4th Sunday of Easter A

To understand what Jesus is saying in today’s gospel we have to forget all about the ‘one man and his dog’ approach to shepherding. It was a great TV programme in its day, but it had nothing to do with the shepherding Jesus knew. There were no collies running around then. As I have had the privilege of seeing many times in Spain, the shepherd walked in front of his sheep and they followed him wherever he went. It was a truly beautiful thing to watch. All day he would lead them from one place to another in search of good pasture and in the evening, along with all the other shepherds in the area, would bring them to the sheep-fold, a walled enclosure in the middle of a field, where all the flocks would spend the night together in safety.

You can imagine, however, the scene the following morning as the shepherds prepared for the day ahead. The sheep were all mixed in together by now and the way they found their way to where they were supposed to be was by recognizng the shepherd’s voice. ‘One by one,’ Jesus tells us, ‘The shepherd calls his own sheep and leads them out. He goes ahead of them and the sheep follow because they know his voice. They do not follow strangers but run away from them: they do not recognize the voice of strangers.’ And Jesus’ point is obvious. He is the shepherd who calls us to follow him. But there are other voices competing for our attention. These belong to thieves and brigands and, if we want to live our lives to the full - the reason, Jesus tells us, why he came into the world, - then we must not listen to them. We must do what the sheep do and run away from them, following the voice of the shepherd instead. But where are these voices? What do they sound like and what are they telling us? Well, their name is legion in the world today and I invite you to recognize just a few of them.

The first and loudest in today’s world is the voice of consumersim. I know I keep going on about it – hardly a week goes past without my mentioning it – but this is only because I believe it is fundamental to understanding the world we live in. Consumersim is the heart of an economic system which depends for its existence on our spending more and more money buying more and more things. And to keep itself afloat it has to use every means at its disposal to convince us of a lie, the lie that doing this will make us happy. Every day on television, on the sides of buses, on advertizing hoardings the lie screams out at us, in sharp contrast to what Jesus tells us in the gospels about the man who built bigger barns to hold his extra crops only for God to demand his soul of him the very night he finished building. Jesus also tells us that a rotten tree bears rotten fruit, and all around us we see the results of consumerism as the very future of the planet is threatened by the way it gobbles up the world’s resources at an unsustainable rate to keep feeding its insatiable need for energy.

Then there’s that other voice, equally loud and persistent in today’s world, which tells us that, in a modern scientific age, faith in God is a thing of the past, a relic of a byegone age. Few of us are unaffected by this idea, so prevalent is it in the media and elsewhere. But it’s not true. There are, of course, aspects of religion which do belong to a byegone age. They are mere superstition or magic, and the quicker we get rid of them the better. But mature, informed, adult faith has nothing to fear from science. At the frontiers of science there are many men and women of deep faith and if anyone tells you differently, like the sheep in the story, take no notice of them. Only two weeks ago, the Tablet carried the story of Mgr Georges Lemaitre, a parish priest all his life in Belgium until his death in 1966, who laid the foundations of the big-bang theory, convincing Einstein, among others, that the cosmos was not static but dynamic.

And there are many other voices ringing in our ears today which, in terms of this morning’s gospel, are the voices of thieves and brigands. There is the voice of narrow nationalism, loud and vociferous in Britain today, especially in the tabloid press, which tells us all manner of lies about foreigners and people different from ourselves. But as followers of Jesus we must have no truck with what this voice is saying. Then there’s the voice of self-interest, the ‘there’s no such thing as society’ voice, which encourages us to look after number one all the time at the expense of other people. I met a mother this week who, having tried all her life to instil the values of the gospel in her teenage daughter, was horrified to hear her speak so uncaringly of others and defend the idea that it is acceptable to use and manipulate them and do whatever is necessary to get what you want. But as a teenager, that deeply ungodly voice has been shouting its ugly message in her ear throughout the whole of her young life.

Another influential voice today is the voice of pessimism which whispers in the ears of many, telling them that life is pointless, that is has no meaning. Even when things were bad in the past, people had always God to fall back on. Sometimes this led to religion becoming what Karl Marx called ‘the opium of the people,’ - and that was not good. But, at its best, there was much more to it than that. Belief in God gave people hope at times when that was all they had, but today, when so many have lost touch with God, this hope is just not there. And I have no doubt this explains much of the drug-taking in our society today and is at least a starting point in any attempt to get to the root of so much self-harm and even suicide among the young at this time.

We are bombarded by lies. The sheep-fold is surrounded by thieves and brigands peddling their false versions of reality. The one voice telling us the complete truth is the voice of Jesus. He is the Good Shepherd. He is the one who offers us the fullness of life. His voice is encouraging, but also challenging, and I invite you to hear it today. And after all these years you don’t need me to tell you what it’s saying.


BIDDING PRAYERS


In the first reading this week, Peter addresses the people on the day of Pentecost, calling them to repentance. ‘Save yourselves’ he says, ‘from this perverse generation.’ Then, as now, many of the ideas current in society were not of God. False ideas and false ways of thinking were everywhere and the early Church did what Jesus had done. It called the people beyond these to new and more truthful ways of thinking and living. And so we pray for that same grace now…………Lord hear us

In the second reading, the same Peter, years later, speaks from experience of how it is often necessary to suffer, as Jesus did, for doing what is right. That has been true in every age and it will be true today for anyone who hears the call of God and stands up against the voices in society which peddle lies and falsehoods. But someone has to do this if the truth is to be proclaimed and we pray for the courage we need to be the ones who do it in our own part of the world……………………...………Lord hear us

The economic system we live under is deeply flawed and contains within itself a number of serious evils. It is ultimately unsustainable in terms of the way it uses the world’s resources. It leads, despite well intentioned attempts to correct this, to the rich becoming richer and the poor poorer. And most seriously of all in the long term, it tells us a profound lie about where the happiness we all seek lies. And so we ask God to lead us beyond this way of thinking to discover new gospel-based ways of organising ourselves and living together as one people…….….Lord hear us

Atheism has become the religion of our modern age. It is actively preached by committed disciples who see it as their mission to destroy forever what, for them, is the great lie of traditional religion. But at the root of this phenomenon is a failure to understand. Many aspects of traditional religion do need to be removed from the world but beyond that lies the wonderful world of faith, as yet unknown to the disciples of atheism. And so we pray that the world of our time will come to know the real God and that that knowledge will form the basis of a better future for the whole of humanity in the course of the third millennium………………...Lord hear us

The sense that life has no meaning is widespread in our day, especially among those in the rich West who either have no access to material possessions or have found out the hard way that happiness does not lie in acquiring them. As a result, many seek refuge in drug-taking which provides a temporary respite from the despair and hopelessness that more and more becomes their daily reality. And so we pray for all who are caught up in this lie………………………Lord hear us

Today is the World Day of Prayer for Vocations. And so we ask God to do what he has always done, give us what we need rather than what we want. The Church is facing many challenges in this area and we pray for the grace to face them rather than expect God to wave a magic wand and fix them. We pray, especially, for the insight to see where God is leading us at this time so that we can be the kind of Church he is calling us to be in the 21st century…………….Lord hear us