The peace of the lamb

 A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 10: 1-9), a passage chosen to mark the feast of Saint Cyril and St Methodius, is one of those parts of the gospel where one could dwell on every line for quite some time. Every expression, every metaphor, and every allusion is pregnant with meaning and significance for the disciples of the Lord. Perhaps, the selection of the seventy-two disciples and their commissioning as missionaries of the good news might make us feel that these are words addressed to those in consecrated life rather than to every Christian. Indeed, in a very concrete sense, the commissioning of the seventy-two is like the creation of the presbyterate, just as the commissioning of the Twelve is the foundation of the episcopate. Yet, in a broader sense, these seventy-two disciples stand for every one of us, and while we may not all live out every single counsel that Jesus places on their shoulders, we are at least called to emulate who they were. And who were they but lambs in the midst of wolves?

To be a lamb in the Christian sense is to be many things. First, it is to be an image of Christ who is the Lamb of God, the Saviour sent for the redemption of the world. St Augustine says that while he is a Christian for himself, he is a priest for others. But on another level, we may observe that to be Christian is to be for others, and primordially for God. Greater love than this hath no one, that a man should lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13). Saint Peter tells us that we are all priests, prophets, and kings, meaning that we all share something of these characteristics which exist substantially in the person of Jesus Christ. We are not all appointed to minister sacramentally to his Mystical Body for that is a role accorded only by the Sacrament of Orders, and, nevertheless, there must be something Christlike in each and every one of us. To be a Christian, therefore, is to be a lamb.

With this slightly uncomfortable reflection, we may consider an even more uncomfortable reflection: that we are sent out as lambs among wolves. Here, Jesus’ metaphor evokes everything about the world that we may fear. I take the world in the sense that Saint John gives to that word: the way in which its forces seem ranged against us, the pressure that they exert on us, the exploitation and manipulation they impose. The intent of the wolf is to consume the lamb while the prospect of the unwary lamb is literally to become a lamb’s supper. Who then is the wolf? We may well ask the question, as the scribe who asked Jesus: who then is my neighbour? And the answer to the first question is disturbingly close to the answer to the second. The wolf is my neighbour, my brother, and my sister. Indeed, as the decadent French poet Baudelaire wrote:

Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère

Hypocritical reader, you who resemble me, my brother.

In other words, you, reader, are the wolf and so too am I. Not that I am all bad (and neither may I say are you). It’s just that we are shapeshifters or, if you prefer, backsliders. Like eggs that can stand on neither of their ends, in the absence of God’s help, we humans are prone first to disobedience and then to every other disgrace that follows on our liberation from God. When we are good, we are very, very good, and when we are bad, we can be rotten. We are lambs by our baptism, we are wolves by birth. We cannot but be sent out as lambs among wolves, for the wolves are among us; indeed, except when we are faithful, they are ourselves.

Every society or indeed social group is prone to want to identify the guilty ones among them – the source of the trouble they all suffer from – and as often as not they scapegoat the wrong person. The key insight of Christianity was to show us that the scapegoat, Christ, is innocent, and that it is we – the rest of us – who are the guilty ones, the source of the problem. In short, the wolves.

But if we are then sent out as lambs among the wolves, we are called to recognise a reality that is, as Chesterton was wont to say, stereoscopic. Saints are not so very different from sinners. Jesus himself said the just man falls seven times a day. We are clay vessels, and even the best of us lack conviction at times and may be full of passionate intensity at just the wrong moments and in just the wrong ways.

These realities are not a reason to despair but rather to become realistic about who we are and about our utter dependence on God. When we say “Peace be to this house” to our neighbour, we must remember that we are unreliable diplomats of peace unless we keep our hearts for the Lord. For that, we must recall that only in the reign of Christ can His peace flourish; only if we say our “yes” continually; only when He remains master of the house, can we we sure that the house is inhabited by lambs, rather than being overrun by wolves.

The editors of today’s gospel extract did not include verses 10-12 from the tenth chapter of Luke, and yet their conclusion is part of the admonition we must daily administer to ourselves:

But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, “Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.” I tell you, it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom than for all that town. Such are the words of the Lamb, Christ.

For ourselves, the meaning is clear: to be born a wolf is no excuse for remaining a wolf. If the miracles of grace performed in us had been performed in our neighbours, they would long ago have repented, sitting in sackcloth and ashes.

Peace then be upon all our houses, the peace of Christ in the reign of Christ.