Do you like yourself just the way you are? Good Shepherd Sunday

Readings for the Fourth Sunday of Easter

As we experience social distancing, relationships become strained. There has been an uptick in suicide and domestic violence. Human beings are made for community. We are not autonomous machines that just need gas and oil to run efficiently. But, we need each other and we get on each other’s nerves.  At the center of human flourishing is love, but that can be elusive. The Gospel is about love that descends to raise us up. If we hear the call from the Good Shepherd and follow, we can transcend a self-centered love to the love of God and one another. The saints are the sign of that transcendent love. The readings today point to that mystery that can be part of our human experience if we choose to follow in faith.
 
The stories we tell ourselves
Last week, the Risen Christ explained to two men fleeing Jerusalem how it is that the scriptures explained the passion, death and resurrection of the Messiah. The two had all the facts, they just couldn’t put them together. They were led through scripture to the experience of Christ in the breaking of the bread. That explanation is a religious explanation of the experience of two disciples. How could there be any other explanation?
 
Could you explain what faith means through chemistry and physics? Here we go; creation had become too acidic and Jesus is the alkali that produces a salt that we call eternal life!  Apples and oranges. Just the wrong language. Religion and chemistry are two different ways of knowing, both leading to truth, only one to eternal life.
 
How about philosophy? We are autonomous individuals and, left to our own nature, our lives are brutish, nasty and short. It is the sword of Leviathan, the state, that holds us in check and provides what happiness can be had. Humans only respect power. The tragedy of human existence is that we see power as the cause of and solution to all our problems. So, we fight for power. Jesus wants to be in control of my life? That makes me less. Wrong way of seeing things.
 
The Christian way of knowing is in the person of Jesus Christ. We are led to understand through typology and scripture. The Church understands Jesus in the light of the Old Testament, God’s millennium-long relationship with the people of Israel. This is why we explain Jesus as the Messiah who leads us on a New Exodus. Jesus is the sacrificial Lamb of God, the King of Israel, the New Adam, Divine Wisdom from on high, the Bread from Heaven, the new Manna, the Light in the Darkness. These are all Old Testaments types used to understand how Jesus saves.  Jesus does not save us by producing a chemical reaction or a good argument for a better way of life. Instead, in the Gospel of John, Jesus tells us that he is the Good Shepherd. Jesus’ self-understanding is rooted deeply in the Hebraic experience of God.  Psalm 23, the responsorial psalm,

“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. In verdant pastures he gives me repose; beside restful waters he leads me; he refreshes my soul.”

On the Fourth Sunday of Easter, the Church begins to transition from the great feast of Easter and head toward Pentecost. We are being led, one might say, shepherded into eternal life. Church, scripture, sacrament and a holy way of life are the voice of the Shepherd and the Gate.
 
The Gospel according to John and the Good Shepherd
Jesus using a figure of speech,( paroimia) we would say, allegory, called himself the Good Shepherd leading us into the sheepfold. The sheepfold is what we in the Golden West would call a corral; a stone enclosure with one entryway. The shepherds brought their sheep to the sheepfold for the night and a gatekeeper would watch the sheep, so that thieves wouldn't break in and steal the sheep.
 
Jesus describes himself as the Good Shepherd leading his sheep in the fold. Then the metaphor changes to:

“So, Jesus said again, “Amen, amen, I say to you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them.  I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture. A thief comes only to steal and slaughter and destroy; I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.”  John 10

The saved pass through Jesus like a gate, he leads them like a shepherd, he protects them in a sheepfold. Nobody enters except through him. Where does this description come from?

Ezekiel: The True Shepherd of Israel is God
Typology is to use Hebraic signs, symbols and meanings to explain present reality. Jesus is using a prophecy from Ezekiel to reveal himself. It is the use of typology. Ezekiel’s prophecy, not part of the readings today, says,

Thus, says the Lord God: Ho, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the crippled you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, and with force and harshness you have ruled them. So, they were scattered, because there was no shepherd; and they became food for all the wild beasts. My sheep were scattered, they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill; my sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth, with none to search or seek for them. Ez. 34:2-6

 He says, “everyone who came before him was a thief”, he's talking about the self-serving leaders of Israel. They were not true shepherds of the people. Jesus refers to himself as the gate to eternal life and says that he is the good shepherd calling his sheep.
 
That chapter in Ezekiel goes on to identify Israel’s shepherd as God himself:

“…thus, says the Lord GOD: Behold, I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock when some of his sheep have been scattered abroad, so will I seek out my sheep; and I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness...” Ex. 34:11

 The Good Shepherd, according to Ezekiel is God. Jesus is claiming what only God can claim. To understand Jesus as the Good Shepherd is pretty obvious. He led the disciples and taught them through the entire gospel of John.  But how is Jesus the sheep gate? Consider the early, apostolic preaching.
 
Baptism as the gate to eternal life: Acts of the Apostles
Apostolic preaching presented baptism as the gate to salvation. The entry, like the gate to a sheep pen, through the death and resurrection of Jesus into the fullness of life. That gate we know as baptism. In the first reading, St. Peter preached,

"Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is to you and to your children and to all that are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.” And he testified with many other words and exhorted them, saying, "Save yourselves from this crooked generation." So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.” Acts 2

 Consider three aspects of this passage:

1. Number one: Christian preaching pointed to the shame and guilt in the human heart, that darkness in our life that undermines love with God and others. People don’t want to hear that. Those that do and recognize the part they play in self-destruction and the destruction of others are given a gateway to safety, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you.”  The early Christian preaching pointed to the sacraments as the privileged encounter with the Risen Christ.  Typology leading to sacramental reality, not metaphors, but a participation in spirit and life.
2. Number two:  Baptism has the power to forgive sins that only God can forgive. Peter says, “be baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.” When you are baptized into Jesus’ suffering and death, you enter into the forgiveness promised on the cross. The post-resurrection appearances of Jesus emphasize the same reality; the sacraments do what God alone has authority to make real.
3. Number 3: Peter calls the people to baptize their children. He didn’t say, “this is for you and for your children if they have reached the age of reason and can choose it for themselves.” Baptism of children is the radical belief in the offer of salvation, the grace of God, which precedes human understanding. None of us really understand the sacraments; because they are a transcendent reality present in material reality. We grow into the reality sacraments make present in our lives through time and experience molded by God’s grace.

God's covenant love in the New Testament is more inclusive than in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, if you were a male, you could be brought into the covenant as an infant through the rite of circumcision. This is why St. Paul says that baptism is the circumcision of the heart
“In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not administered by hand, by stripping off the carnal body, with the circumcision of Christ.   You were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.   And even when you were dead [in] transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, he brought you to life along with him, having forgiven us all our transgressions;  obliterating the bond against us, with its legal claims, which was opposed to us, he also removed it from our midst, nailing it to the cross;” Col. 2:11-14
The New Covenant is more inclusive than the Old Covenant. Not only are male children to be spiritually circumcised, but females as well. Everyone is marked with the covenant. We Christians take that revolution for granted, but it was the foundation for how religious thought began to change a woman’s role in the world. 
 
Change and Resistance
There is a great story about the English Catholic novelist Graham Greene who had converted to Catholicism and then fallen away. When in Italy, he had the chance to meet St. Padre Pio. At the last minute, he cancelled his appointment. When asked why, Greene, who was travelling with a woman friend (who was not his wife) said, he and his friend declined “as neither of us wanted our lives changed! We were both Catholics.” Yup, you can choose that. [i] Actually, I respect Greene’s honesty.
 
Tertullian, an early Church Father from the early third century, complained about the reluctance of the people of his time to come to baptism. They were reluctant because they were honest. They didn’t want to change. They liked themselves as they were. Tertullian said, ‘if I told you I have gold for you at the Church, you would break the doors down. If I tell you I have the gateway to eternal life, you say, “maybe tomorrow.” ( of course I paraphrase)
 
Science is not religion or metaphysics. It looks at what can be weighed and measure and tries to interpret what it might mean. It is judged, in large part, by its capacity to predict. We don’t look to God for a vaccine for coronavirus. We do pray that God might inspire a great scientist to a helpful discovery.
 
The Christian Religion proclaims Christ crucified, buried, risen from the dead and ascended to the right hand of the Father. Its language isn’t scientific in the sense of natural science, like physics and chemistry, although theology does have a rational method. The proclamation of Christ, however, is not an argument arrived at through Socratic dialectic or the methodology of analytic philosophy. It is, instead, a proclamation of a fact that cannot be known unless God himself should choose to reveal it in his Divine Providence. It is mediated to us through the person of Jesus Christ as understood in the light of faith as shaped, in part, through the signs, images and meanings of God’s ancient covenant with the people Israel.  Christ on the cross is the revelation of God’s love that leads, heals and sanctifies his creation. Science and philosophy can uncover truths about our lives. God alone, not science and not philosophy, can lead us to life more abundantly. Something more that arguments. Something more than can be mathematically measured. Love does not exist on a spreadsheet or in a formula. Love is experienced by those who can open themselves to love itself.