Christ the Good Shepherd for Oppressed and Oppressors 

On Good Shepherd Sunday, we are reminded that Jesus Christ is the Good Shepherd because he lays down his life for the sheep. If Christians took this designation Christ gives to himself with any seriousness, they would see that all people are either simply sheep who were sought out and redeemed by Christ, or they are not, at least not yet. Another way to say this, of particular significance this week, is to say that the Good News of Jesus Christ the Good Shepherd is Good News for oppressed and oppressor alike.

The Good Shepherd – Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1922.
The Newark Museum of Art. Public Domain.

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One of the most influential Christians of the twentieth century is a German theologian named Jürgen Moltmann, whose theology is valued for its emphasis on hope in Christ, and themes of reconciliation. Moltmann was, like many Germans of his generation, raised by Nazi ideology, joined the Hitler Youth, and was eventually conscripted into the German army. He was captured by a British soldier near his native city of Hamburg, and taken to a prisoner of war camp. In this camp, Moltmann came to learn of the atrocities that he was, in part, responsible for and wished he had been killed in battle so that he did not have to deal with the weight of what he and his nation had done. It was in this time of darkness that he was befriended by an American Army Chaplain, who gave him a copy of the New Testament and met regularly with him to discuss it. Gradually, Moltmann’s personal darkness was transformed by the light of Christ, an experience that gave Moltmann the vision for a theology that has served the church wherever there is conflict and strife because of racial and political division, particularly in South Africa and South America. Moltmann reflected on his experience of coming to know Christ as a prisoner, saying, “I didn’t find Christ, he found me.”

Jesus the Good Shepherd seeks out the least and the lost, both the oppressed and the oppressor. It is a scandalous truth, but a truth nonetheless, and a truth the Church must rediscover that it might share it with a world that desperately needs to hear it. Christians are being tempted, as they always are, with human solutions to human problems. Choose this or that, the logic of such decisions tells us. To follow Christ faithfully in the midst of our own strife and divisions is simply to reject that logic, reject that way of thinking, and to choose Christ the Good Shepherd instead. We can only count ourselves among the sheep because of the Shepherd, because we have been found by him when we were lost, whatever form our lostness may take.

Fr. Matt