THE BEAUTIFUL SHEPHERD

From today’s Gospel passage a face emerges, that of Christ the good shepherd. Well, I would like to concentrate on this face, and I would like to do so (since we are faced with a literary image) starting from a qualifying adjective which in Greek – the language in which the Fourth Gospel is written – is kalos. This adjective has been variously translated as good, suitable, and, last but not least, beautiful. Therefore Christ says of himself: “I am the beautiful shepherd”. But what beauty is he talking about? Let’s go gradually. We Christians must never forget that Jesus is not only an ethical model to inspire us but he is above all a mystery that must amaze and attract us. If we open the Gospels, it does not emerge that Jesus plagiarized or made fanatics of those who followed him; Yes, Jesus conquered his interlocutors and conquered them, always leaving their freedom intact. This is a fundamental aspect in following the Gospel and also responds to an anthropological issue well highlighted by the great Saint Augustine where he wrote that man, every man, always acts following what he likes best. Augustine spoke of delectatio victrix (enthralling pleasure). Christ must then increasingly become for us a pleasure that captivates, that irresistibly attracts and that, therefore, conquers. But beauty has two faces, as the ancient Greeks already taught us: it is Apollonian and Dionysian, harmonious and chaotic, luminous and dark. Rilke stated that «the beautiful is nothing other than the beginning of the terrible». Whoever looks at Christ then sees this double aspect: on the one hand he sees the beauty that radiates from his life. Christ attracts his interlocutors because he understands the suffering that goes through them, because he speaks the truth, and has a pure eye, a word that digs into the depths of the soul. On the other hand, those who look at Christ recognize that this beauty is crucified. Christ is glorious and crucified at the same time. And we must never separate these two traits. He suffers the loss of his authentic face. Furthermore, by bringing our gaze to him, we should let ourselves be wounded by that crucified beauty, we should see in that wound (think of the open side) a crack through which to see the Infinity, the eternal Source of Love. In this regard, we all remember the famous cut of the Milanese painter Lucio Fontana. Well, when they asked him what that cut meant he replied: “With this cut I just want to create a glimmer of the absolute.” Here, crucified beauty pushes the human gaze upwards and beyond and asks the question, that question that makes man a seeker. But not only that, crucified beauty redeems us from two monsters that loom over our life and work; two monsters that are based on the same etymological root but are different from a semantic point of view: ugliness, an ethical category, and ugliness, an aesthetic category. We are surrounded by banality, malice, stupidity, vulgarity… we sometimes live in ugly spaces, soulless containers and all this almost like a basso continuo that accompanies living and even dying. Crucified beauty, however, when recognized in faith, redeems us. Even a ferocious anti-Christian like Henry Miller confessed this when he said: «Beauty and faith are of no use except to show the meaning of life». The way of beauty that Christ, the beautiful shepherd, inaugurated is the way of love. The via pulchritudinis is a via amoris. And this love is expressed for Jesus through gratuitousness: he in fact exposed his life, in obedience to the Father, to the point of losing it, and then disposed of his life in favour of his brothers until his death. But what makes Christ beautiful is not only his generosity but also his affection (he calls his sheep by name, one by one), and last but not least his guardianship (he defends his sheep from bandits and thieves).

​Commentary by b. Sandro Carotta, osb
Abbazia di Praglia (Italy)

Translation by f. Mark Hargreaves,
Prinknash Abbey