4th Sunday of Easter B - Homily 6

Homily 6 - 2024

The passage in today’s Gospel that has triggered my reflection this week is the comment put on Jesus’ lips by the Evangelist: “I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.”

I find it very encouraging to realise how well Jesus does know me. What he knows does not frighten me because I am convinced that his interest in me is directed towards helping me to become ever more increasingly alive — just as he in turn is not frightened of his Father. He knows that God is not a punishing God. God is rather the source of all love energy in the cosmos — and there is nothing else. For God, loving and creating are essentially the same energy, after all.

The older I get, the more I realise how far I fall short of the fully-alive person I could be. I still find criticism a more common spontaneous response to others than respect or love — even though I do manage better to keep those negative reactions to myself. In many ways I have been spontaneously my own worst critic. (Or did I bestow that role on God?)

Where does that negativity come from? Over the years I have come to notice that I have a lack of spontaneous confidence in myself, an uncertainty about how others may see me. As an infant, I would have inevitably misinterpreted restrictions stemming from my parents’ love and parental responsibilities, as acts of rejection on their part that would have left their repressed wounds on my still undeveloped child’s psyche. An unconscious fear of rejection still operates; and so I have tried to compensate by compulsively trying to take control, in my case by fruitlessly wanting to be perfect. Being a perfectionist has been and still is hard work!

Gradually I have come to realise that God loves everyone, including myself, unconditionally. I have seen how God’s loving is altogether different, quite separate, from God’s capacity to assess behaviour. God loves sinners, not because we sin, but because of the sheer human dignity that God gratuitously confers on everyone simply by creating us. God forgives spontaneously. What a radically different world we would be if only we would see and accept that!

 I love the way how Jesus insisted in today’s Gospel that “the good shepherd” is one who “lays down his life for his sheep”. And went on to say of himself, “I lay down my life for my sheep”. Sheep have the reputation of being helpless, stupid animals. Is humanity much different? But Jesus’ love for us says nothing about what we are like, and everything about the radical dignity he sees in each of us, given to us all by his Father. His laying down his life for us, “his sheep”, is the price he is prepared to pay to redeem us, to save us from our own stupidity, to motivate us to reduce, and even to admit and eventually to overcome, our perennial mutual hostility.

As I mentioned at the start, I am thrilled that Jesus identifies himself as “the good shepherd” who “knows his own”. This intimate knowledge he has of all of us enables him to continue to heal our wounded psyches from where most, if not all, our stupid, irresponsible and destructive behaviour originates.

The better we come in turn to “know” him, the more warmly we welcome him wholeheartedly into our lives.