The Lamb of God, Pope Francis & the Smell of Sheep

Readings for 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time: I SAM 3: 3B-10, 19; PS 40: 4, 7-10; I COR 6: 13C-15A, 17-20; JN 35-42

Over his years in office, Pope Francis has come in for some harsh criticism from the U.S. right wing. But most of the time he had been simply ignored.

It’s not just because of his rejection of free market capitalism, trickle-down theory, and huge income disparities between the rich and poor. It’s not just his openness to gays and divorcees, and his refusal to obsess about abortion and contraception.

Yes, all of these have undermined what conservatives have seen as a close alliance between the Catholic Church and their pet causes and thinking modes — not to mention the Republican Party.

However, the straw breaking the back of reactionaries was probably the pope’s unequivocal warnings about climate change. For those conservatives, the publication of his eco-encyclical, Laudato Si, 2 ½ years ago raised the threatening specter of a global Catholic climate change movement potentially mobilizing the world’s 1.2 billion members.

The question is: why did the reactionaries prevail? Why after almost 3 years have Catholics not fore-fronted such a movement? Why, instead, did a majority of them in the 2016 elections vote for climate-change-denier, Donald Trump?

Could it be that the right wing persuaded Catholics that the pope was overstepping his authority? Or, on their own, did they intuit the drastic lifestyle conversion implied in effectively addressing climate chaos in the ways Pope Francis suggested? As announced in the title of Naomi Klein’s book, did they sense that This Changes Everything? Did they fear that taking on climate change as a moral issue would undermine the American Way of Life based on insane Republican (and Democratic) policies promising unlimited economic growth on a locked and limited planet?

Were they somehow convinced by the rhetoric like that of First Things blogger, Maureen Mullarkey who simply dropped all pretense and turned to full attack mode? According to Mullarkey , Pope Francis was simply “an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist. His clumsy intrusion into the Middle East and covert collusion with Obama over Cuba makes that clear. Megalomania sends him galloping into geopolitical—and now meteorological—thickets, sacralizing politics and bending theology to premature, intemperate policy endorsements.”

Do the Catholics ignoring Pope Francis agree with Mullarkey that he pretty much stinks?

Wrestling with such questions in those terms is inspired by today’s gospel reading. It’s all about stink – about sheep and what Pope Francis calls “the smell of the sheep.” (Famously, you recall, the pontiff called on Catholic priests to live closer to the poor, to recognize them as God’s people and their welfare as the guideline for economic and social policy – to “take on,” he said, “the smell of the sheep.”)

Is it possible that conservatives have been put off by Pope Francis and vilify him because he smells too much like sheep — like the poor. He smells too much like Jesus.

Notice that in today’s gospel, John the Baptizer identifies Jesus as “the Lamb of God.” To begin with, the phrase reminds us of the Bedouin origin of the biblical “People of God.” Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the great King David were all shepherds. They were primitive people close to the earth. They were tribalists. In that sense, Jesus was a tribalist. According to John’s image, Jesus didn’t just smell like sheep; he was a sheep! He was in spades like his slave and Bedouin ancestors — like the poor people the pope has centralized during the entirety of his papacy.

Pope Francis shares Jesus’ closeness to and concern for tribal people. And he’s practicing what he preaches — both liberation theology’s “preferential option for the poor,” and the traditionally Catholic principle of subsidiarity. That means he endorses economic and environmental policy not on the basis of market dictates, but according to human decisions about values like the common good. Humane policy, the pope implies, originates not on Wall Street, but in places like the slums of his native Argentina and the Philippines.

As our century’s most powerful illumined voice of conscience, Francis has used his bully pulpit to wake us up. But we don’t seem to be listening. We’re like Samuel in today’s first reading – fast asleep even before the Ark of the Covenant (a reminder of Israel’s enslaved and Bedouin past). But we fail to recognize the biblical tradition’s significance to our lives – its call to tribal values which unfailingly center on animals, human family, and Mother Earth. We fail to see the implications of Paul’s observation in today’s second reading that all human beings – especially the poor and outcast – are temples of God’s spirit. That’s our tradition! That same Spirit resides, the pope says, in the planet that he (like St. Francis himself) calls our Mother and Sister.

So what kind of conversion do we need? What would a global Catholic climate movement look like?

It would entail:

• Waking up like the young prophet Samuel. Like him we’ve heard God’s call many times. But at last in Pope Francis, we have a thought-leader speaking in a voice the simplest of us can hear. It’s the voice of conscience. And like Eli it’s giving us the proper way to respond: “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.”

A global Catholic climate movement further entails:

• Embracing conservation as a moral issue deeply connected with faith
• Forming a serious study group to internalize Pope Francis’ faith-based approach to climate change
• Rejecting of superficial criticisms like Mullarkey’s suggesting that the pope is somehow an outlier on the question of climate
• Repudiating of corporation-based globalization which has us (over)consuming imported necessities that could be home-grown.
• Joining the fight against fracking and projects like the XL Pipeline
• Voting accordingly.
• Urging the institutions we can influence (churches, universities, hospitals . . .) to divest from fossil fuel industries.
• Adopting a “zero waste” policy in our homes and places of work.
• Cultivating home gardens.
• Adopting a vegetarian diet.
• Educating ourselves about “green burial” and including plans for that in our “living wills.”

The list, of course, goes on. But you get the idea.

Pope Francis is showing us the way out of our collective insanity. It is not too late for Catholics and others of good will to wake up and join his Global Movement to save the planet.