Today is known as Good Shepherd Sunday because each year the gospel is taken from John 10 where Jesus speaks of himself as the Good Shepherd.
It is also known as Vocations’ Sunday because, in 1964, Pope St Paul VI established this day as a special day to pray for vocations.
The logic is obvious and can be found in those words from the prophet Jeremiah, when God says: “I will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will feed you with knowledge and understanding” (Jer 3:15). Let us ask God to grant us authentic shepherds of souls, who, in imitation of Christ, are ready to lay down their life for the sheep, tend the weak, seek out the lost, and guide all to good pastures.
Israel in Jesus’s time was a profoundly agrarian society and sheep mattered. The Davidic king, the anointed ruler from the line of David, was seen as shepherd of his flock. David himself was a shepherd boy when anointed to be king, taken “from the pasture, from following the sheep, that you should be prince over my people Israel” (2 Sam 7:8). And the Israelites could get very tender over their sheep, as we see in the parable which Nathan told David after the latter’s great sin. The prophet speaks of a poor man who had a single. "little ewe lamb … it grew up with him and with his children; it used to eat of his morsel, and drink from his cup, and lie in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him." (2 Sam 12:3).
But in today’s gospel (Jn 10:1-10), Jesus adds a slightly different nuance. He is not only the Good Shepherd, as he will explain, he is also the gate of the sheepfold, the only legitimate way to go in and out of it. If we see the sheepfold as the Church, the place we are nourished and kept safe from wolves, then we only enter it through Christ. As Christ enters us through the Eucharist, we enter him through Baptism. But Jesus encourages us to ‘go in and out’ of the fold, not to abandon the Church, but in the sense of leaving its obvious confines – the parish, the home life of a Christian family – to go into the world to witness to our faith.
Guided by Jesus the Good Shepherd, we go out to witness, with his word in our hearts, but we return to the fold to be restored, fed and renewed. Jesus here is speaking to us of the very dynamic of Christian life: we need parish and home life yet must not stay locked in them but should rather witness in our work and leisure.
Finally, Jesus warns us against false teachers, "....“thieves … who come only to steal and kill and destroy”, who try to gain access to the fold in some other way than through him. With such people, let’s be like the sensible sheep Jesus speaks of:“A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.”
Homily on the readings of the Fourth Sunday of Easter (A)
The priest Luis Herrera Campo offers its nanomiliaA short one-minute reflection for these Sunday readings.
