Does it not strike you how much the Lord loves to spoil us, especially during these Fifty Days of Easter? All the texts of the Liturgy overflow with expressions that should fill our hearts with joy and gratitude. On this 4th Sunday of Easter, for instance, the Church invites us to contemplate the image of Jesus the Good Shepherd. This is much more than just a comforting theme, since it is not any poet or preacher who announces it to us but the Lord Jesus himself. He looks into our eyes and, with all the ardor of his Heart, reveals to us his identity: I am the Good Shepherd! It is the Son of God himself, dead and risen, who speaks to us. And what does he seek from us by doing so? Quite simply, that we give him permission to take care of us!
Jesus is indeed the Good Shepherd; but are we humble enough to allow him to cast us in the role good sheep? Do we even want to be such? Admittedly, it is more than a little humiliating to be called a “sheep”, an animal famous for its stupidity… There are so many things that must first change in me if I am finally to rejoice in having been elected to the humble flock of Jesus Christ!
First of all, I must agree to be a follower rather than a leader when it comes to the spiritual quest, and I must admit to my existential condition of being lost, of having gone astray. I will only be sensitive to the approach of this divine Shepherd, and tuned in to the sound of his voice, if I feel the urgent need to be sought and found by Someone who can save me from my lost condition. For this I need humility and realism, springing from a certain honest knowledge of myself, out of a bitter experience. Sometimes we first have to fall very low for our pride to finally surrender to the action of grace, and for me to cry out from the bottom of my heart: ‘Lord, save me! Now I truly know that I cannot save myself!’
Within our family and community, we must have the humility and realism to look at ourselves and each other and admit with good humor that we are all of us, most of the time, rather stupid and lost sheep, and that it is not from someone in our midst that we will find a shepherd who saves us: neither heads of state, nor politicians, nor scientists, nor economists, nor (believe it or not!) abbesses or abbots or superiors ad nutum, nor above all the generals and their soldiers, whose god is war. And yet, socially and culturally speaking, it is not so easy to give up our instinctive search for salvation from among those whom the world presents to us as the “wise and strong” who will “take good care of us”.
No, we must definitely look elsewhere, realizing that the only one who can save us is the One who declares to us today in the tone of a lover: I am the Good Shepherd, [and] a good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. This moving and consoling statement is nevertheless difficult to accept, for two further reasons. First, it seems insane to us that a shepherd could save his sheep by offering himself as a sacrifice to the wolf. Why would this wolf ever stop his carnage after having devoured the shepherd? And the second reason touches us even more closely: If this Shepherd saves others by giving his life, will not his own tough logic apply to us, too, as having been saved: namely, that we also, in turn, become shepherd for others and give our own lives so that they may be saved? Something in us recoils at that thought, and whispers: ‘Yes, you want to be a good Christian, but surely not a fanatic!’
The Word of God we have just heard, on the other hand, intends to persuade us to become more available, more consenting, to the action of God in our lives through the coming of his Son. The Paschal Mystery requires that I radically change the commonly shared logic I have received. Like Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, I must come to be totally convinced that only God can raise from the dead the One whom human beings have put to death. God follows precisely the logic that you and I conventionally reject, in order to bring about the salvation of the world, instanced here in the healing of a cripple: There is no salvation through anyone [other than Jesus Christ, the Nazorean]; nor is there any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved. The strength and courage to affirm such an unheard-of thing, first in our own inmost heart and then before the hostile world, can only come to us from the power Holy Spirit dwelling within us, as in the case of St Peter.
The intimacy with himself to which Our Lord invites us today is so extraordinary that it can have its source in only one place: the sphere of the Blessed Trinity, and more precisely in the mutual love and trust existing between the Son and the Father in the bond of the Spirit. Let’s listen carefully to what Jesus is revealing to us today: I am the good shepherd, and I know [my sheep] and [my sheep] know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. This revelation seems to me almost unimaginable: the same reciprocal and eternal knowledge and love between two divine Persons who are inseparable and necessary to one another—this same mutual knowledge and love has been communicated to us, poor creatures that we are. We exist within the Trinitarian relationship; the roots of our life suck up sustaining sap from the ground of God’s own intimate life!
As if that weren’t enough, the Lord adds: This is why the Father loves me: because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. Now, for whose sake exactly is Jesus laying down his life? For the Father’s sake, since he says: the Father loves me because I lay down my life? But the Father has no need of such a sacrifice! For what precisely, then, does the Father express so much gratitude to the Son? It must be for Jesus’ laying down his life for our sake. The inevitable conclusion may sound blasphemous to rigid ears: namely, that the Father must not love us any less than he has loved the Son from all eternity. I leave you to ponder this unbelievable truth, which we must nevertheless believe because nothing less would be worthy of the God we worship, and nothing less can raise us from the dead. As we have just heard in the First Letter of John: See what love the Father has bestowed on us, that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are! … We shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.
