14-Apr-2013 Dear Friend,
In life we realize that people are rewarded for their successes and punished for failures. Hence we equate living with being always successful. But our common experience tells us that we can’t always succeed, we are bound to make mistakes sometimes. However, in our faith life there are no failures and God comes to us especially in moments of failure. In this Easter Season discover a God who never fails us! Fr. Jude Sunday Reflections: 4th Sunday of Easter “Jesus, the Good Shepherd cares for his sheep!” 21-Apr-2013 Readings: Acts 13: 14, 43-52 Rev. 7: 9, 14-17 John 10: 27-30 This Sunday’s first reading focuses on Paul and Barnabas preaching at Antioch. They are filled with the Spirit and preach with zeal and the people listened to them and liked what they heard. Their ministry is a great success and paradoxically that causes a problem! The Jews become jealous of the success of Paul and start to oppose him, contradict him and find fault with his teaching so much that Paul is frustrated at the rejection and opposition and leaves the town and goes off to the pagans. What seems to be a failure turns out to be a blessing in disguise. The pagans now have an opportunity to hear the good news preached to them and are converted. The important thing is to be able to listen to His voice and do His will rather than ours. God’s interruptions or…… One night the Philadelphia Orchestra, under the baton of Leopold Stokowski, was performing a Beethoven overture. In it, a part for the trumpet is played off stage. When the time came for the offstage trumpet, there was no sound. Stokowski was furious. Again the time came for the offstage trumpet. Again, there was only silence. After the overture ended, Stokowski stormed offstage to find the trumpet player. There he was his arms pinned to his side by a security guard who said, “This nut was trying to play his horn while your concert was going on out there.” - Do we not sometimes frustrate God’s plans by failing to recognize Jesus’ role in it? Mark Link in ‘Sunday Homilies’ In today’s passage Jesus is reminding us that he knows us just as intimately as a shepherd knows, his sheep. “I know them and they follow me. I give them eternal life; they will never be lost and no one will ever steal them from me.” We may not know him but He knows us. His word reassures us that we belong to Him. He promises us that He alone gives us eternal life. Jesus’ discourse from which our Gospel is taken, comes from the Jewish feast of the Dedication, a feast celebrating the presence of God in the temple. The temple was not just a building, for Israel it was the visible place where God dwelt with his people. To go to the temple and worship in the temple was to approach God. Now within this setting Jesus teaches a completely different way to God. He stands within the precincts of the temple and boldly proclaims that it is by hearing His voice that one can come to eternal life, and never be lost. One does not approach God through a building, no matter how beautiful or sacred, one does not approach God through laws, rituals and sacrifices no matter how sacrosanct. Jesus is the only way to the Father. Through the ‘voice’ of his teaching, life, death and resurrection, the ways of God are made known to us. The ‘voice’ of Jesus is not just the sound, which came from his human mouth. It is everything about him: his way of life, his loving, his teaching, his dying and his being raised from the dead. Jesus uses the image of the shepherd to make this point. No longer does one need to look to the temple or any other human institution to find the abiding presence of God. “I and the Father are one.” The Pastoral Touch I will never forget the testimony of a pastor whose experience I heard on radio one day. I do not remember the pastor’s name. But I can recall most of what he said when he gave his testimony that I am about to share with you. He said, “When I started out, I wanted to be a great preacher, someone whom people revered and thought of highly. As I got older and wiser, I began to realize that people don’t want just a preacher. They want a pastor. One day this hope became evident to me as I went to see an AIDS patient in the hospital. When people came to see him they stayed at the edge of the room near the door. One preacher even said a prayer from the door. But, when I went to see him, I went over to him held his hand and said a prayer. He cried, because that was the first time anyone other than medical personnel had touched him since he had been in the hospital.” The point of the story is that whether one is a preacher or not, people who are hurting and/or sick want others to be pastoral to them. A Pastor is a metaphor for a shepherd who looks after his/her congregation just as a shepherd looks after his sheep. John Pichappilly in ‘The Table of the Word’ Being a Good Shepherd Philip Lawrence was the principal of St. George’s High School, London, when he noticed a fight among some boys just outside his school. One of his pupils was being attacked by a gang of hooligans. Without a thought for his own personal safety, Philip rushed to the rescue of the student and was himself fatally stabbed. In consequence he was posthumously voted Personality of the Year, ahead of the then Prime Minister, John Major. When the presentation was made to his wife, she humbly informed the audience that her husband had been a very modest man and would have been extremely embarrassed by the public recognition and accolades. As a principal Philip Lawrence had worked tirelessly and devotedly to ensure a safe environment for his pupils, so that they could study and grow to be proud of themselves. And that explains why he could not stand by apathetically and watch one of his students being attacked and beaten. Like a good shepherd, Philip Lawrence had nobly rallied to the defense of his student and put his own life at risk so that the young lad might be saved. James Valladares in ‘Your Words are Spirit, and they are Life’ Good Shepherds today On All Souls Day six young men came to the cemetery to pray for a lady who was not their mother although they had etched “Dear Moma” on her tomb. The leader of the six said: “Here is the dust of a holy woman who found me two years ago, a total stranger to the city of Chicago and to God. She invited me to her Bible class, and though my clothes were threadbare she invited me to her home.” The second man said, “My friend and I were homeless and friendless in this city. We heard about this lady’s Bible classes and so we went and took a back seat, and tried to hide ourselves, but the eyes of this lady missed no young man who appeared to be lonely, friendless and homeless. She gave us a place to stay, and slowly made us give a place to Jesus in our lives.” The fourth man said, “We have more reason to thank this lady than any of you. Two years ago my two friends and I were drunkards. The lady found us at the Young Men’s Christian Association rooms, and took us to her house. We told her that we had been Christians, but now we had wandered far away into sin. She looked at us with tears in her eyes and prayed with us and entreated for Jesus’ sake, our mother’s sake and for our own sake. New strength came into us and by God’s grace; we have been able to live a sober life. Boys, I tell you, this dear woman was a mother to us. Her name is Sara Houghton Fawcett.” John Rose in ‘John’s Sunday Homilies’ Mothers as Shepherds In the movie, ‘Places in the heart’, Sally Fields plays the part of a young mother in West Texas whose husband was killed in a tragic shooting accident. The story is set in the wake of the Great Depression. Times are hard. Money is scarce. Unemployment is high. She’s never worked outside the home. She doesn’t even know how to write a cheque, much less borrow money or deal with shrewd businessmen and bankers. She has two small children depending on her to survive. And survive she does. She rolls up her sleeves and partners with a black tenant farmer, takes in a blind boarder and fends off the vultures who want to exploit her naïveté. By sheer determination and hard work, she and her partner cultivate thirty acres of cotton; win the hundred dollar prize for bringing the first crop to the cotton gin and get top dollar to boot. By all rights, you could say she shouldn’t have succeeded. All the odds were against her. But then she was a mother with two small children. What more can I say? Mothers are like that. They are good shepherds. John Pichappilly in ‘The Table of the Word’ In the footsteps of the true Shepherd In San Salvador on March 24th 1980 an assassin killed Archbishop Romero with a single shot to the heart while he was saying mass. Only a few moments before, Archbishop Romero had finished a hope-filled homily in which he urged the people to serve one another. Since Archbishop Romero was demanding human rights for his people under oppression, he knew his life was in danger. Still he persisted in speaking out against tyranny and for freedom. He once told newspapermen that even if his enemies killed him, he would rise again among his people. Because Archbishop Romero was so devoted to his people in San Salvador, and because he died defending their cause, he could truly make his own the words of our Lord in today’s Gospel. “I am the Good Shepherd, I know my sheep and for these sheep I will give my life.” May we experience the touch of the Shepherd guiding our lives! Fr. Jude Botelho [email protected] PS. The stories, incidents and anecdotes used in the reflections have been collected over the years from books as well as from sources over the net and from e-mails received. Every effort is made to acknowledge authors whenever possible. If you send in stories or illustrations I would be grateful if you could quote the source as well so that they can be acknowledged if used in these reflections. These reflections are also available on my web site www.netforlife.net Thank you.
