The Lord is My Shepherd

2nd Sunday after Easter

There’s something very endearing about sheep, isn’t there?  They’re placid little animals on the whole, meekly following their shepherd as he leads them from one pasture to another so they can feed on the fresh grass of God’s good earth.  They trust their shepherd, and most of them are quite content to follow him without a single rational thought in their head.  They don’t question how they should follow, or why they should follow, they just follow.  They don’t worry about what would happen if the shepherd can’t find a fresh pasture, or what he would do if the wolf attacks them.  They just trust him unquestioningly and follow him whithersoever he goeth.  It’s Good Shepherd Sunday today.  We know who the Good Shepherd is, and it’s time to realize also that we are the sheep.

“We are his people, and the sheep of his pasture,” as it says in Psalm 94.  It’s an analogy we should pay more attention to.  The nature of sheep informs us as to the how’s and why’s of the behavior God requires of us.  Like sheep, we should have blind obedience to our Shepherd, who is our Lord Jesus Christ.  We should follow him wherever he takes us—without question, without complaint, and without fear.  Whatever the perils the future holds for us, perils from land and sea, enemies foreign and domestic—we must trust in the Lord.  That Lord is our shepherd, and our trust in our shepherd should be unassailable.  Why?  Because he is such a Good Shepherd who will never fail us, never abandon us to the wolves, never tire of looking after us, his sheep.  He loves his sheep.

Between his Resurrection and his Ascension into heaven, our Lord founded his Church.  He appointed Peter, the Rock, to lead his Church, and to be his vicar on earth, acting as his very own chief shepherd, our pastor.  Three times he admonished St. Peter to feed his sheep.  For two thousand years, the Catholic faithful were able to trust Peter and each of his successors, the Vicar of Christ, to feed us, his sheep, to carry out the duties of shepherd entrusted to them.  We became accustomed to blindly following Christ’s Vicar, the Shepherd he appointed over us.  We followed like sheep, with total trust.  What an inconceivable betrayal then, that they allowed the smoke of Satan to enter into the sheepfold.  It was a betrayal of us, and more significantly, it was a betrayal of the trust our Lord had placed in the successors of St. Peter.  They not only allowed the wolves to enter in, they actually became those very wolves, devouring the faithful instead of feeding them.  On top of it all, while they acted as wolves they put on sheep’s clothing and still to this day play the exalted role of shepherd in this pantomime, this parody of the Holy Catholic Church.  The Shepherd has been struck, and “all we, like sheep, have gone astray,” as Isaiah prophesied, “every one to his own way.”

Yes, we were given the grace not to follow a fake shepherd who was now a wolf in sheep’s clothing.  But make no mistake about it, we are still in a very perilous situation.  We have gone astray.  We are sheep without a shepherd, and that’s not a good thing to be.  Because sheep need to follow something, and there are plenty of evil men in this world who would gladly become your new leader.  Hence the abundance of cults, not only religious cults (and we probably know a few traditional Catholic groups who have become cults), but also cults of personality—we follow celebrities, movie stars, corrupt politicians, influential doctors, and turn them into our new shepherds, someone who will feed us with something worth eating.  Don’t be misled.  The constant haranguing from these people who would push their anti-Christian agenda upon us must be not only ignored but defied.  And defiance does not come easily to us sheep.

There is no substitute for the Good Shepherd.  Don’t place your hope in men—the Lord is my Shepherd.  With the dismal failure of his representatives on earth, we must not go wandering off after anyone who plays a tune we find attractive.  Remember the children who followed the Pied Piper to their doom!  Our only hope today is to turn to our blessed Lord himself, and to him alone.  It’s not how he wanted it to be, but if our pastors have betrayed him, we have no other suitable alternatives.  There are no other options.