We Cannot Feed on Lesser Truths
Fourth Sunday of Easter
Imagine that you are in a room surrounded by people who matter to you. People from your past, maybe: parents and family, teachers who changed your life, friends who helped you become the person you are today. Maybe there are also people from your present life who are in the room: new friends, perhaps a family of your own. And imagine that there in the room with you are all of the figures who have helped you to piece together whatever kind of a worldview you have for yourself, the people who have shaped your thinking about life and politics, your thinking about meaning and value: saints and scientists and politicians and authors and philosophers and popes and priests and playwrights and composers and songwriters.
Imagine that you are in a room surrounded by people who matter to you and imagine that everyone in the room is talking to one another. Imagine that everyone in the room is trying to talk to you. And imagine that into the room walks Christ. You do not see him, but he calls out to you over the other voices.
Would you hear him?
Would you know his voice if he called?
Would you respond to his call and follow him out of the room if he asked you and leave behind the people who matter to you?
The pasture that Christ describes in the Gospel today is a more dynamic image than we might think; there are many flocks of sheep, under the care of many different shepherds, using the same pasture for safety overnight. In the ancient world, to share a pasture was customary because most shepherds did not own the land needed for grazing and keeping their flocks. So, with the parable of the Good Shepherd, Christ describes a shepherd who enters a pasture in the early morning, filled with hundreds, maybe thousands of sheep, only some of which belong to him. But when the shepherd calls out, his sheep—and only his sheep—hear his voice, and they follow him out of the pasture.
Christ is concerned about other voices who call out to the sheep. There are strangers who call out in the pasture, the voices of other shepherds. Maybe these other shepherds do a fine job of caring for their own sheep, but those who belong to Christ do not belong other shepherds, no matter the quality or the goodness of their care. There are also the voices of thieves and robbers, who in ages past might have deceived many sheep into following them, but now that Christ has claimed the sheep of his flock, the sheep recognize only a single voice. I think it is interesting that Christ uses the present tense to describe actions that took place in the past. The author of the Gospel is clearly talking about other philosophies and religions, other ways of living life. Before Christ came into the world, other voices might have called out to the sheep, offering the promise of protection and care, and the sheep might have followed these voices as well as any other. But now that Christ has come into the world and claimed the lives of his sheep, these ancient voices belong to thieves and robbers. There is only one Good Shepherd, and only he offers the promise of salvation.
What we are talking about with the parable of the Good Shepherd is ownership. There is a moment that comes in the rite of baptism when a priest seals the forehead of a catechumen with a sign of the Cross, and with the imposition of the seal the life of the person to be baptized is claimed by Christ. The Fathers of the Church describe this moment with great beauty.
St. Cyril of Jerusalem says to the person about to be baptized:
Come near and receive the sacramental seal so that you may be recognized by the Master. Be numbered among the holy and recognized flock of Christ, so that you may be placed at His right hand.
Theodore of Mopsuestia says of the seal of the Cross upon the forehead that:
This sign with which you are now marked, is the sign that you are from now on marked as a sheep of Christ. For a sheep, as soon as it is bought, receives the mark by which its owner may be known; and it feeds in the same pasture and is in the same sheepfold as the other sheep who bear the same mark, showing that they all belong to the same master.
What we are talking about with the parable of the Good Shepherd is ownership; we belong to Christ. And what I would like to say is that because we belong to Christ, we know that his is the only voice to which we must respond. But we know that life is not so easy. Christ is a shepherd unlike any other. He shares his ownership of the flock. The sheep whom he loves and protects are entrusted to the hands of others for safekeeping. We belong to Christ, but there are so many other voices that speak for the Good Shepherd, who share in his labor: parents and teachers and friends and saints and priests and artists and philosophers and popes. Imagine the room filled with the people who matter to you. Each of the persons in that room, in their own way, if they really matter to you and you really matter to them, speaks for Christ.
And the problem for us, I want to say, is that the voice of Christ gets lost in the crowd. We become so accustomed to hearing the inflections of Christ’s voice spoken through the lives of others that we lose our facility for recognizing the call of the Good Shepherd; or maybe we never really learn to recognize his voice at all. The reality of Christ for us becomes the life of another person, or several different relationships, or a way of understanding politics, or a philosophy that resolves our doubts, or a form of art that gives expression to the deepest truths of our interior lives. We confuse the words that others speak on behalf of God for the Word of God himself. We confuse lesser truths for the one who is Truth itself. The people who matter to us are in the room, and so is Christ, and everyone is calling to us, but his voice we do not hear.
The danger for us, as I understand it, is that we become settled. We become accustomed to hearing familiar voices in the pasture. We feed. We stay close to the people we know. We let life get ordinary. But Christ is a shepherd unlike any other. We aren’t meant to stay in the pasture and feed the whole of our lives. We belong to Christ’s flock, sure, but Christ is the shepherd who also sends us out like sheep amongst wolves to share in the work of building up the Church. He tells us quite clearly that we are to love his voice more than any of the other voices in the room, more than the voices of mothers and fathers and sons and daughters. Christ says that we are to take up our cross and follow him, and that the radical discipleship of the Cross demands that we leave behind the pasture that we know and follow his voice out into the world. He tells us that when it comes to the life of discipleship, we need to be more than sheep; we need to be wise, shrewd, prudent, cunning, like a serpent, making calculated choices for the good of the Church and the good of our salvation.
To hear the voice of Christ over the other voices in the room is to hear a voice that calls us out of the pasture and into the world. What we are talking about with the parable of the Good Shepherd is ownership. We belong to Christ, and our belonging to him is rooted in baptism and realized, lived out, in mission. What is our mission? Our mission is whatever role Christ gives us to play in the drama of salvation. You can call it a vocation; you can call it the Cross you are asked to carry; you can call it the special purpose for which you are asked to sacrifice and that fills your life with meaning and purpose; you can call your mission the way you become who you really are in the mind of God. Your mission is the life of radical discipleship, your following the voice of the shepherd who calls you out of the pasture. The Good Shepherd names his sheep, he knows his sheep deeply and personally, and he calls his sheep to a life of discipleship in service of the Gospel.
I suppose that what troubles me is the kind of Christian complacency we see too often in the Church today. The dictionary says that to be complacent is to possess for ourselves an undue sense of satisfaction or contentment; to be complacent is to settle for less. And there are ways that we all suffer from complacency. We like to stay in the pasture and graze; the pasture is safe, there are no wolves in it; the pasture is familiar, we know the voices we hear; the pasture is home, and to stay in the pasture is to never need to leave anyone we love behind. We could spend our whole lives, maybe, there in the pasture, grazing upon lesser truths, staying close to the people we know. But the Good Shepherd who is Truth itself calls us by name out into the world and he gives us work to do, our Christian labor, and the life of real discipleship is the life of following his voice out of the safety of the pasture.
Imagine that you are in a room surrounded by people who matter to you and imagine that everyone in the room is talking to one another. Imagine that everyone in the room is trying to talk to you. And imagine that into the room walks Christ. You do not see him, but he calls out to you over the other voices.
Would you hear him?
Would you know his voice if he called?
Would you respond to his call and follow him out of the room if he asked you and leave behind the people who matter to you?
Maybe those questions are hard for you to answer. Maybe you aren’t even sure how to answer them. But those are the kinds of questions that matter because otherwise we risk missing out on the goodness and the glory of God’s promise to us. The Good Shepherd calls you out of the pasture and into the world, and his promise to you is that if you follow you will have life and have it more abundantly.
Homily delivered at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on April 30th, 2023