How Mary Shepherds Us in Imitation of Her Son, Fourth Monday of Easter, May 13, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the Fourth Week of Easter
Memorial of Our Lady of Fatima
May 13, 2019
Acts 11:1-18, Ps 42, Jn 10:1-10

To listen to this morning’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• The mystagogical catechesis of the Easter Season commences with the apparitions of the Risen Lord to convince us anew of the fact of his Resurrection and how he seeks to have us seek the things that are above and live a new life. Then we have a four-day catechesis on the Sacrament of Baptism followed by an eight-day catechesis on the Eucharist. With Good Shepherd Sunday at the beginning of the Fourth Week, we begin to focus on various images and realities by which the Lord Jesus wishes to relate to us and bring us fully alive. Today everything is summarized in the passage, “I came that they might have life and have it more abundantly.” Jesus wishes us to overflow with his risen zoe (supernatural life in contrast to “bios” or biological/natural life). At the end of today’s first reading, the Church grasped that God wanted his “life-giving repentance” to be preached and offered to all the nations. To the extent that we haven’t lived with Jesus’ life, in which we haven’t related to him as good sheep to Good Shepherd, he wishes now to give us that life-giving repentance so that we might have his risen life in us more abundantly.
• In today’s Gospel, and throughout the tenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel concerning Jesus’ Good Shepherd Discourse, we see how Jesus shepherds us to give us life in the following five ways:
  • First he calls us by name — None of us is a number to him. He knows us by name and calls us each individually. We’re special to him.
  • Second, he leads and guides us — He doesn’t call us and leave us on our own, but he constantly calls us to be with him. He goes before us so that he can turn to us and say “follow me.” Because he knows us individually, he knows that we need direction and he constantly gives that personal direction.
  • Third, he feeds us — In the most famous Psalm, which is all about how God shepherds us, we proclaim that with him, we lack nothing, but have it all. He leads us  into green pastures to have us graze. He guides us to restful waters to refresh us. He sets a table before us and makes our cup overflow. In St. Matthew’s Gospel, when Jesus looked on the crowd because they were “like sheep without a shepherd,” on one occasion he worked the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish and on other occasion he began to teach, knowing that people were hungering for nourishment for their souls as well. As our shepherd, Jesus always remembers to give us each day our daily bread, both material and spiritual.
  • Fourth, he protects us — The ancient shepherds used to risk it all to protect their sheep against savage animals like wolves but also against bandits who would come to steal them. Jesus came into our world courageously to do the same for us. When we get lost wandering away from the fold, he leaves everyone else to come to find us and rescue us when we’re in danger.
  • Finally, he loves us enough to die for us — Jesus says three times in today’s Gospel passage that he lays down, and lays down freely, his life for his sheep. I’ve always considered it crazy for a human being to die for an animal. It’s silly for us to die for our hamsters or parakeets or even for our pet canines and felines. But shepherds actually would die protecting their flocks from wolves, or lions, or evil bandits. The distance between human beings and animals, however, is nothing compared to the gap between God and us his creatures, and yet that’s precisely what God does. And he does so because he loves us.
• These are all characteristics of how the risen Lord Jesus wants to relate to us as our shepherd. Our first task is to respond to his shepherding in each of these five ways.
  • To respond to his call and singular involvement involvement in our life, to recognize that we’re special to him and summons us to a special bond with him and share in his saving mission. He says that his sheep hear his voice and don’t recognize the voice of a stranger. Yet one of the problems we face is that of discernment, because, after the Fall, we can’t always readily recognize his voice, and so we seek to attune our listening, with the help of others, to his constant calling. Each of us is called!
  • To follow him with docility and alacrity, knowing that we need his guidance and that he is constantly providing it. Our Christian life is not static, but dynamic. Jesus is always leading us out and he wants us following him. He’s leading us on a pilgrimage all the days of our life. Occasionally he will guide us through dark valleys with his rod and staff and we follow him there, too, as he gives us confidence to be with him even on the way of the Cross that is the path to glory.
  • To hunger for what he gives us, derive our nutrition from what he provides, and be grateful. It’s important for us to allow God to provide for us. That’s what God helped St. Peter to see in today’s first reading when God pronounced clean all food he had created. That’s key to spiritual childhood, that we recognize we need him. This hunger is important physically but even more important spiritually, and God seeks to feed our solves even more lavishly than he feeds our bodies, because for our souls, he gives us himself as nutrition.
  • Not to run away from his protection to get his attention, but to stay close to his strong arm. That’s what gives us great confidence and happiness. There’s a beautiful part of today’s Gospel that says that the sheep “come in and go out and find pasture.” Those verbs point to the fact that they’re secure enough, under the protection of the Shepherd, to wander about, without being paranoid about the wolves or thieves.
  • To receive the fruits of laying down his life for us. Jesus gave his life, as he tells us today, so that we might have life and have it to the full. The way we receive this gift is by coming alive, by seizing that gift of abundant life, which is not bios (biological life), but zoe (supernatural life). We don’t want Jesus’ gift of life to be wasted, but to invest it so that we may have more and more a share of his life, by entering into his life.
• Today we celebrate the feast of Our Lady Fatima, remembering her appearances to the three young shepherd children in the Cova da Iria in Portugal. She came essentially to shepherd the shepherd children, and with them, the whole Church. To be a spiritual mother is to be a good shepherd and in Fatima, she revealed herself to be a Mother concerned for the spiritual growth and health of all her sons and daughters. On Calvary, Jesus gave her to us as our spiritual Mother and gave us to her as her spiritual sons and daughters. As a spiritual mother, she knows us individually and calls us by name, just like she called Lúcia, Francisco and Jacinta. She led and guided them in prayer and in sacrifice. She fed them with the truth about the situation the Church and world were in. She came to protect them and the whole world from the consequences of sin. She didn’t need to give her life, but left heaven to help us to receive the fruits of her son’s great gift. In Fatima, Mary appeared with a word of conversion, the same word with which Christ the Good Shepherd began his public ministry (“repent and believe in the Gospel”) and the same message with which he sent out his apostles at his Ascension (to proclaim “repentance for the forgiveness of sins to all nations, beginning in Jerusalem”). With great maternal solicitude, she wanted to help us to mature, to see things as they really are, and to use the freedom her Son gave us to choose aright — and that involves seeing sin for what it is and turning away from it and turning toward her Son and living by the Gospel he is and announced. She specifically called the pastorinhos and through them the whole world to penance and conversion, asking these children to pray for the conversion of poor sinners and to offer up sacrifices, voluntary and involuntary penances, and sufferings for sinners’ conversion.
• Why did she appear to shepherd children, ages 7, 9 and 10? Obviously part of that answer is mysterious, but it’s likely because most of her older children — then and still now — routinely ignore this summons of her Son. But it’s also because they could heed the message and become pastorinhos of others through their prayer and sacrifices, giving their lives for us their sheep just like they would for the sheep and goats entrusted to them. It’s very moving how Francisco, Jacinta and Lucia immediately acted on this summons. They prayed the Rosary for sinners. The recited between the mysteries of the Rosary a prayer Mary herself taught them that most Catholics continue to pray to this day: “O my Jesus, forgive us our sins. Save us from the fires of hell. Lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of your mercy!” From the beginning of the apparitions, Francisco began to pray almost constantly to “console Jesus for the sins of the world.” One night, when his father discovered him sobbing in his room, Francisco gave the reason: “I was thinking of Jesus who is so sad because of the sins that are committed against him.” Jacinta was so convinced by the vision of the reality of Hell of the importance of saving sinners from it that she began to pour herself into prayer and practice various corporal mortifications. “Pray, pray much and make sacrifices for sinners,” Mary had told her. “Many souls go to hell because they have no one to pray and make sacrifices for them.” Jacinta responded, as did her brother, by prostrating themselves in prayer for hours, kneeling with their heads humbly bowed to the ground. They made all types of physical sacrifices, wearing tight cords around their waist, scourging themselves with stinging nettles, abstaining from water on hot days and other penitential practices. When both caught the terrible 1918 flu that took the lives of tens of thousands, they offered all of their sufferings for sinners. Having been told by Our Lady that she would take him to heaven soon, Francisco declined hospital treatment, bearing enormous pain with a smile and without complaint. Our Lady appeared to Jacinta and asked if she wanted to stay on earth a little longer to convert more sinners. She said yes. So the little girl allowed herself to be dragged from clinic to clinic, to have two of her ribs removed without anaesthesia, valiantly sacrificing herself as a victim for the conversion of sinners and for the Holy Father, whom she knew from the vision would suffer much. When Saint John Paul II beatified them in Fatima in 2000, he lifted them up as an example to the whole world of what Christ-like and Marian shepherdly love for the salvation of others looks like. He stressed that their lives demonstrate that children can be heroically virtuous and reach “the heights of perfection” at a very young age, and if they can so can all of us.
• Mary said that the remedy to all that would plague the world would be consecration to her immaculate heart, which means, essentially, to entrust oneself to her maternal, shepherdly love. Lucia, Francisco and Jacinta did. Today we’re called to imitate their example. Mary seeks to call us by name, guide us, feed us, protect us and help us to open ourselves up to receive her son’s life to the full. In this year marking the 100th anniversary of the birth into eternal life of Francisco (April 4, 1919), we ask Mary’s help that she may help lead us, and many others, like she led him to the eternal sheep fold.

The readings for today’s Mass were: