This Sunday, Jesus Is More a Shepherd Than the Pope: Takeaways for Easter Sunday 4

This Sunday is Good Shepherd Sunday, the Fourth Sunday of Easter Year C, and it is tempting to make it all about the Pope, the lead shepherd selected by cardinal shepherds in Rome.

But in this very short Gospel, Jesus does not point to Peter or Pope Francis or Pope Leo XIV. He  makes a very different point. He looks at each of us individually and says: You belong with nobody else but me. It is hard to exaggerate how enormously significant it is for the Second Person of the Trinity, the Lord and King of the Universe, to say this to us. Here are seven takeaways from  Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

What Jesus says about being the Good Shepherd is so significant, in fact, that Jewish leaders wanted to kill him for it.

The brief Gospel reading we hear at Mass from the Chapter 10 of the Gospel of John includes no context so we might miss exactly what is going on.

The order of events goes like this: In John, Chapter 9, Jesus is at an Autumn Temple festival when he heals the man born blind on the Sabbath, and the Pharisees, badger the man, saying, “We know that God spoke to Moses, but we do not know where this one is from.”

The newly sighted man answers, “This is what is so amazing, that you do not know where he is from, yet he opened my eyes.”

In other words, one question hangs in the air: “Where is Jesus from?”

Jesus answers the question at length in John Chapter 10 and we hear bits of his words in the Good Shepherd Sunday Gospel on each Fourth Sunday of Easter in the Church’s three-year cycle. In Year A, Jesus says that his sheep know his voice and that other would-be shepherds are strangers and robbers. In Year B, we hear him say, “I am the Good Shepherd,” and “the Father knows me and I know the Father.”

This upsets the Pharisees immensely. They are very familiar with the prophecy of Jeremiah which is echoed in Ezekiel, when God speaks against the leaders of his people and says,  “I am coming against these shepherds. I will take my sheep out of their hand and put a stop to their shepherding my flock. … I myself will pasture my sheep.”

So when Jesus says he is the “Good Shepherd” he is not saying, “I am a kindly helper, like a friendly farmhand.” He is saying, “I am the Great One here to oust you from your places, you rotten thieves.”

In fact, his words upset the Pharisees so much that they brooded over them for weeks. And that brings us to this Sunday’s Gospel.

In Year C, the Gospel for Good Shepherd Sunday takes place months after the Autumn festival at a winter festival at the Temple. The Pharisees have gathered around Jesus and they demand: “How long are you going to keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”

It is at this climactic moment that Jesus delivers the brief speech that is our Gospel this Sunday.

Instead of backing down from his previous words, he doubles down on them:

“My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish. No one can take them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.”

Those words make them so furious they pick up stones and are ready to kill Jesus then and there for blasphemy.

They see in a flash what Jesus has done. He has set them up. In the incident with the man born blind, their own words helped establish that Jesus was comparable to Moses, and that he was fulfilling Isaiah’s prophesy about the Messiah, giving sight to the blind. Now he says that he is “one with the Father” and will take their place.

For now, though, he escapes their grasp.

Today, 2,000 years later, his words should comfort us as powerfully as they upset his original audience.

The Pope is a crucial part of Jesus’s plan for the kingdom, but he is not our ultimate shepherd. God himself is. And the consequences of that  are enormous.

“My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me,” Jesus says. That changes everything for us. It means we don’t just belong “to” Jesus, our true shepherd, we belong with him.

Everyone who has made a conscious decision to follow Christ will know what that means. When we read the Beatitudes, or when we kneel before the Eucharist, we aren’t just experiencing something we know to be true — we are experiencing someone we know, personally and intimately, and someone who knows us.

Encountering Christ is like being with our favorite family member — or, to use Jesus’ analogy it’s like a sheep hearing a shepherd or, closer to our experience, like a dog hearing its master’s voice.

A dog can be tricked or bribed or tempted into doing the wrong thing, but when the master comes home, the dog knows immediately where its true allegiance lies.

We hear Christ’s voice the same way. We may get distracted and stray away, but when we stop and listen and pay attention to his voice we know who he is, and we know where we should be.

It turns out that having the King of the Universe as your advocate comes with some very strong perks.

“I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish,” Jesus says.

The Second Reading, from the book of Revelation, describes just what that eternal life looks like.

“The one who sits on the throne will shelter them. They will not hunger or thirst anymore, nor will the sun or any heat strike them,” it says. “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

This description of heaven describes exactly what we love about the happiest memories of our childhood, when people who loved us watched over us and provided everything we needed, and we had no worries and no fear.

Our memories are happier than the actual experiences were, probably — and even then they are a pale comparison of what life with God will be like.

Then Jesus says something which is at once comforting and terrifying: “No one can take them out of my hand.”

The devil can’t snatch us away. Neither can our persecutors.

The kind of persecution that is increasingly common in our day, physical martyrdom, can’t do it. The Second Reading describes martyrs this way: “They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” That is what the Middle Eastern and African Christians targeted today are experiencing.

The kind of persecution that we experience in America can’t take us away from Christ, either. In the First Reading, the Christians’ opponents “were filled with jealousy and with violent abuse contradicted what Paul said.” Not only that, they “incited the women of prominence who were worshipers and the leading men of the city, stirred up a persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and expelled them from their territory.”

In other words, they mocked the Christians, made their arguments seem absurd, and froze them out of society. We experience the same thing in our culture today — and it shouldn’t stop us any more than it stopped them.

Which brings us to what is terrifying about what Jesus says.

While no power can take us away from Jesus Christ, one small thing can: Our own willingness to shrug him off and follow our favorite sin instead.

Jesus finishes by spelling out his relationship with you and me in plain terms.

“My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.”

The Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it this way: “A baptized person belongs forever to Christ.”

In The Inferno, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s description of hell, those who were baptized and then rejected God are punished more severely than those who were never baptized and never rejected him so directly. That is because baptism has given us a special relationship with God — and when we turn against him it is an even greater sin.

The moral is: Stay where you belong.

Neither Pope Leo, the college of cardinals, our parish priest or any leader can force us into right relationship with Jesus, or take us out of it. We were placed there by the Good Shepherd and he will never let us go.

Lord Jesus, give us the grace to always stay safe in the palm of your hand.

Image: Church of England and Wales, Flickr.

By Tom Hoopes