Fourth Sunday of Easter

Sheep.  I don’t know about you all, but the first time I gave serious consideration to this analogy, I wasn’t very flattered.  How many of you have spent any time around sheep?  They are kind of stupid.  Apparently, their eyesight isn’t too keen, and I’m being kind in suggesting that their brain power is somewhat limited.  On top of all this, they really don’t smell very nice.  On the positive side, they do seem to have good noses, and really rely on their sense of smell.  So I’m sitting at my desk, trying to make sense of this business of being told that we are sheep, or should act like sheep, or that we should resemble sheep in any way.

Regardless of all of this, the comparison remains.  In today’s Scripture readings, we first hear about it in Psalm 23, a psalm of King David.

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; he makes me lie down in green pastures.  He leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul.”

In our Second Reading, taken from the first letter of the Apostle Peter, we are told that we are sheep.

“For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Guardian of your souls.”

If any doubt remained in our minds before the Gospel reading, it has surely been removed now.  Jesus was teaching his apostles, using the metaphor of the Shepherd and the sheep, and as usual, they were staying true to form, not understanding Jesus’ meaning, so he has to repeat Himself.

“Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep.  All who came before me are thieves and robbers; but the sheep did not heed them.  I am the door; if any one enters by me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture.  The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

Where does this leave us?  Are we truly to behave as sheep?  Thankfully, no!  If we remember the book of Genesis, we are told that we are born in the likeness of God.”  This certainly doesn’t sound like sheep.  We can understand this puzzle if we keep the big picture in mind, not zeroing in on one passage, or one phrase, or one comparison.  We want to be “catholic” in our approach.  We want to be “Both/And” rather than “Either/Or”.  We are admonished to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves”.  So what is it about sheep that we want to emulate?

The answer is that sheep are very trusting.  They trust their ears because they know the voice of the Shepherd.  They trust their nose, because they know the smell of their Shepherd.  They know that even though there are predators out there, even though there are wolves among us, they know that Jesus has not abandoned us, that Jesus will never abandon us.

If you remember two Sundays ago, Divine Mercy Sunday, we spoke of the Divine Mercy Image.  Under the Image of Christ, there is the motto, “Jesus, we trust in you.”  Time and again, the Lord has promised us that he will always take care of us.  He says further on, in the 14^th Chapter of John’s Gospel, “I will not leave you orphans”.

But how can we tell who is the trustworthy shepherd now.  Stay close to the Church, stay close to Peter.  We know that Jesus built his Church on solid rock, and it has survived for two thousand years.  We know that even though Peter and the rest of the Apostles died, they provided shepherds for us to carry on the work of the Lord.  They laid hands on disciples, and today we call them Bishops. They passed the authority that Jesus had given to them on to their successors.  So we can trust in the Church because Jesus promised that “You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” 

So we trust in our Lord, we trust in our Church, in our Shepherds, Saints John 23^rd and John Paul 2^nd, Pope Benedict 16^th and Pope Francis. Here in the Oakland Diocese we have been blessed with our own Bishop, Michael Barber. We can rest assured that we haven’t been left to flounder.  We have been given reliable witnesses, we have been promised and have received trust-worthy and reliable shepherds.  As we approach the Altar, we can truly be thankful for this!