say that the leader is a “gate” is to say that the leader understands himself or herself as kind of “passageway” to life. The true leader lets people pass “through” them and not “to” them. This is the leader who is non-possessive and who is not interested in making disciples for themselves. Tragically, history has known many leaders who were exactly the opposite. Today, I want to pray in a very special way for our own shepherds, the priests, especially the parish priests, that their ministry will always be the kind of visionary leadership which facilitates the authentic human development of their people and that they may always leave behind them people who are happy, deeply Catholic in their outlook and values, confident in their own abilities and who exercise visionary and encouraging leadership of those in their care.