Good Shepherd Sunday Homily for 4th Sunday of Easter A – May 2, 2020
By: Fr. Tony Bidgood, CSsR
The 4th Sunday of Easter is traditionally called Good Shephard Sunday, because it focuses our minds on Jesus as the Good Shepherd. It is also the World Day of Prayer for Vocations; this year it is the 57th year of this annual day of prayer when the Church invites people around the world to pray for vocations. Thus, one would expect a reflection on this day to have a focus on vocations to religious life, priesthood, and lay ministry in the Church; that would be typical. However, these are not typical times! Here in the province of Newfoundland, Canada we are moving into the third month of living with the pandemic of Covid-19 and I find that so much of what I do and think is mitigated by the pandemic. Perhaps this is true for you too.
We as a society are looking at everything differently now, and that is frustrating and intimidating because we do not know how our life will look going forward . All we are told is that it will look different. Richard Rohr recently wrote that we live in an in-between time right now: life as we knew it has stopped and life as it will be is not yet clear; thus, we live in-between, we live in what he calls liminal space in other words.
I find this helpful as we together mark Good Shepherd Sunday. I believe that this pandemic is compelling us to reconsider many things. This imposed ‘pause’ in our life is not just temporary or inconvenient, it is life changing. That is certainly true for the people who are sick with Covid-19, and especially true for the people who have died and those who mourn them. But it is also true, to a lesser degree in comparison, for everyone else. On this day I find my thoughts about the Good Shepherd developing in new ways. It says in the Gospel, that the Shepherd calls out to the sheep, and the sheep hear his voice. The Shepherd calls the sheep by name and leads them. The sheep follow the shepherd because they know his voice. What is Jesus, the Good Shepherd saying to us at this time of pandemic, what is he calling out to us?
I could – and perhaps some would say – should talk about vocations in the more conventional sense on this Good Shepherd Sunday, but somehow that does not feel appropriate given our context. What if Jesus is calling us to consider vocations in a new light? At this time, the Church’s the shepherds: religious, clergy, Bishops have found themselves without their pulpits as Churches are locked and still. However, new ways of proclaiming God’s word are being found online, as we are experiencing right now in this mass that you are watching. So, the Church is finding a new way to reach people and proclaim the Gospel, people seem to be accessing the Good News with a new attentiveness. In addition, our attention is also being drawn to people on the ‘frontline’, namely nurses, doctors, paramedics, first responders. These are among the people right now, who are shepherding us through this crisis. Their dedication to their profession of caring is admirable; society calls them ‘heroes’. These are people who every day go to work and follow their own vocation to care for the sick, to run into a crisis and help people. Today they are doing what they do every day of their working lives, pandemic or not. They are dedicated to bringing, mercy, healing, comfort and companionship at a time of unprecedented difficulty. They are the good and necessary shepherds that we need at this time.
But they are not alone in the vocation of shepherding. There are others whom most of us, rarely think of, or perhaps, we thought of as somehow ‘less important’ in their jobs, who are now revealed in this pandemic to be vitally important. How wrong we were as a society to ignore or dismiss them! Recently while making rounds as a chaplain in the ICU I talked with one of the members of the hospital housekeeping profession. She is a happy person with an ever-present smile. She was clad in full PPE and her task was to maintain the cleanliness and the hygiene of the ICU. She is on the frontline, she is face to face with Covid-19 daily; she and her colleagues, are absolutely an essential part of keeping people healthy and safe. Without them, the task of nurses and doctors would be impossible. She and her colleagues are good and necessary shepherds that we need at this time.
Earlier this week, I was in a local Walmart picking up some supplies when I had a conversation with the woman who was staffing the checkout lane. She was behind the plexiglass shield, she wiped down the conveyor belt after each customer was checked through. I asked her how she was doing, and with a big smile she said generally well, expect when people are rude to her. Imagine someone being rude to this frontline worker, who puts her health on the line everyday she works to makes sure you and I get what we need! She, and her colleagues are essential. She shows up for work and stands there to help me and other customers therefore potentially exposes herself to Covid-19. She said, her smile and her happy sing-song voice were deliberate efforts she uses to try to make the best of a hard time. I left Walmart touched by her attitude and her courage. She and her colleagues are good and necessary shepherds that we need at this time.
Jesus, the Good Shepherd, is telling us all something right now. I think, he is telling us that everyone matters, and the role they play in our society and the contribution they make demands respect and recognition. The practice of placing people on pedestals over and above others, because of career, job, money, education, position, status, needs to end. Our society is driven by the values of power and money, and yet ironically the institutional symbols of these values – office towers, closed, stock markets wobbling, parliaments shuttered are now closed. These places and professions that once enjoyed so much power and prestige are now sidelined and it is those who stand on the frontline to face the pandemic who are in the spotlight – people like nurses, doctors, cleaners, cashiers, and others who are the shepherds today. In addition, our Churches the symbols of institutional Christian religious power and authority are also shuttered. Perhaps the Good Shepherd’s voice is calling out to all of us to see the dignity of those we often overlook and marginalize and recognize the essential, inherent dignity and contribution that they make. Perhaps the Good Shepherd is also asking us who are part of the institutional Church to hear this challenge to our own power and authority structures as well.
In this time of liminal space, the Good Shepherd’s voice is calling out to us, but is saying something that is not new. Jesus has always been about giving a voice to the voiceless and the forgotten and the marginalized. His revolutionary gospel is so strong that it echoed around the stone-cold tomb as God brought forth resurrected life in the face of the ultimate power of death. But, we have not heard his voice because we have not fully followed it. In our society we have elevated as powerful those with money, those who have better education, those who get elected to public office, those who are celebrities and so on. In the Church we have elevated men because they are ordained and endowed them with enormous power that has been misused and has excluded so many. This, I believe is not consistent with the voice the Good Shepherd. The voice of Jesus is speaking to us now, and is calling us to rethink how we consider people in our world and in our institutions. If our shepherds right now are those who once were overlooked, or even looked down upon, then we are being called to think again, and to think anew.
In this month of May, dedicated to Mary, the following line from her famous prayer, the Magnificat, comes to mind: “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly.” Let us listen to the voice of the Good Shepherd at this time, let us hear that voice, and let us act upon what we hear as we move forward.