Where do you hear the Shepherd's voice?

 + J. M. J. +   

 
Homily Outline for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year C

On this Good Shepherd Sunday, we hear very succinctly, “My sheep hear my voice; I know them and they follow me.”  It is very hard for us to embrace this truth: we are not the principal shepherds of our lives, ourselves, or our families!  Jesus is our shepherd, Jesus who is God, and we are not.  This boils down to a very simple truth: God is God and I am not!  It bears repeating. We so easily place ourselves at the center of all reality and meaning, thus displacing God, and very quickly we can find ourselves worshipping at our own altars, instead of at God’s altar.

Jesus our Good Shepherd leads us to green pastures, to fresh water; He protects us from wolves and thieves; He seeks out the lost sheep and brings them home.  This is reassuring in theory, but it’s only meaningful if we actually allow Jesus to direct and shape our lives.

Where do we hear Jesus’ voice?  If He is to guide, protect, teach, and rescue us, we must hear His voice.  We hear His voice in our hearts and in the Church.  We are created for God, this longing for God is inherent and constitutive of what it means to be fully human. As St. Augustine said, “You have made us for Yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”  God’s voice speaks to us in the depths of our conscience and in our pure desires.  However, that interior voice must be tested and purified by God’s self-revelation through the Church.  Left to our own devices, we are supremely capable of justifying nearly anything we want, supremely capable of distorting, ignoring, or even silencing the voice of our conscience for a time.  We are broken and weak from original sin and our own sins, and so left to our own devices we are terribly vulnerable.  Jesus entrusted His teaching and authority to His Apostles.  In time, the New Testament was recognized and assembled by the Church.   No Church, no Bible.  If we want to know God’s teaching and His law, we must turn to the His Revelation, both in its written form, and in the living voice of the Church which necessarily interprets a text.  No text can interpret itself.  Scripture and Tradition together correct and guide our consciences, so that we can truly be one flock, hearing Jesus’ voice and following Him.

To hear this Word, and even more, to act on this Word, will necessarily involve us in difficulty!  In our 2^nd reading we are given a beautiful vision of heaven where every tear has been wiped away, but notice, these multitudes who stand before the throne and before the Lamb are also the ones who have survived a time of great distress, and they have been washed white in the blood of the Lamb.  In our 1^st reading Paul and Barnabas are preaching Jesus Christ, but they are rejected by many, persecuted, and they end up getting kicked out of the whole region.  If we are faithful to Jesus Christ, we too will face opposition, rejection, and even persecution at times.  We do not seek trouble, but we must know that to follow Christ means not only glory and eternal life, but also the Passion and the Cross.  We have experienced the resistance in our own hearts to doing the right thing.  We have been hurt by others when we tried to do what was right.  We have looked around at times and noticed that the great tide of majority opinion and practice often seems to be flowing away from or against the Church.  Jesus told us this would be so, and from the Early Church to the present, so it has been.

As an under-shepherd, delegated by the Church to serve you on behalf of Christ, I participate in a very small way in Jesus’ sacred role as shepherd, and so I am charged with helping you to hear the Shepherd’s voice and to follow Him, even as I struggle to do this myself.  With you I am a member of the flock, for you I am a shepherd.

As I look around the world in which we live, I see so much that is broken, so many attractive lies that lead us away from the Flock and away from the Shepherd, Jesus Christ.  One place this is particularly evident is in the breakdown of our families, the basic unit of the flock.  We are all impacted by this in one way or another.  Our society and culture becomes more and more extreme in worshipping the God of Self at any cost, and vocations that require the gift of self have suffered terribly… both priesthood and marriage.  The Church continues to teach the truth, as She always has, the truth entrusted to Her by Jesus Christ, and yet it seems that our society, and indeed, most of us baptized Catholics, turn a deaf ear.  More and more people seem to understand that something has gone terribly wrong, and as I talk to you in many different contexts, I hear your concern and anxiety.  The death toll mounts from war, and violence, and abortion.  Our children are more and more brutalized by a world full of pornography and bloodshed sold as entertainment.  Fewer young adults each year enter into stable marriages, and fewer children have access to both their mother and father.  We all see this, we are all impacted by it, on some level we all cry out, “What is happening to our world, to our society, to our communities, to our families!”

God has not abandoned us in these storms and continues to teach us the truth through His Church, if we have ears to hear. We are not sheep scattered without a shepherd, unless we refuse to hear His loving voice.  Jesus is calling us together away from bitter pastures and tainted water, away from wolves and precipices, but we must respond, we must hear His voice and follow Him. We must know Him and be known.

The most basic building block of society is the family, and our families are falling apart all around us.  OUR families! ..not families in some far-off inner-city war zone… OUR families.  Our parents, our children, our spouses, our grandchildren… we are falling apart.

Almost 44 years ago, Pope Paul VI issued an encyclical letter titled Humanae Vitae, which means “Of Human Life,” and he addressed the raging storms of controversy that surrounded the use of artificial birth control in the Church.  New technologies had arisen, and many voices confidently asserted that they would bring a new era of human flourishing.  Many voices within the Church clamored for the pope to give the thumbs up to the creation of a brave new world where no one would be burdened by a pregnancy that they didn’t intend.  And, yet, being the Vicar of Christ, a shepherd in service of the Good Shepherd, Pope Paul VI taught the truth, a truth that was very hard for the Church to hear, a truth that lead many to revile and scorn him.  We have sown the wind, and after forty years, we are reaping the whirlwind that Pope Paul VI clearly prophesied.  Let me close by reading you two short paragraphs from that letter, paragraphs that strike to the heart of the very broken world in which we live.  Hear the voice of the Shepherd speaking to you through His Church:

Consequences of Artificial Methods

17. Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.

Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.                                          (Humanae Vitae # 17) (Full text here: Humanae Vitae)

My brothers and sisters in Christ, sadly, Pope Paul VI was exactly right in every regard… there has been a general lowering of moral standards, both women and men are treated more and more as instruments, even by their spouses, and the government here and in many other countries has indeed taken undue control of human life into its own hands and away from families and parents.

I do not even begin to imagine that what I have said today has explained in any full way the Church’s teaching, nor do I imagine that I have provided an adequate or convincing defense of that teaching.  However… Jesus is our Shepherd, He speaks to us through the Church, and Pope Paul saw what the experts and pundits did not.  If you would like to learn more and grapple with these important issues, pick up a copy of Humanae Vitae at the entrances and read it prayerfully.  Also, we have a rack of very fine pamphlets examining various aspects of a Culture of Life, please check them out!  If we will listen, we will hear the Shepherds voice, and He will lead us through the storms of this world to eternal life.

+ A. M. D. G. +