Easter
4A
In our gospel today, our Lord gives us a pastoral
image of the relationship between Himself and His disciples. Our Lord is the
Good Shepherd whose objective is to give abundant life to His flock. But He
also reminds us that there are charlatans abroad – they are not there to give
life, but to steal and kill and destroy. There is then this basic option: life or death. The way of abundant life is to
follow the Good Shepherd, for He will lead His flock to fresh pastures, and
even though they walk through the valley of the shadow of death, they will not
fear, for they know their Shepherd and Guardian is with them.
One of the features of this pastoral image is of the
closeness between the shepherd and his flock. They know His voice, they trust
only His voice, and He knows them personally/individually. He speaks and walks
out of the sheepfold and they follow. They don’t need to be driven, they
follow.
Our Saviour Jesus Christ is the eternal Shepherd and
Guardian of our souls. We are the sheep of His flock by being members of His
Church. If you like Holy Baptism made us into His sheep!
But I think the questions we must ask ourselves are
whether we do recognise His voice, whether we do indeed trust Him, and whether
we do indeed follow Him. Now this might sound like a strange thing, for we are
the baptised, but we need to remember that baptism does not mean we are
thereafter controlled by God. We still have free will, and we can still choose
to ignore, to disobey, to listen to other voices, and to follow other shepherds.
Remember the shepherds of Jesus’ time did not drive their sheep, they led them
and they chose whether to follow or
not.
This gospel, pastoral image reminds us today of a
number of things but basically that the way to “abundant life” as Jesus puts
it, or we could say the “life of grace”, or indeed “salvation”, is not
automatic. Just as the sheep is not protected by the shepherd if the sheep
chooses to not listen, to not trust, and to not follow when he calls, so it is
for us. Salvation is not automatic.
It is the closeness between the shepherd and each
sheep that perhaps we need to dwell upon today. Our shepherd does indeed speak
to us through His most Holy Word and by the action of the Holy Spirit within
us, but we must ask ourselves are we listening? How much time are we willing to
spend in listening to our Lord’s voice? The world in which we live today, and
especially because of all the media we have at our disposal, means that there
are voices all around us. Are we listening to them more than we are listening
to the Word of God? It is the voices we listen to most of the time that we end
up following. That’s the way it works. The more we listen, the more inclined we
are to trust and to follow.
So we should all ask ourselves a basic question –
how much time each week am I listening to God’s Word, and how much time am I
listening to the various voices of the world? St Paul says in Romans, in a
verse that means a great deal to me personally, but I also think is very
important for our present time, “Do not be conformed to this world but be
transformed by the renewal of your mind...” Now we will be conformed to the
world if that is what we listen to most of time – if we prefer the voices of
the world to the Word of God, then our lives will more and more conform to the
world – which means in terms of the pastoral image, that we are following other
shepherds. It is very simple and straightforward. The other shepherds are not
shepherds in fact, they are (as our Lord tells us) charlatans, they might
promise us all sorts of good things but in fact want to kill, to steal and to
destroy. So we have that basic choice. The voices that we choose to listen to
through each day shape our soul.
You see it is tempting to think that these other
voices are not really doing us any harm. But it is because we prefer them to
God’s Word speaking to us, and we prefer those voices to building up our
relationship in prayer, and we prefer those voices to spending time before our
Lord in the blessed Sacrament, that in fact they are doing us a great deal of
harm.
Today is also known as vocations Sunday, and Holy
Mother Church challenges us all to ask whether we are answering the call of God
– she challenges us to pray that all the baptised will hear the Shepherd’s
voice and answer His call to follow Him. Within God’s Holy People our Lord
calls us to take our part in the building up of the His Body, His Church. For
some He calls them to live the Religious Life – to live the Kingdom of God now,
in community life as religious brothers or sisters, as friars, or monks or
nuns. For some of the men He calls them to share directly in His pastoral
ministry as priests of the Church – He calls them to a life that shares His
Shepherding of the sheep. The priest at ordination is configured to Christ in a
way that enables Him to pastor Christ’s flock. And for many the Lord is calling
them as members of the laity to transform the world in which we live, to
conform the world to the gospel, and thus they must proclaim the gospel in the
lives they live and in the words they speak. Not least is the vocation to
Married life, when a life of particular intimacy and love results in family
life.
There are a whole host of ways in which our Lord,
the Shepherd and Guardian of our souls, is calling us. But the fundamental
question is: are we listening – do we even recognise His voice? Do we prefer to
listen to other voices that are perhaps easier on our ears and less demanding?
Today the Church needs more priests, more Religious
and more faithful families. Our Lord calls, He wants to lead us to a place of
abundant life, but are we listening?
Do
not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind,
that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and
perfect. Rom 12:2
