Ostracism and the Good Shepherd

In Athens, under the democracy, the Ancient Greeks had a procedure by which any citizen could be expelled from the city state for 10 years.

The procedure was called Ostracism.

The assembly would gather and every citizen would scratch the name of the one he wished to expel on a pottery sherd (ostraka) and put it in an urn.

6000 sherds with the same name guaranteed expulsion within 10 days.

In most cases this was not a punitive, but a preemptive procedure; a citizen was booted out not because he had caused problems, but in order to avoid potential trouble in the near future.

The property of the man banished was not confiscated and there was no loss of status,

but if he attempted to return before 10 years the penalty was death.

You have to admit that the Athenians had it right:

we are communal creatures, and the bonds of affection, the relationships that we form with each other are our most precious possession.

Expulsion from the group we belong to is the worst possible punishment.

No wonder the worst criminals are placed in isolation cells...

Our individual identity is so strongly tied into group identity that when we lose our community we lose ourselves, at least temporarily.

Nowadays we don’t use ostracism anymore, but we still have social rejection, which by definition is “any behavior in which a group or individual excludes and ignores another group or individual.” Social rejection happens to all of us at some point in life.

Unless we are extremely lucky, very naive, or totally unaware, sooner or later we find ourselves on the “wrong” side of some kind of wall.

It may happen at school, at work, in friendly or romantic relationships.

And it hurts.

If you don’t remember how much, ask any teenager you know.

As researchers have dug deeper into the roots of rejection, they've found surprising evidence that the pain of being excluded is not so different from the pain of physical injury. So when I say “it hurts”, I mean “it REALLY hurts.”

Rejection also has serious implications for an individual’s psychological state and for society in general. Social rejection can influence emotion, cognition, and even physical health. Ostracized people sometimes become aggressive and can turn to violence.

Human beings need community. It’s deep in the genes. We have a fundamental need to belong. Just as we need food and water, we also need positive and lasting relationships.

It goes back to the beginning of our evolutionary history, when co-operation meant survival and our instinct told us that the stranger was a threat.

As clever as human beings are, we rely on social groups for survival.

We evolved to live in cooperative societies, and for most of human history we depended on those groups for our lives.

A solitary human being could not have survived during the six million years of human evolution while we were living out there on the African savanna.

We still carry certain behaviors derived from our ancestral fears and needs.

Still we have to establish quickly whether someone we meet for the first time is friend or foe and nowadays we do that by figuring out whether the stranger we encounter knows somebody we know.

Watch people do it in any social context: “where are you from/What do you do”

are questions we ask to figure out not just whether we have something in common,

but somebody in common. The friend of my friend can be my friend too (even just the coworker, even the passing acquaintance).

I have lost count of the times I was asked whether I knew So-and-So in Italy

simply because I am Italian…

The triune God, eternally in relationship within the three persons of the Trinity

would never experience “social rejection”, but Jesus, God incarnate and made man,

knows and understands rejection and abandonment and all the feelings and the hurt that stem from there.

Through Jesus’ experience, God understands and shares the plea of the ones we call ‘the last, the least, and the lost’ those for whom nobody else cares.

And God cares deeply for those who are left outside of the circle, the ones the majority will work hard to forget.

In Jesus’ time it was the tax collectors and the sinners.

The first because they were doing something that no good son or daughter of Israel

would be caught dead doing, i.e. working for the hated Romans; the second because at the time sin was believed to be contagious in a very real way: consorting with sinners would render one impure and unfit for worship in the Temple.

Unfit for being close to God.

Jesus not only opened his arms of grace to them all, but went and sought them out, right there at the margins. Sharing time, empathy, food.

Today, social rejection affects the poor, the sick, the unemployed, the elderly

and also those who speak our language with difficulty or who dress, behave, think differently. They are ostracized by the majority, condemned to live at the margins of our circles of love, of our communities, of our society.

So the question that our Gospel reading poses for us today is: 

Who are the contemporary “good shepherds” who will go and meet the outcast on the way? Who is called to leave the comfortable and familiar behind and go out into the night to save the last, the least, and the lost from their very real pain?

Well, my brothers and sisters, you know it: that would be us - the Church.

Jesus calls US to acknowledge with gratitude how WE first have been welcomed in his circle, in his home, in spite of our many failings - that are well known to him - and to provide a similar circle of care, forgiveness, and love to others.

Jesus wants a missionary Church, a body that includes, that welcomes, that goes out into the broken world and brings the healing that only real acceptance and relationship can provide.

It is a tall order. It is a difficult call to put into practice.

Yet easy to understand and embrace when we remember how we were accepted first.

When we keep in mind that the good news for us and for the world is that God loves us first no matter what. It is totally doable (as my child would say), when together with Paul, the Apostle to the gentiles,we maintain the unshakable conviction

“that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)

It is this conviction that gives us strength and joy in our mission in the world and to the world; this knowledge that pushes us out at there at the margins, where too many others don’t want to go. It is this love that makes us a community of healers, shepherds, and imitators of Christ where everyone, every single one is welcome.

Amen