Editor’s note: This is Bishop Douglas J. Lucia’s homily for the Fourth Sunday of Easter (A), April 30.
This particular Lord’s Day in the Easter Season has a variety of names. Properly it is referred to as the Fourth Sunday of Easter, but popularly it has received the name “Good Shepherd” Sunday because of the theme of the Gospel reading. However, since 1964, it is also known as the World Day of Prayer for Vocations as established by St. Pope Paul VI.
In marking this milestone, Pope Francis has written the following concerning this year’s observance:
This is now the sixtieth time that we are celebrating the World Day of Prayer for Vocations, established by Saint Paul VI in 1964, during the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council. This providential initiative seeks to assist the members of the People of God, as individuals and as communities, to respond to the call and mission that the Lord entrusts to each of us in today’s world, amid its afflictions and its hopes, its challenges and its achievements.
This year I would ask you, in your reflection and prayer, to take as your guide the theme “Vocation: Grace and Mission.” This Day is a precious opportunity for recalling with wonder that the Lord’s call is grace, a complete gift, and at the same time a commitment to bring the Gospel to others. We are called to a faith that bears witness, one that closely connects the life of grace, as experienced in the sacraments and ecclesial communion, to our apostolate in the world. Led by the Spirit, Christians are challenged to respond to existential peripheries and human dramas, ever conscious that the mission is God’s work; it is not carried out by us alone, but always in ecclesial communion, together with our brothers and sisters, and under the guidance of the Church’s pastors. For this has always been God’s dream: that we should live with him in a communion of love.
Sisters and brothers, in reflecting upon this “communion of love,” that is at the heart of the Church’s mission and of all her vocations, I couldn’t help but recall the theme of the homily delivered at my First Mass as a Priest some 34 years ago in a few weeks’ time. It was Trinity Sunday 1989 and the homilist chosen for the occasion spoke on the same theme that Pope Francis highlights in this year’s World Day of Prayer for Vocations message. He spoke of my response to God’s call — to the voice of the Good Shepherd in my life — as a mission to build a community of love. And I would carry out this mission by not only listening to the Shepherd’s voice, but by entering deeper into his way of life, that is, deeper into communion with God and Jesus Christ would be my gateway!
Yes, in this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus mixes his metaphors a bit, but for me they give direction to each of our vocations within the Church. As the First Letter of Peter reminds you and me: “For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his footsteps” (5:21). This interplay between God’s call and our response, or as Pope Francis describes it, “between divine choice and human freedom,” is the fundamental structure of a vocation. As the Holy Father notes, “God calls us in love and we, in gratitude, respond to him in love.”
These are beautiful words that may touch our hearts, but they leave me with the question found in our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles this afternoon/morning: “What are we to do?” (2:37) Even as one who is trying to live out his vocation on a daily basis, I still find myself asking this question. It is like St. Theresa of the Child Jesus, who even as a Carmelite religious sister, was wondering what her vocation really meant — until one day she hears the voice of the Good Shepherd speak to hear and she writes in her spiritual journal, “At last I have found my calling: my call is love. Indeed, I have found my proper place in the Church. … In the heart of the Church, my Mother, I will be love.”
So again, brothers and sisters, what does all of this mean for you and me, today? How can the concluding words of our Gospel reading be true in each of our lives: “I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.” (Jn. 10:10)? Again, I invite us to turn to the Acts of the Apostles and Peter’s call to repentance. The repentance he speaks of is not simply being sorry for our past sins of commission and omission against the communion of love that we are called to be part of, but is an act of metanoia, of radical conversion of heart and mind that turn’s one life to Christ. In other words, how can each one of us better hear the voice of the Good Shepherd and follow in his footsteps — knowing that he is both the shepherd who guides and protects us, as well as, the gate into the sheepfold, our point of entry into communion, safety and rest?
Let me conclude our breaking open of the Word of God with a reflection on the words of John 10:10 which I just shared with you:
Why is it then that many individuals settle for less, or even least, in their own life? Did you ever hear a student ask, “Just tell me what I have to know for the test?” Or how about a person who inquires, “What’s the minimum I need to do?” To live abundantly parallels a marketing approach which features products as good, better or best.
It seems that most men and women, boys and girls, consider themselves to be good — or at least good enough. Then there are other persons who believe that they are better than others — at least better than their peers. However, do these men and women ever discover their individual best, and do whatever needs to be done to abundantly live it out, whatever their personal best might be?
Abundant living does not settle for being simply better, or for being just good enough. It is to discover your best in every situation that you may have in life and have it abundantly. It is to discover your vocation rooted in grace and mission — a gift and a task, a source of new life and true joy. Amen!
