Good Shepherd: Priest, Prophet, King

My sheep hear my voice, and they follow Me. [Spanish]

The Lord Jesus shepherds us. We talked about this two weeks ago.

Shepherds guide sheep, care for them, protect them, provide for them. Sheep cannot live without their shepherd. So the image of the shepherd and his sheep offers us an excellent metaphor for our relationship with Christ—a metaphor so excellent that He Himself employed it.

But we need to expand the metaphor in order to grasp its significance fully. Christ is the shepherd of our souls. And He shepherds us by being our priest, our prophet, and our king.

1. Our priest. We need a relationship with God Almighty, the mysterious, the awesome, the one omnipotent truth and beauty. Jesus shepherds us in that relationship.

On the cross, Christ acted as a priest, offering Himself to the Father, in order to reconcile all of creation with her Creator. All of us share in Christ’s priesthood when we offer ourselves to the Father along with the Body and Blood of Christ crucified. In the Holy Mass, Jesus joins our offering of ourselves to God with His offering of Himself to God.

Without Christ as our priest, we would not know how to offer ourselves honestly and well. We would have no real hope that any offering we made of ourselves would actually please the Father.

But when Christ our Good Shepherd unites our offering of ourselves with His offering of Himself—which is precisely what happens at Mass—then we can rest in the peace of knowing that God does accept the sacrifice.

He smiles on it. It pleases Him. Our sacrifice of ourselves to God does bring about peace and friendship; it harmonizes us with heaven. Because we share in the priesthood of our Good Shepherd and High Priest, Jesus of Nazareth.

2. Our prophet. We need to know the truth. We need insight into the great mystery of life. We need to understand somehow why we exist and what we should do. We need to know what ultimate goal we can seek.

Our Good Shepherd Jesus Christ reveals all this to us. We have a Father in heaven Who loves everything that He made. He wills our growth, our fruitfulness, our ultimate happiness. He united Himself to us personally, so as to share His life with us. He has made us His adopted children and has prepared a heavenly inheritance for us. He forgives repentant sinners. He rewards self-sacrificing love.

For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son. The Good News. The world does not know Him, but we know Him. And He has entrusted to us the message of God’s undying love.

He has given us ‘the key of knowledge,’ so to speak. Jesus Christ makes human life make sense. Jesus alone has spoken to the human race the truth about itself. With Him as our teacher and source of heavenly information, we can deal with anything. Without Him, we inevitably destroy ourselves, one way or the other.

3. Our king. Here’s a quote from Pope St. Leo the Great: What indeed is as royal for a soul as to govern the body in obedience to God?

Jesus used the cross as His altar, as we remembered earlier. But He also used the cross as His throne. From the cross, He reigned over all things.

Now, worldly selfishness cannot conceive of the cross as a throne. But worldly selfishness has no true peace or happiness, either.

The true king does not subjugate us by coercion, by flattery, or by indulgence. He subjugates honest and free souls solely by the power of the truth. He sees all and knows all. He governs all things in accord with the loving plan of Providence.

On the cross, Christ revealed the greatest sovereignty. A human soul so self-possessed that nothing could detach it from God. No threat of violence, no recrimination, no false promise of passing comfort or fame could move the kingly soul from its true love.

The devil wants to subjugate us by dishonestly promising us all kinds of benefits—benefits that quickly turn into shackles. Christ liberates us from this by freely giving us the freedom to trust in our heavenly Father for everything. And to live only to please Him. Christ gave us this kingly gift from His cross.

Christ is the shepherd-king of the humble sheep who live for God and only God. Christ’s people quietly lead unremarkable lives of little, unnoticed kinknesses—all the while enjoying a kind of serenity and joyful hope that all the gold in Fort Knox could never give.

Our shepherd-priest. Our shepherd-prophet. Our shepherd-king. We follow Him to the altar to give ourselves to the Father. We heed His teachings, live by them, and share them with love. We follow Him gladly to the throne of the cross, because we know: That is where our King reigns over the whole universe.

Good Shepherd and Maimed Sheep

The Lord is my shepherd. We sheep hear His voice, and He leads us. We are His people, the sheep of His flock. As St. Peter put it: Jesus Christ, risen from the dead–“the shepherd and guardian of our souls.” He leads us to pastures of abundant life.

Good Shepherd Sunday this Sunday. Fourth Sunday of the blessed Easter season. I daresay we have all heard homilies about how we are sheep. And sheep are dumb. And I daresay we’ve heard other homilies about how yes, sheep are indeed quite dumb, but not about everything. Sheep can skillfully recognize their shepherd’s familiar voice. And I daresay we’ve heard other homilies about how gently and lovingly Jesus shepherds us; mercifully, sweetly, etc., etc.

All true. All good. Yes, we’re dumb sheep. Yes also: we’re not totally dumb; we can recognize and follow the voice of Christ, the Word of God. Yes, His voice sounds in the ears of our souls, in the ears of our consciences—and it’s not a hard sound, but a soft one, a familiar one.

We do not doubt that Christ our shepherd leads us to salvation. We know that we reach heaven by humbly obeying Him, just like sheep obey the shepherd. We need His guidance. The demands of His doctrine touch us like a shepherd’s staff. We pray that we might have the grace to co-operate. All this is Christianity in a nutshell, and we are Christians.

But maybe we sheep can credit ourselves with enough intelligence to pose a question. We can allow ourselves to recognize a difficulty, an apparent contradiction in the Good Shepherd’s teaching.

On the one hand, Christ promises us a pleasant time when we obey Him. He declared, “My yoke is easy and my burden light.” His Apostle John wrote to us, “Keep His commandments. His commandments are not burdensome.” The prophet Micah put it like this: “What does the Lord your God require of you but to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God?”

Doesn’t sound all that difficult.

But, on the other hand, Lord Jesus said: “How narrow the gate, how constricted the road that leads to life! Those who find it are few.” “If anyone come to Me and hate not even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.” Jesus damned the selfish people to eternal hell for failing to offer Him a glass of cold water. They protested, “Lord, we never saw you thirsty!” We know how He replied. “Whatever you failed to do for even the least ones, you failed to do…  for Me.”

Sounds pretty demanding. Pretty burdensome, in fact. Jesus Christ is a gentle, loving shepherd—with a staff that feels more like a whip on our shanks. He smiles, then whips us and says, “Hurry up and become saints right now.”

So we have an honest question: Lord, how can it be both hard and easy to follow You as our shepherd? How can it be both hard and easy?

I think there’s a way for us to resolve this apparent self-contradiction on the part of Christ the Good Shepherd. But it will be humiliating for us. To find the answer, what we have to do is: Acknowledge that, if we find obeying Christ the gentle Shepherd difficult, it’s our own damn fault.

As far as what He has done goes, He made it easy. He took the initiative of total love. He knew that the human race as a whole had fallen into hopeless sin. So He became one of us and offered the sacrifice to make things right. And He poured out the Holy Spirit upon us in such a way that, had we co-operated ever since earliest youth, becoming a diligent mature Christian would have involved far fewer challenges than we sinners have to do battle with. For the soul that keeps a pure conscience from childhood onward, growing into holiness involves maybe the kind of effort and exertion involved in a round of miniature golf.

But who among us can reasonably claim to have co-operated all along and maintained that kind of purity? Don’t we rather have to admit: “Okay, Lord. Keeping up with you as the shepherd feels to this particular sheep more like training for a marathon than like walking in a park. But that’s because I have sinned, and I have developed bad habits that make it hard for me to act with virtue. I have turned something pleasant into something hard. Forgive me! And please give me the help I need to stumble after You, and stay close enough to hear Your voice, in spite of the self-inflicted wounds I bear, which make me a slow and feeble sheep.”

Now, how does He respond to this? With the same immeasurable patience He had when He invited us to follow Him in the first place. “Come to Me, all you who are weary and find life burdensome, and I will refresh you.”

Our sins have debilitated us; we are not just dumb sheep—we are maimed sheep, and we have maimed ourselves. But Christ’s medicine is stronger than the wounds we have given our own souls. He will even yet make the burden of following Him light, even for us. “Don’t give up, sinner,” He says. “The shepherd will gladly lay you on His shoulders.”

The Shepherd Leads, Our Souls Grow

“The Lord is my shepherd.” The Lord’s flock knows His voice, and we follow Him. We follow Him as He leads us through the pilgrimage of time, the pilgrimage of our earthly life. Time passes. We listen for His voice and follow. Years pass. He leads on.

Two quick points on this.

1. Speaking of time passing… Exactly three years ago, we had just finalized the Martinsville-Rocky Mount parish-cluster Mass schedule. Remember that? On Good Shepherd Sunday, 2011, those of us down here in Franklin and Henry counties, Virginny, had to face some facts together. Life was going to get a little bit harder, for the people and for me.

John 10 Compendium

1. Some facts about John 10

2. Christ Shepherds One Church

3. The Sheep’s Gate

4. Brief Sheep’s Guide to Spiritual Growth

In Through, and Out From, the Sheep’s Gate

Here is a little homily, with some remarks of purely local interest…

Jesus said, “I am the gate for the sheep. Whoever enters through me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.” (John 10:7-9)

Kidron Valley, without a knucklehead in the photo

“The Lord is my shepherd.”

Maybe these are the most famous words in the Bible. With these words, we, the Church, respond to Christ, Who declared Himself to be the divine Shepherd of souls.

Christ gave His Good Shepherd discourse in the Temple precincts of Jerusalem.

In other words, Jesus spoke about being the sheep’s gate very near the Sheep’s Gate in the Jerusalem city wall, where they led the animals for sacrifice into the Temple area.

The sheep that entered through this gate had walked through a dark valley–the Kidron Valley between Jerusalem and Mt. Olivet. For these lambs, the Kidron Valley was a valley of death in more ways than one.

Pópulum tuum, quaésumus, Dómine, intuére benígnus

“Look kindly upon Your people, we beseech You, O Lord”

This sentence is from one of the priest’s prayers in today’s Mass.

This is why I exist: to ask God to look kindly upon His people.

The sacred priesthood is: Begging God, look kindly on us, please.

Plus, there is preaching and teaching.

But the main thing is begging God.

This sentence from today’s Mass is a shorter version of my favorite Mass prayer:

“Father, …You sent [our Redeemer] as one like ourselves, though free from sin, that you might see and love in us what you see and love in Christ.”

…John 10 contains statements by Christ that are illuminated somewhat by the following facts of first-century life in the province of Palestine:

1. Shepherding was the #2 most common occupation, after farming.

2. Shepherding was not romanticized by first-century Palestinians. Our Lord’s audience knew that shepherding was a difficult, exceedingly dangerous life.

3. There were two kinds of shepherds: Those who owned their own sheep, and those who tended sheep owned by someone else. The second category was the LEAST desirable of all jobs, just one tiny notch above being a criminal.

4. Sheep are not stupid in every way. They have no sense of direction and are utterly defenseless against predators. BUT they learn their names quickly and recognize voices.

5. Shepherds used common sheepfolds to protect their sheep from predators at night. One of the shepherds slept in the opening in the hedge or fence. He would be the human gate.

6. In the morning, the gatekeeping shepherd would only allow shepherds he knew and recognized to enter the sheepfold.

These facts make our Lord’s discourse a little easier to understand.

If you have never read Jesus Christ’s discourse in John 10, then you are seriously impeded from understanding reality.

Click the link and read it right now.

…Ovie hat-trick!!!

Caps up 2-0!!!