4th.
Sunday of Eastertide (A)
(Acts of
the Apostles 2:36-41; 1st. Letter of St. Peter 2:20b-25; John’s
Gospel 10:1-10)
In today’s Gospel passage, dear People
of God, there is mention of shepherds and their approach to, relationship with,
their sheep; and this is of practical interest for us today since parents, teachers,
political leaders, and indeed many others, can be regarded to a greater or
lesser extent as included in that word ‘shepherds’.
Jesus tells us that He Himself:
Came
so that they (the sheep of His flock) might have life.
There were many who had put
themselves forward as shepherds to God’s people in the long course of Israel’s
history and more especially in quite recent times; but they had all shown
themselves, or had been shown, to be not shepherds for life and salvation but bringers
of death and destruction as Jesus goes on to say:
All
who came before Me,
pretending to be saviours and guides, offering victory, life and
fulfilment –were in fact:
Thieves
and robbers.
Come only to steal and
slaughter and destroy; I came so that they might have life and have it more
abundantly.
He calls them ‘thieves and robbers’ –
very strong language for Jesus – because:
Jesus said, ‘I am
the gate for the sheep.’
Whoever enters through
the gate is the shepherd of the sheep.
They (did not and) do not enter the sheepfold through the gate but climb over elsewhere.
Now, the background of our Gospel
reading is to be found in the thirty-fourth chapter of the book of the prophet
Ezekiel. There the first part is – as in
today’s Gospel reading from St. John – about worthless, ruthless, shepherds who
feed themselves not the sheep; who, pursuing their own purposes, let the flock
be scattered over the face of the earth and become prey to wild beasts.
Then the prophet (vv. 11-16)
continues:
Thus says the Lord God:
Behold I, I Myself will search for My sheep and will seek them out. I will seek the lost, bring back the strayed,
bind up the crippled, strengthen the weak, and the fat and the strong I will
watch over; I will feed them in justice.
Therefore, when Jesus -- in
fulfilment of that prophecy -- said ‘I am the gate’, He was speaking divine
truth, as He went on to explain saying:
I am the good shepherd
... and I know mine as mine know Me, just as the Father knows Me and I know the
Father; and I will lay down My life for the sheep. I have come in the name of My Father.
Those pseudo-leaders, those false
shepherds whom the Jews had followed before Him had in no way entered through
Him, the only true gate; that is, they had not prepared the way for Him
(the only-begotten Son of the Lord God
of Israel), they had in no way spoken of, invoked, or witnessed to, Him. They had done all for their own glory, in
their own names:
You do not accept Me
(Who have come in My Father’s name); yet, if another comes in his own name, you
will accept him. (John 5:43)
Nevertheless, Jesus, was indeed the Way,
the Truth, and the Life, the gate through which the God of Israel was coming to
shepherd His flock. In and through the
very Person of Jesus -- Son of God and Son of man -- the Father Himself would feed
the flock, as the prophecy of Ezekiel (vv. 25ss.) foretold:
Thus says the Lord God:
My flock shall know that I am the Lord; they shall know that I,
the Lord their God, am with them and that they are My people, the sheep of My
pasture.
Therefore, although God’s Chosen People
of the New Covenant will still have shepherds to lead them in Jesus’ Church,
nevertheless, they also will – as living members of the Body of Christ -- be
able to recognize God’s Truth in the depths of their own hearts:
(Jesus said:) My
teaching is not My own but is from the One who sent Me. Whoever chooses to do His will shall know
whether My teaching is from God or whether I speak on My own. Whoever speaks on his own seeks his own glory,
but whoever seeks the glory of the One Who sent Him is truthful and there is no
wrong in Him. (John 7: 16-19)
Notice then, dear People of God, the
great freedom of God’s flock in Christ: ‘I
am the gate. Anyone who enters through
Me’ -- that is, whosoever enters God’s sheepfold through faith in and love for,
Christ – ‘will go freely in and out and
be sure of finding pasture.’ The flock do indeed see, hear, and confidently
follow God-given shepherds going before them to a future, as yet unseen, divine fulfilment.
Though still on the way they can, however,
in times of need or deep personal prayer, be strengthened, even thrilled and
delighted, by an awareness of the mysterious presence of God Himself -- the most
merciful and bountiful Cause, the great Hope and supreme Aspiration, of all
that is beautiful and harmonious in their lives – in the dedicatedly secret
shrine of their own loving and obedient mind and heart.
This has most important consequences
for us.
First of all, the People of God – ‘those
who choose to do His will’ -- can never, as a whole with the Pope, be
led astray by false teachers; for Jesus Himself promised most clearly (John
7:17):
They shall know whether My teaching is from God;
That is, they will be able to
recognize the divine truth of Christian teaching causing peace and hope to rise
up within their own God-seeking hearts; for Jesus, Head of the Church which is
His Body, and the Spirit, the Father-given and Jesus-sent ‘Helper’, are inseparably
with the Church in all her trials.
As individuals however, we all have,
for our part, the obligation so to live our Christian and Catholic lives that that
God-given ability to respond to divine truth is never obscured, tainted, let
alone poisoned, in what should to be the spontaneous appreciation of our hearts;
for sinful living, pride, indulgence, worldly cares and preoccupations can turn
disciples aside from their Christian commitment and ideals, and gradually lead them
to mistake error for truth and to follow false prophets and hirelings instead
of true shepherds and even Christ Himself.
Therefore, it behoves us, St. Peter writes, to:
Be sober and vigilant
for your opponent the devil is prowling round like a roaring lion looking for
someone to devour. (1 Peter 5:8)
Above all, however, let us confidently
adopt positive endeavours let us ‘put on Christ’ by sincerely following the
teaching of God proclaimed by Mother Church in its fullness, and by our own
personal prayer and patience, that thus we can be gradually led to humbly
recognize and joyfully experience a clear echo and loving response to God’s
truth in our souls. That response will come
to mean more and more to us because God has indeed most truly given us an inner
divine life which, when fully developed, pulsates in rhyme and rhythm with,
positively thrills in response to, His Fatherly call and teaching.
If, on the other hand, the truths of
faith, the life and promises of Jesus in the Scriptures, and the Christian practice
of your vocation of loving obedience to God and service of your neighbour, seem
cold, impersonal, and fruitless to you, then it might perhaps be a fact
that God is testing you for your greater good, as He has done with many great
saints and even with Jesus Himself. However,
such dryness or distaste may also –and much
more probably – prove to be a fault in your way of living the Christian life:
perhaps you have been only existing, not really living in Christ, neither
loving His Person sincerely nor committing yourselves trustingly to His divine Providence
and His guiding Spirit of Truth and Love.
But, whatever be the cause of any such personal lassitude, divine trial
or personal fault, we do know most certainly that Jesus came, as He said, for
one supreme purpose: that we might have life in all its fullness:
I
came so that (you) might have life and have it to the full.
Therefore, as we proceed in our
celebration of this Mass, the great sacrament of Jesus’ life and death for us,
let us beg Him for a deeper -- oh so much deeper! -- share in His Spirit of life
and love so that we may be enabled thereby to respond with all the love and
devotion of which we are capable to His divine truth and beauty in all the myriad
forms in which we can encounter it here below.
For such is the whole purpose and aim of our new and heavenly life: that
we come to recognize and appreciate the original meaning of God’s
self-revelation in His beautiful creation, and that we learn to whole-heartedly
vibrate in harmony with the heavenly music of His saving purpose, our
redemption through Jesus Christ, His only-begotten Son-made-flesh ever
witnessing here on earth to His Father by His Spirit bestowed on Mother Church
for the salvation of all men and women of good-will throughout time.
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