“Thy Rod and Thy Staff”: The Grace of Discipline
sixth in a guest series by Myles Werntz on Psalm 23 and the moral life
The way of the LORD leads us through Death’s shadow, that we might not fear the path through which we are brought to God, a path which the LORD has made, and which the LORD lights. The moral life which we are led into is one which the LORD sustains, and one in which there is opposition. But the opposition, we have seen, is not one which is ultimate: light precedes darkness, and whatever darkness is, it depends on light for its very existence.
Our moral lives persist in that shadow, but we do not live it on our own strength or direction. And yet we must move through it. “Discernment”, that buzzword of the moral life, appears before us as a possible mode of approach in the dark, of choosing between good and evil. There is a kind of utilitarian calculus hiding here, that goodness is a matter not just of choosing the greatest good for the greatest number, but that choosing the good is a matter of weighing options. This approach, though, assumes that we know both the infinite facets of an option, and more importantly, the path this option will go in the future.
Lest we follow this path, Bonhoeffer again comes to our aid: the point of the moral life, he says, was never that we were meant to choose between good and evil, to discern first. Maximus the Confessor before him made this point: our wills, choosing between options, is a fallen faculty, mimicking the temptation of the serpent to even be able to perform this function. Our vocation, they argue, was never to weigh good and evil, as we could hold oceans in our hands, but to follow divine leading, and in that following, to understand the wisdom of that way.
But how to follow? What tools are given us for this end?
Authority Under Death’s Shadow
Before we describe the gifts of rod and staff, a moment of sobriety: in the world of Death’s shadow, there is disorientation, not the least of which pervades our sense of the path. Some plurality of the paths, as we have seen, is intrinsic to the act of living, the distensions of time and culture. And all of these paths are relative to this one path: the path through Death’s shadow. The moral distinctions which we make among paths—between the moral life of the Jew and the Gentile, the male and the female, the poor and the rich—are drawn together ecumenically here, the shared journey of mortality. That this is our shared life, despite all other fine distinctions, refocuses what is central to the moral life: our notions of freedom, agency, power, and goodness must never pretend that they will live forever, but that even hard-fought freedom will ultimately end in dust.
The context of shared suffering, then, is what joins our pursuits together, a strange sort of ecumenical ethic. It is the union between Jerusalem and Galatia in famine, the common link of Paul in Rome and the church in Phillipi: that in and through that common suffering, the suffering LORD leads them together. But left to its own, “shared suffering” can become its own tournament, that the ones who have suffered the most become the most authoritative among us. This is not to diminish the suffering of the saints or the piety of the martyrs, but to say that what the martyrs point to is not their own suffering but to, as it were, the rod and staff: our common suffering is what joins us together, but it is the leading of the LORD who is determinate for our shared journey.
The leading of the LORD, and the rod and the staff, come into focus in this way: they persist within the conditions of Death’s shadow, and more specifically, among a flock joined together not by culture or tongue, but their shared suffering. And so, the rod and staff exist not to increase that suffering, but to shepherd us within it. The rod and staff, far from being the instruments of power, appear among us as comforts, and in that way—and only in that form—do they offer protection.
Whence Authority?
The rod and staff, joined as they are here, invite a question: how do they function? The one LORD who guides us through Death’s shadow is the one LORD who loves both fields and temples, and so it will not do to play them off of one another. The rod, identified in Scripture with the protective royal presence of the LORD, and the staff, the guiding crook of the shepherd, are not the same: these tandem signs of city and pasture, of the shepherd boy and the city king he will usurp, come to us not sequentially, but as the inseparable operations of the one LORD. There is no competition here between guidance and authority, nor compassion and direction: they are one in the LORD, and one in those the LORD calls, as sheep among sheep, to lead the flock.
Their presence together mirrors the LORD who brings them: the LORD who is the shepherd, God in crucified flesh, authority in fragile form. Whatever more the authority of the LORD might mean, it cannot mean less than this: that it is tied up in the life of the sheep, and must be intelligible to them. The words of the LORD appear to us as words, and thus, as words that can be apprehended, followed, misunderstood, interpreted. The words come to us through mouths of sheep, male and female, no differently made than other sheep. The words come to us as words which can be deliberated over time, commands to be implemented.
And so, the words of authority appear not as thunderclaps, but as bleats. The risk the LORD takes here is evident, but also fitting of sheep: we are led in fitting ways, by unworthy servants and by those whose pasts we remember. But they come on borrowed authority—that of the Shepherd—who leads all the sheep. Those called from among the sheep readily take up the staff, as if the two instruments are separable, but this is to presume that the Shepherd is other than the LORD, that the operations of God are divisible, that somehow the face of Jesus is other than the face of God. And so, authority and compassion are healed in our sight, with authority made to accompany others and compassion the ruling face.
Discipline’s Grace
The leading of the LORD is within the shadows illuminated by the LORD, and through the ways of Death. The moral life of the flock is not which is maintained by our attempts at self-possession. The Stoics, emphasizing that no external forces could cancel our dignity and our ability to live a moral life, were half-right: neither life nor death separates us from God’s love, but this is not to say that our faculties—our reason, our consciences, our discernments of morals—are immune from Death and all its friends. As time grows long, our bodies and minds betray us; well-ingrained morals give way to the mind’s dissolution; if we forget even ourselves, would we not also forget to love others as ourselves?
In light of Death’s undoing of our bodies, what good is discipline? What good is the harnessing of desire, of habit and thought, in light of Death? If we think of habit as that which emerges from the self-possessed individual, Death always an end to our desire for habit. But this is not how the rod and staff direct. The rod and staff, as gifts for our leading by the Shepherd-LORD, are gifts which emerge from among the flock; as such, they are ever present helps to lead us forward. As gifts given in common, the rod and staff are tools which transfigures our singular lives into icons meant to be hung in the halls alongside the saints. We do not engage in the disciplined life alone, but alongside those who have gone before, and among the flock. When I cannot walk forward, I am nudged forward and sometimes carried, reflecting the truth of the moral life: we are always and ever joined together as members of the flock, and as such, the rod and staff are from me—correction and authority which I can share with others--and for me—the gift returned again.
In this gift of discipline, there is an unevenness: the water is given to all to drink, but not all of Joshua’s soldier’s drink it well. Not all the kings of Israel raise the people up to the LORD, and not all the prophets speak truthfully. The gift of discipline is received as such: as a gift, consonant with the LORD’s own presence, though we may be ruined of the words which name those gifts. It is in remembering that it is by the LORD that they appear at all, that the sheep are not left to do the right in their own eyes, that we can be led out of our fragmented moral lives and into a flock comprised of sheep spotted, striped, and spotless, that all might inherit the provisions of the green pastures and still waters.