• What the word actually means
• The man whose name is in the prayer
• Where the church swaps the verb
• Whom I am naming, and why the text requires it
• The vestry sink
• The chair of the ancients
• Back to Advent

Feed my sheep.

Three imperatives before anything else happens, and every one of them is the same imperative. Feed my lambs. Feed my sheep. And then, when the Lesson arrives, feed the flock of God which is among you.

Feed my sheep, and that is the job.

I want to spend this morning on the verb, because I think the verb is the whole argument and I think it is the part we skip.

What the word actually means

Feeding is not a state of mind. It is a physical transaction with an output, and the output is that somebody who was hungry is now not hungry. It has a quantity. It has a frequency. It can be measured by asking the people who ate.

Feed my sheep, and you can tell whether it happened.

That matters because the other word available here is one this Mass never uses. Not once are we told to hold the flock. Not once are we told to keep it from anything, to draw a line around it, or to stand at the door of it. The order is catering, and it is given to the man everybody remembers for the keys.

Feed my sheep, three times, and the keys are one line in a Gospel that has already said this first.

The Lesson takes the same verb and does the same thing with it. Feed the flock of God, it says, and then it sets three conditions, and all three are about the manner of the feeding rather than the fitness of the fed. Not under compulsion. Not for money. Not from above.

Feed my sheep, and the only person under examination in that sentence is the one holding the ladle.

I am not going to make the argument I made in November about that Lesson, because I made it, and it is there to be read rather than said twice. That day asked which of the two people in the room the conditions were written for. Today asks something smaller and plainer, which is what the job is.

Feed my sheep. The job is the meal.

The man whose name is in the prayer

The Collect this morning is the same one we heard yesterday, with a different name inside it. Today it belongs to Damasus, and the Catholic Encyclopedia gives the shape of him. Born about 304, to a father named Antonius and a mother named Laurentia. He grew up in the service of the church of the martyr St. Laurence in Rome. He was elected in October of 366 and he died on the eleventh of December, 384, after eighteen years.

Feed my sheep, prayed this morning through a man who held the office for eighteen years.

Two things he did with those years are worth the whole feast, and both of them are the verb.

The first is that he induced Jerome to undertake the revision of the earlier Latin versions of the Bible. That is the encyclopedia’s own phrase, and the man it describes was for a time his confidential secretary. Think about what that act actually is. It is a bishop taking the measure of the texts his people are hearing and concluding that the problem is the food.

Feed my sheep, and the first thing he does is check what is in the bowl.

The second is the tombs. He had, the article says, an extraordinary devotion to the Roman martyrs. He restored the catacombs. He composed the epitaphs for the graves, and he had them set in a lettering so distinctive that it carries his name to this day, cut by Furius Dionysius Filocalus.

Feed my sheep, and he spends part of eighteen years making graves legible.

I find that second one harder to dismiss the more I sit with it. Those inscriptions answered no pressing need. The dead were already dead and already honoured, and a man with eighteen years and a city to run had a great many more urgent things in front of him.

Feed my sheep, and one of the things he put in front of people was a name they could read.

Both acts are the same act. A readable book and a readable stone are both somebody deciding that his people should be able to take in what is there, rather than being told it is there and left to manage. He held synods too, and sent legates to a council, and those are real. But the two things that survive him best are a text and a set of letters cut in stone, and each of them is food handed over in a form a person can actually eat.

Feed my sheep. Not tell them there is a kitchen.

Where the church swaps the verb

Here is the harm, and it is ordinary rather than dramatic.

A community with something precious in it will, given time, start describing its work as custody. The vocabulary moves without anybody voting on it. Words like minding the deposit, holding the line, keeping the faith intact, being careful who we let near it. None of that is wicked and most of it is sincere.

Feed my sheep, and not one of those phrases has an eating in it.

Custody has a fatal property that catering does not: it is discharged by withholding. A storekeeper who issues nothing has kept a perfect store. A cook whose pans are still full has not cooked. So the moment an office understands itself as custody, its own success becomes indistinguishable from giving nothing out, and the failure does not register from inside because the thing is still there on the shelf.

Feed my sheep, and the shelf is not the point of the shelf.

You do not need any of the theology for this. A body that exists to hand something out will drift, over years, into behaving as though it exists to keep it, and the drift is never announced. The test of whether it has happened is not what the body says about itself. It is whether anybody has eaten lately.

Feed my sheep, and count the plates.

Whom I am naming, and why the text requires it

I am naming people who are poor this morning, and I am naming them on provision.

The teaching I mean is the one that treats material help as a distraction from the real work, or as something that follows conversion rather than precedes it. It is rarely said outright. It shows up as a preference for the spiritual over the practical, as a worry about dependency, as a sense that a church which simply feeds people has become a service and lost its purpose.

Feed my sheep, said to the first pope, with no clause underneath it about souls being the actual business.

The verb in this Mass will not carry that. It is the plainest word available and the Missal repeats it three times rather than reaching for a better one. Whatever else the office is, it is an office that hands things over.

Feed my sheep, and no adjective anywhere is doing the work of separating bread from grace.

Six days ago we kept a Friday in Advent and I named the same people, under any merits of ours, on contribution: on standing being priced against what a person can put into a room. Today is the same axis run the other way. That day asked what you have to put in. This one asks what you get handed.

Feed my sheep, and the two questions are not the same question.

A community can get the first one right and the second one badly wrong. It can charge nothing at the door and still run its actual provision on a quiet order of merit, so that the people who receive most are the people whose lives are already settled, and the ones who need most are managed instead of fed.

Feed my sheep, and settled is not a criterion anywhere in this Mass.

Judge that teaching by what it grows, inside Christianity’s own record, since that is the only record we are entitled to examine. It has produced parishes with a food cupboard and a form. It has produced help offered with a conversation attached that the person did not ask for. It has produced a way of speaking about the people served that puts them in the third person while they are standing there. And it has produced a great deal of genuine generosity that arrived with a condition that was never written down.

Feed my sheep, and there is no form in the sentence.

The vestry sink

There is a story sometimes told of a woman of fifty-eight who has done the flowers in her church every other Saturday for nine years, and who stopped believing any of it somewhere in the middle of that.

It went slowly, over about eighteen months, the way these things usually go. She did not have a crisis and she did not have an argument with anybody. She simply found one spring that the words had come loose from the things, and that she was saying them out of muscle rather than conviction, and that this had been true for longer than she had admitted.

Feed my sheep, and here is a woman with nothing left to say and a bucket in her hand.

She did not resign from the rota. That is the whole of it, and I think it is more than it sounds. Every other Saturday she still lets herself into the vestry, runs the cold tap into the galvanised bucket, spreads yesterday’s newspaper on the draining board and cuts the stems at an angle because that is what she was taught in her first fortnight. Then she carries two jugs through and puts them where they go.

The flowers are for other people. They always were.

Feed my sheep, and she is feeding a room she cannot eat in herself.

She has never told the parish. The question has not been put to her and she has not raised it, partly because there is no natural moment and partly because she is not certain what she would say. Two people on the rota died. One moved. The lilies are ordered from the same supplier and the account is still in her name.

Feed my sheep, and the account is still in her name.

I am not going to tell you her faith came back, because as far as anyone knows it has not. This is not a story about a woman who kept going and was rewarded for it, and I would rather leave it bare than tidy it into that. She is still not certain what she thinks. The church is still getting its flowers.

Feed my sheep, and one of the people doing it may be running on nothing at all.

I tell it because the day’s verb does not ask her a single question she cannot answer. It does not ask what she believes. It asks whether anything was put in front of anybody, and every other Saturday for nine years the answer has been yes.

Feed my sheep is a test that does not turn on the thing most people are afraid of.

The chair of the ancients

The Gradual asks two things this morning, and the second one is the odd one. Let them exalt him in the church of the people, it says, and praise him in the chair of the ancients.

Two places, and they are not the same place. One is the assembly, which is everybody. The other is the seat of the elders, which is a small number of people and a piece of furniture.

Feed my sheep, and the Gradual will not let us keep the praise in one of those rooms only.

I said above that the office is defined by what it hands over. The Gradual says the same thing from the other direction: the exalting happens in the church of the people, in the plural, and the chair is mentioned second. A body that has its whole life in the chair has misplaced itself, and a body that has no elders at all has lost something too.

Feed my sheep, and the seat exists for the sake of the room.

The Secret carries it home. It asks that the Church be enlightened so that the flock may everywhere progress and prosper. Progress and prosper are increase words. They are not preservation words, and a flock cannot do either on an empty stomach.

Feed my sheep, and the prayer wants the flock bigger and better fed than it found it.

Back to Advent

None of this floats free of the fortnight it sits inside. We are three days from the Third Sunday of Advent and the whole season is one long argument about getting ready for somebody’s arrival.

The prayer for the feria this morning asks that we be stirred up to prepare the ways of the only-begotten Son. Preparing a way is roadwork. It is the least mystical verb in the season and it belongs beside today’s, because both of them are about what is actually in place when the person arrives.

Feed my sheep, and Advent is asking the same thing in a different trade.

So this is what I would leave with you on a small white feast in the middle of a violet fortnight. The office at the top of this Church was defined, in the first place, by an order to put food in front of people, given three times to a man who had every reason to think he was being handed something grander. Everything else the office has ever been is downstream of that.

Feed my sheep. Eighteen years, a readable book, and some legible stones.

Feed my sheep, and that is a life anybody could measure.

↑ The order resumes below.