The Transformation the Good Shepherd Wants In Us, Fourth Sunday of Easter (B), April 21, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year B
April 21, 2024
Acts 4:8-12, Ps 118, 1 John 3:1-2, Jn 10:11-18

To listen to an audio recoding of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• The Fourth Sunday of Easter is called Good Shepherd Sunday because every year we focus on a part of the tenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel in which Jesus tells us, “I am the Good Shepherd” and then describes what he does for us, his beloved sheep: He knows us intimately and calls us by name, he leads and walks ahead of us, he protects us from thieves and marauders, he comes in search for us when we’re lost and brings us back, he lays down his life for us, and he gives us life to the full.
• These words of Jesus were powerful when he preached them in the Temple area during the Feast of Tabernacles several months before his death. But the Church has us read them in the heart, the midway point, of the Easter Season, because when looked at in the light of his Passion, Death and Resurrection, they take on much deeper meaning. They show us not only how to relate to Jesus risen from the dead, but also how to allow the power of his resurrection to transform us so that we might be able to love others as he has loved us first, in order that, being his faithful sheep who hear his voice calling us to follow him, we might in turn become shepherds to others after his own shepherdly heart. For us to live the Easter season well, for us to experience the fullness of our Christian vocation, we must enter into the metamorphosis Jesus seeks to bring about in our lives through his resurrection by helping us to relate to him as our Good Shepherd risen from the dead.
• Many of us, when we reflect on the resurrection, think about it as a fact, an event, a mind-blowing occurrence that happened early on a Sunday within Joseph of Arimathea’s freshly hewn tomb outside the city gates in ancient Jerusalem. Yet for Jesus, the resurrection wasn’t so much a fact but a relationship. When Martha, four days after her brother Lazarus had died, told Jesus that if he had been present, Lazarus would still be alive, Jesus told her, “Your brother will rise.” Martha replied, doubtless based on some of the conversations she had had with Jesus in her home in Bethany about what would happen after we die, replied with faith, “I know he will rise in the resurrection on the last day.” But then Jesus upgraded her — and our — understanding of the resurrection. He said, “Iam the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
• Jesus was stressing that eternal life, as he said elsewhere, is to know Christ Jesus and the Father who sent him. It is a relationship that death cannot kill. When we know Jesus truly as a friend, as a Savior, as a Lord, as a Bridegroom, as a Good Shepherd, when we enter into communion with him, death is nothing other than a change of address, or more accurately, a change of state. As Jesus says in this Good Shepherd discourse, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them and they follow me. I give them eternal life and they shall never perish. No one can take them out of my hand.” When we remain in the strong, loving, gloriously scarred hands of Jesus, when we stay in that loving covenant with him, he continues to embrace us into eternal life. That’s why St. Paul would exclaim in his Letter to the Romans, “I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities … nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38-39).
• And so the most important thing in life is to learn how to enter into relationship with the Good Shepherd who is the resurrection and the life, to believe in him, to trust in him, to live in him. It means to recognize, as we pondered in St. Peter’s words to the leaders and elders of the people in today’s first reading, that “Jesus Christ the Nazorean, whom you crucified, … God raised from the dead” and “there is no salvation through anyone else, nor any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved.” It means to become convinced, as we prayed through the Responsorial Psalm, that “it is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes” and to say to the Lord, “I will give thanks to you, for you have answered me and have been my Savior!” It means to enter into the astonishing truth St. John testifies to in today’s epistle, what Jesus has made possible for each of us when we enter into his death and resurrection in the sacred waters of Baptism: “See what love the Father has bestowed on us,” the apostle exclaims, “that we may be called children of God.” It would be the greatest privilege and honor of our life just to becalled God’s son or daughter. But St. John tells us, “Yet that is what we are!” And as if that is not enough, he adds, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. But we know that when it is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” All of this begins by entering into relationship with Jesus, the Good Shepherd, the Resurrection and the Life. He calls us by name and leads us into his own divine filiation, so that we might become sons and daughters in the Son, and, as St. Paul would say, “and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if one we suffer with him so that we may be glorified with him” (Rom 8:17).
• The first thing we need to do is to be humble enough to enter into this relationship with Jesus. For some today, there’s a resistance to doing so. On March 8, during his third Lenten sermon to Pope Francis and the leaders of the Roman Curia, Capuchin Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa, the preacher of the Papal Household since 1980 and one of the greatest preachers in the history of the Church, spoke about resistance to Jesus as our Good Shepherd. He said, “Let’s face it, the image of the good shepherd, and the related images of sheep and flock, are not really fashionable nowadays. … People disdainfully reject the role of sheep and the idea of a flock. They do not realize, however, how much they experience in practice the situation that they condemn in theory.… We let ourselves be guided supinely by all sorts of manipulation and occult persuasion. Others create models of well-being and behavior, ideals, and goals of progress, and people adopt them. … We eat what they tell us, dress as fashion dictates, and speak as we hear.” He went on to describe what Jesus’ original listeners would have understood by the image of being a sheep to the Good Shepherd. “In the beginning,” Cardinal Cantalamessa stated, “Israel was a people of nomadic shepherds. The Bedouins of the desert today give us an idea of what life was once like for the tribes of Israel. In this society, the relationship between shepherd and flock is not only economic, that is, based on interest. An almost personal relationship develops between the shepherd and the flock. Spending day after day together in solitary places, without a living soul around, the shepherd ends up knowing everything about every sheep. The sheep recognize the voice of the shepherd who often talks out loud to the sheep, as if they were people. … With the change of being a nomadic tribe to that of being a settled people, the title of shepherd is given, by extension, also to those who act as representatives of God on earth: kings, priests, leaders in general. But in this case, the symbol diverges; it no longer evokes only images of protection and security, but also exploitation and oppression. Alongside the image of the good shepherd, that of the bad shepherd makes its appearance. In the prophet Ezekiel we find a terrible indictment against the bad shepherds who feed only themselves. They feed on milk and dress in wool, but they don’t care in the slightest about the sheep whom they actually treat ‘with cruelty and violence’ (Ez 34:1ff). This indictment against bad shepherds is followed by a promise: God himself will one day take loving care of his flock: ‘The lost I will search out, the strays I will bring back, the injured I will bind up, and the sick I will heal’ (Ez 34:16). In the Gospel, Jesus takes up this theme of the good and bad shepherd, but with something new: “I am the good shepherd!,” he says. God’s promise has become reality, exceeding all expectations. But we need to allow ourselves to know him who knows us, to call upon him who calls us by name, to follow him, to eat the food he gives, to receive the protection and the love he provides, and to learn how to love the other sheep the way he loves them.
• Jesus wants to strengthen his sheep to become shepherds, to take disciples and make them apostles. He wants us who have been fed by him, guided by him, and protected by him, to feed, guide and protect others in this name. This is what is meant to happen in the lives of young people who become parents. This is what occurs when older brothers and sisters mature and take responsibility for their young siblings. This is what takes place with godparents faithful to their responsibility. This is what is supposed to occur in every Christian as we look at family members, friends, peers, colleagues. If we’re good sheep of Jesus, he wants us to become, with him, good shepherds of others. We see this transformation in the vocation of St. Peter. After the Resurrection, when Jesus appeared to the disciples on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus asked Peter three times: “Simon, Son of John, do you love me more than these?” Jesus was querying whether Peter loved him more than anything and everything else, because the Lord wanted that love to be the distinctive mark of Peter’s life from that point forward. Three times Peter responded, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” After each response, Jesus gave him a commission, a task that would be the bedrock of all he would do in Jesus’ name. The first commission was, “Feed my lambs,” telling him in particular to take care of Christ’s young people. The second was “Tend my sheep,” which in the Greek means to guard and guide. The third was “Feed my sheep.” Jesus, the Good Shepherd, was entrusting the care and nourishment of his flock, young and old, to Peter’s loving solicitude.  They would always remain Christ’s sheep — feedmy lambs, tend my sheep, Jesus said — but they would be guided by a sheep like themselves whom Christ would choose, appoint, and help to be a shepherd after his own loving heart. And it’s obvious that St. Peter never forgot this lesson. Peter’s love for Jesus — and our love for Jesus — would be shown in how we love those whom Jesus loves. Jesus wants us to get to know others by name and lead them to him, to help them recognize his voice and follow him. He wants us to sacrifice ourselves for them. He wants us to help them seize the eternal life he gives and protect them from the spiritual and earthly bandits who are all around us trying to preach a different Gospel and way of salvation than Jesus the Good Shepherd has given us. And he wants us to do so willingly.
• One of the most powerful lines in the Gospel today is Jesus’ phrase, “I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me. I freely lay it down. I have the power to lay it down and the power to take it up again.” As our Good Shepherd, Jesus willinglygives his life to save ours. He uses the present tense, because he is in a perpetual state of self-giving. From his perspective, his crucifixion and death was not a passive victimization, but an active holocaust, the exclamation point of a life that began when he took on our humanity precisely to sacrifice it out of love so that we could share in his divinity. To be a shepherd after his heart is to be willing to imitate, indeed to share in and extend, his self-giving love. In an age in which so many see themselves fundamentally as victims, as some try to compete against each other to describe how they’re greater victims of “multiple and intersectional forms of discrimination,” Jesus wants us not to look at ourselves fundamentally as victims but as courageous shepherds. He would say to us elsewhere that if someone strikes us on the right cheek, freely to offer him the left, that if someone wants to go to law with us over our tunic, freely to hand him our cloak as well, that if someone wants to press us into service for one mile, freely to go with him for two. He wants us to convert every situation, especially those in which we might be tempted according to human logic to resist defensively, into a circumstance of self-giving love, freely to lay down our lives for God and others.
• We see this in the first reading today when St. Peter defends himself for a “good deed done to a cripple.” All of us are called to be capable of making the same defense. We’re all called by the Lord to do good deeds for those who are in need. Today’s second reading helps us to see clearly those for whom we’re caring: “See what love the Father has bestowed upon us letting us be called children of God; yet that is what we are.” When we care for others, we’re caring for children of our Father, which makes them, truly, our brothers and sisters. They are not anonymous strangers in need, but brothers and sisters. But Jesus gives us an even stronger image: they’re his brothers and sisters, too, and our care for them, even the “least” of the world, he tells us, he takes personally as our care for him. He wants us to do this not out merely out of religious duty, or a sense of guilt, or even fidelity to a fourth vow, but freely out of love. Jesus who said, “No one takes my life from me. I freely lay it down!,” wants us to choose freely to sacrifice. St. John would way in his first letter, just a little bit after the passage in today’s second reading, “The way we came to know love was that he laid down his life for us; so we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers” (1 John 3:16). That’s the essence of the Christian life! That’s what the Good Shepherd has done for us that he wants us, first, to receive and, then, to live. That’s ultimately the transformation Jesus wants to work in the midst of a world who rebels against the docility of sheep. Jesus wants to transform us from sheep ultimately to shepherds who care for others as he cares for us, and not to treat them as “objects” of our sacrificial care, but as subjects we, too, are seeking with him to transform into shepherds who care for others.
• Every Mass is an opportunity for us to enter into this transformation that the Good Shepherd wants to bring about in each of us. It’s here that Jesus the Good Shepherd calls each of us by name and seeks to have us grow intimately in knowing him as he knows us. It’s here that he seeks to guide us along right paths. It’s here that he prepares a banquet for us, one that is meant to be a foretaste of the eternal banquet in the Lord’s house where we hope to dwell forever. It’s here that he who willingly gave his life for us on Calvary here gives himself anew, saying, “This is my body given for you” and “This is the chalice of my blood poured for out for you.” It’s here that we, eating his flesh and drinking his blood, enter into communion with him risen from the dead as he seeks to transform us so that we might do this in his memory, laying down our life, giving our body and blood for God’s glory and for others’ good. It’s here that he seeks to fill us with wonder that, if God so loves us that he not only permits us to be called his children, that he not only adopts us as his beloved kids, but that he feeds us with himself, then we can look ahead with faith-filled eagerness to what this Eucharistic banquet leads to, when we shall become even more like our Good Shepherd, when we shall see him as he is.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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