Fifth Sunday of Easter

Dominica V Paschae C
15 May 2022

As a priest I have had many opportunities to be with people who are near death due to terminal illness or very advanced age.  The knowledge that your life is near its end is at once sobering and clarifying.  Knowledge that death is approaching helps put things in perspective.  It helps clarify what is most important; what a person most wants to be known for; the legacy a person wants to leave behind.

Jesus faced this very situation in the gospel selection of this Mass.  Today’s gospel from St. John comes from the chapters describing the Lord’s Last Supper with his apostles.  Jesus knew his earthly life was near its end.  In fact, he told his apostles he earnestly desired to celebrate this final Passover with them and that he would not celebrate it again until he had entered his Kingdom.  In the course of that meal where Jesus gave us the gift of his Body and Blood the Lord was in his final hours of life on earth, preparing for his departure through death, and for his glorification in resurrection.

In his final words to his apostles Jesus gives them a new commandment: love one another.  Jesus determines that the command to love one another is the most critical topic he must address in his final hours of earthly life.  Given the dramatic scene of being near the point of his departure, we can say that it is critically important that we accept those words from the Lord.  And his call is not to some generic, undefined love.  Rather he says, “As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.”  His apostles would understand what that command requires when in hours of having spoken those words they would see Jesus love them to the end and lay down his life for them even though their betrayal and denial did not deserve that type of love.  This is the pattern of Jesus’ own love.  This is the pattern Jesus calls them to model.  They are to love one another in the laying-down-your-life kind of love that Jesus models.

Through the gospel Jesus is imparting to us the same legacy, the same critical lesson.  What’s more, in following his style of love, Jesus says people will know that we are his disciples.  Do we think people will know we are disciples because they see us walking into or out of church on the weekends?  Do we think that people will know we are disciples because we identify ourselves as Christians?  Do we think people will know we are disciples because we have a crucifix or some religious symbol somewhere?  Jesus says people will know we are disciples if we have love for one another – the type of love he modeled.

The word “disciple” refers to a student or a learner.  For followers of the Lord, being a student or a learner is no mere academic pursuit, or something that exists only in the mind.  To believe and to be a believer certainly involves an intellectual assent of the mind to the truths God reveals.  But it would be a mistake to think being a disciple is shown only by an assent of the mind.  One can believe something in the mind while not letting that belief impact choices, the way one lives.  We hear these dichotomies a lot, don’t we?  It is popular for many a person to indicate they believe things about God and faith but to never do anything about it.  I have met people who believe and who share Christian faith sincerely, but who have never been baptized.  Yet, the Scriptures are very clear that faith and baptism are how one enters life in Christ and becomes a Christian.  We all know people who make the distinction saying they are spiritual but not religious, they believe but resist being part of the Church.  But Jesus says, people will know you are my disciples if you love one another.  I can tolerate a whole lot of people I never have to interact with… you can say the same, right?  But for Jesus to command “love one another” immediately takes discipleship out of a “me and my personal Lord and Savior” category and places it in a communal arena.  If you love one another people will know you are my disciples.

There is no doubt that being a disciple of the Lord means that we make an intellectual assent to his teachings.  But the Lord won’t let us get away with that alone.  Speaking these words at the Last Supper, the Lord will put that love into action the very next day on the Cross.  We often point to the heart as being the center of what drives us and our actions, our will.  We learn in this Gospel passage that keeping the Lord in the realm of the mind and head belief is not enough.  To be sure, our mind must conform to the Lord’s teachings.  But our actions, our will, is also critical for showing that we are disciples, students, learners of our Master.  This is how the Lord says people will know we are his disciples: if we love one another.  A belief put into action is what the Scriptures call us to.  May our correct belief of the mind be visible also in our actions.  In this way our belief changes us and becomes a light to others so that they might join us in becoming students in the Church, this school of the Lord’s service.

Fourth Sunday of Easter

Dominica IV Paschae C
8 May 2022

 This weekend is commonly known as Good Shepherd Sunday because we hear from John 10, where Jesus uses the image of sheep and shepherd, and some verses before the passage today he calls himself “the Good Shepherd”.  Good Shepherd Sunday is also a time to give focus to prayer and to our efforts to encourage vocations in our parish by directly speaking to the young people in our midst and in your families about the call of Jesus in their lives.  In your charity, I ask for your prayers for me as your Pastor and for Fr. Bali in the great way he assists me in the work of shepherding.  In our prayers for young people, we need to create an atmosphere in our families where being open to God’s call to a religious vocation is fostered and even expected.  On Good Shepherd Sunday I ask you to pray that the young men in our midst whom God is calling to the priesthood, that they would hear His voice and that obstacles to hearing that call would be removed so that they can respond as future priests.  I ask you to pray, too, that the young women in our midst whom God is calling to be religious, that they would have the courage to follow the divine Lamb of God, and to be a future bride of the Lamb.

 Speaking of himself as Shepherd in relationship to the sheep, Jesus says, “I know them.” A shepherd in Palestine would spend all day and night with the sheep.  He would know their sound, their normal sounds and bleats, and their sounds in distress.  We would know their behavior.  We may not know this experience of a shepherd, but we can certainly understand how true this is if we consider how we might know a pet.  One time my mom sent me a pic of a family pet.  The photo was totally staged, but mom did not tell me it was staged.  She hoped I would think it was a natural moment caught on camera.  I knew immediately.  And when I texted back, “Oh please, that is totally fake,” she was amazed and asked how I knew.  I told her that because I knew his behavior I could tell by how the pet was holding his ears that he was not relaxed and that he was suspicious something was up.  That told me it was staged.  We can understand how a shepherd would come to know the sheep.  Of course, it is important for us to move out of the realm of literal animals, literal sheep, and to hear the Lord’s words as referring to us.  He knows us.  We are his sheep.  He is our Shepherd.

 Notice what we might call a progression, an order, or hierarchy of shepherding in this passage.  Our Lord, the Good Shepherd, sort of stands in the middle in a sense of this order of shepherds.  Earlier in John 10 he references himself as the Good Shepherd.  But here he references the way in which the Father is the shepherd.  That’s the implication of the words here.  The Father is greater and He has given the sheep to the Son, to the Good Shepherd.  And, likewise, descending in order, we know that the Lord has established his Church with visible shepherds who govern in his place as vicars, most especially the apostles and their successors, the bishops.  In fact, just last Sunday we heard of this final order of shepherds because the Lord was clearly choosing St. Peter as a shepherd when he told him three times: “Feed my lambs”; “Tend my sheep”; and, “Feed my sheep.”

 I want to suggest for us that the Lord has so designed his Church in fulfillment of the Father’s mission that there is a unity among the progression or the order of shepherds.  This is a clear meaning of the words the Lord says, “The Father and I are one.”  The Son does not shepherd in a different way than the Father.  Likewise, our Good Shepherd has given us an assurance, that the legitimately constituted apostolic shepherds guide us rightly when they are faithful to the deposit of faith, which is the Sacred Scripture and the Sacred Tradition.  When they speak to us these truths they amplify the one voice of our Good Shepherd and we can recognize the voice we hear.  Should the bishops not speak in accord with the deposit of faith, a dissonance is introduced into that voice and we can recognize it as departing from the fullness of truth.

It cannot be emphasized enough that there is no guarantee from the Lord that a person cannot or will not be separated from the Good Shepherd.  The idea of “once saved; always saved” is not a scriptural doctrine.  In fact, the exact opposite is claimed as St. John later records in chapter 15 when Jesus describes that branches on the vine that do not bear fruit are cut off and thrown out.  Likewise, the example of Judas is a clear indication that a person can freely choose to separate ourselves and to be lost.  But if we are sheep of the Good Shepherd we hear his voice and we follow him.  That is a reference to obedience and the moral way of life, we follow the path of morality.  I think it is critical that we embrace this in our confused age.  In our time and to great extremes, we have a self-referential culture that exalts the individual, the “I”, above any duty or obligation to another person, and even exalts the individual above reality itself.  This is in part why people can follow, promote, and defend outlandish immorality as a good because they claim it fulfills the self and no one can limit another person’s self-actualization in this way of thinking.  This is in part why people can claim to be something their own physical body clearly manifests they are not.  In this self-referential culture nothing – not even physicality, biology, or anatomy – is more concretely true than what the person decides he or she is, how he or she identifies.  Sadly, and frankly, we find many a catholic holding such opinions that do not come from the voice of the Good Shepherd.  Politicians of the highest order, celebrities, groups that call themselves Catholic while supporting positions at odds with the faith… all this goes on in a narcissistic age.  Whatever that is, it is clear it is not at all hearing, listening to, and following the voice of the Good Shepherd.

 My brothers and sisters, we live in an age that can choose to listen to any number of voices.  Because of that our social life will be a cacophony of dissonant noise at times.  Like Paul and Barnabas in the first reading, we too will face a society that is “filled with jealousy and with violent abuse,” who will contradict and malign and even come after us.  But following the message of the Scriptures today, Let nothing take away our joy in the Holy Spirit!  In the spiritual battle we are called to engage in, we are protected by our Good Shepherd who said, “No one can take them out of my hand.”  That’s the implication of those words, that the Good Shepherd provides a type of spiritual protection to those who follow him.  We listen to the voice of our Good Shepherd.  We follow him so that we may follow the narrow way to eternal life.  And along the way, we share the truth of what our Good Shepherd speaks so that others may be freed of the lies and ideologies and sins that enslave them.  We give them a chance to join us as sheep of the flock!  That will require us to pray so that we form a deep communion with the Lord.  And it will require us to accept sacrifice and maybe even abuse from those who oppose us.  This is the path our own Good Shepherd traveled.  It must be ours too, for as we sang in the psalm, “We are his people, the sheep of his flock.”