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Homily:
4th Sunday of Easter – Cycle B
The other day, I got to thinking about this woman I know
named Laura. I met Laura nearly five
years ago when we both signed up for a summer internship for future pastors and
pastoral counselors at one of the hospitals in Carmel. This was a non-denominational program, so
there were Catholics, Protestants, and even those who didn’t claim to belong to
any particular faith tradition. Laura
fit into that latter category. She grew
up Catholic but had long since drifted away from practicing her faith in the
Catholic Church. I must confess that at
first I judged her unjustly. Because she
was a woman, divorced, in her early forties, and had left the practice of the
Catholic Church I judged her to be someone who left the Church for ideological
reasons—I assumed that she wanted women to be priests—which was why she was now
pursuing this pastoral career from outside of the Catholic Church.
As I got to know Laura through working together in the
hospital, I grew to respect her deeply.
She had been through a lot of painful situations in her life and I could
see that she was trying to make sense of it all while remaining true to who she
was and to being a disciple of Jesus.
Nonetheless, I still held on to my prejudice that she had an agenda
against the Catholic Church (in spite of the fact that she hadn’t said one
negative word against it). One day, however, she said something that
blew me away. I don’t remember what the
conversation was about, but we must have been saying something about the Church
or about different faith traditions, because at one point Laura said “That’s
why I love the Catholic Church, because it’s so egalitarian. They take anybody!” “Wait,” I thought, “you’ve abandoned the
Catholic Church to do your own thing but you love it anyway?” It was confounding to me, but it completely
obliterated my prejudices of her and it made me think harder about how I look
at people, especially people who don’t “fit” into my idea of a “good disciple”.
Today, in our Gospel reading, we hear Jesus call himself
the “Good Shepherd”. In fact, in each
year of the three year cycle of readings the Gospel for the 4th
Sunday of Easter is taken from the “Good Shepherd” discourse in John’s
Gospel. Therefore, we’ve come to call the
4th Sunday of Easter “Good Shepherd Sunday”. This year, we are blessed to hear the part of
this discourse in which Jesus calls himself the “Good Shepherd” and then
continues to describe how a good shepherd behaves. The good shepherd “lays down his life for his
sheep”, Jesus says, and he knows his sheep and his sheep know him. We know that Jesus is the Good Shepherd,
because we know that he laid down his life for us his sheep. In every church we keep a reminder of that
somewhere and so all we have to do is look to the crucifix to be reminded that Jesus is the Good Shepherd who
laid down his life for us his sheep. And
he knows us and we know him. Every
Sunday (and for some of you even more frequently) we come to Mass and we hear
the Word of God proclaimed and broken open for us. This word reveals Jesus to us so that we can
know him and know him deeply. And, of
course, since Jesus is the Son of God “through whom all things were made” he
knows us and he loves us: not as some sheep that his Father hired him to
shepherd, but as his own sheep for whom he would lay down his life. And this is all very familiar to us.
Then Jesus says something interesting. He says “I have other sheep that do not
belong to this fold. These also I must
lead, and they will hear my voice, and there will be one flock, one
shepherd.” You know, if you take a look
around you, you’ll notice that we’re a pretty homogenous group of people. Certainly there is great diversity in our
backgrounds, but if someone who didn’t know any of us stood outside and watched
as everyone left after Mass, I’d bet that he or she would conclude that, for
the most part, we were all pretty much the same. And if we look around in our community, we
can see that there is a large part of it that does not belong to this Church:
people of different races and ethnicities, people of different socio-economic
status, and people of different religious tradition. And so when you heard the words of Jesus
today—“I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold… These also I must
lead”—I hope that some of these people came to your mind. I want you to ask yourselves this question:
“Are there any of these people who are not part of this Church whom I would not
want to be part of this Church?” In
other words, is there anyone who isn’t here whom you would be “repulsed” to see
come here? My hope is that the answer
for all of us is “no”, but I suspect that at least for a few of—perhaps more
than we would like to admit—the answer is “yes”: that there are people in our
community whom we think don’t “fit” and so we would rather that they find
another place to worship.
In the first reading, we heard Peter proclaim in his speech
to the Sanhedrin that there is only one name by which we are to be saved (that
is, the name of Jesus). Notice he didn’t
say by which “the chosen ones” would be saved, but rather by which we—meaning all—are to be saved. Coupled
with Jesus’ words that there would be “one flock [and] one shepherd”, we see
that we have no claim to exclusivity in the Catholic Church. In other words, no one has any right to claim
“this is my church and I hope that only people like me attend here.” In fact, none of us even have the right to
claim that any church is “their church”.
In fact, there is only one person in the entire universe who can
rightfully say “this is my church”, and that’s Jesus. The rest of us can only claim to belong to it.
And so, my brothers and sisters, we see that my friend
Laura was right. The Catholic Church,
that is, the universal Church, is the Church for everyone, because it is Jesus’
Church. In fact, it has to be for
everyone; because if it devolves into being “my church” then it loses its very
reason for existence: to be the one flock of the one shepherd, Jesus
Christ. If we struggle with the idea of
having… oh let’s call them “less favorable people” here, then I invite you to
remember one thing, which we heard in our second reading from the letter of
Saint John: “Beloved, we are God’s children now.” My brothers and sisters, there is no greater
dignity than this: to be children of God.
Therefore, any distinction between us and those around us—either here in
the pews or out in the community—are distinctions in this world only. In God’s eyes, we are either his children or
those who one day will be his children through baptism. Our task is to erase every other division and
work solely so that there would be one flock for our one shepherd, Jesus
Christ.
As we continue to revel in our Easter joy, let us show God
how grateful we are to be called His children by renewing our efforts daily to
build up His Church into the one flock whom Jesus the Good Shepherd laid down
his life for; and for whom he will one day return to shepherd into the eternal
joy of heaven.
Given at All Saints Parish:
Logansport, IN – April 25th & 26th, 2015
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