EASTER IV [B] SUNDAY: Acts 4:8-12; I Jn 3:1-2; Jn 10:11-18 

The fourth Sunday of Easter is known as Good Shepherd Sunday. It is also the World Day of Prayer for Vocations. Each year on this Sunday we reflect on the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, devotedly taking care of his flock.   In the past, we tended to restrict the term ‘vocation’ to the priesthood and the religious life. Yet, everyone in the church has a vocation, and, today, we are invited to reflect a little on the different ways in which we have each been given a vocation. Each of us is called by God. We all find ourselves standing before the call of God.

The particular way the Lord calls us and works through us will be unique to each one of us. I can do something for the Lord that only I can do. Each one of us has a unique contribution to make to the work of the Lord in the church and in the world, and that contribution is just as important as anyone else’s contribution. We each have a unique vocation and each vocation is equally significant. When we each respond to our own unique vocation, we are supporting others in their response to the unique call of the good shepherd to them.

The theme that the Pope has chosen for this Vocation Sunday is ‘vocation to service’. Each one of us, in different ways, has been given the vocation to service. In his message for this Vocations Sunday the Pope reminds us that Jesus is the perfect model of the ‘servant’. He is the one who came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. In the words of today’s gospel reading, he is the good shepherd who lays down his life for his flock. All that he received from God he gave to others, he gave for others. This is at the heart of our own vocation to service too. All that we have and all that we are we have received from God, and we are called to place what we have received at the service of others.

The Pope in his message for this Vocations Sunday states that service is possible for everyone, through gestures that seem small, but, are, in reality, great, if they are animated by sincere love. The ways in which we live out our vocation to service can often be small and hidden. We give something of ourselves in service to someone. What we give may seem insignificant – a listening ear, a word of encouragement, a small gesture of some kind, what the gospel calls in one place a ‘cup of cold water’. We don’t have to think of service in terms only of the big commitment, the huge undertaking, or the absorbing task. It is in that relatively small space that most of our vocation to service is to be lived. The way we live out our vocation to service in that space will not make headlines, and may never become known beyond a small circle. Yet, as the Pope says in his message, when interpersonal relationships are inspired by mutual service a new world is created.  

In the gospel reading Jesus says that he is the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. Perhaps one of the reasons why the image appealed to Christians from earliest times is because it conveyed something of the personal nature of the relationship between Jesus and his followers. The image of the good shepherd carrying the straying sheep on his shoulders conveys a sense of the close personal connection that the shepherd has with his individual sheep. He declares that he knows his own and his own know him, just as the Father knows him and he knows the Father. It is an extraordinary statement to make. Jesus is saying that the relationship that he has with each one of us is as intimate as the very personal relationship that he has with his heavenly Father. Jesus knows us as intimately as the Father knows him. When it comes to the Lord we are not just one of a crowd, lost in a sea of faces. In a way that we will never fully understand, the Lord knows each one of us by name. We only really know those we love. It is because the Lord loves each of us so completely that he knows each of us so fully. Saint Paul expresses this conviction in his letter to the Galatians saying, ‘I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me’. We can each make our own those words of Saint Paul.

 

The first reading declares that the stone that was rejected by the builders proved to be the keystone. There is a clear reference there to Jesus himself. He was the rejected one who became the keystone of a new family, the church. There is a sense in which the Lord sees each of us as the keystone for some aspect of his mission. We are all key to the Lord’s work, and he calls each of us by name from the first moment of our conception to share in that work. On this Vocations Sunday let’s commit ourselves anew to hearing and responding to the call of the good shepherd. With trust and confidence, let’s join the psalmist in praying: The Lord is my Shepherd, there is nothing I shall want.