Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - 22nd April 2018

Fourth Sunday of Easter -

I am the good shepherd, and I know mine and mine know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I will lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep* that do not belong to this fold. These also I must lead, and they will hear my voice, and there will be one flock, one shepherd". (Jn 10:14-16)

Why is it that the tendency of Christian communities is to become tribal? Maybe I see things from a distorted perspective, after all my own life and ministry has been rooted in ecumenical exchange right from childhood when I became aware I was a Catholic Christian.

Other family and friends who did not think or believe as I did opened out different perspectives, teaching me a valuable lesson, that good people, loving kind people, those we may call, the "friends of God", exist, live and are loved by God outside the institutional structures of the Church.

Do that we ever fully learn the lessons of Jesus? How many times have you heard statements from religious people who are quite willing to condemn those who do not follow a particular line of thought or practice? The media is full of them! You and I know that Institutions need rules, that faith needs parameters and guidance, that belief needs some form of creed, but none of these things can ever supplant the place of the living Christ whose love reaches out to all, and whose death and resurrection opens the gates of salvation. Why? I suppose the simplest answer is love, relationship, belonging to God.

Time and time again Jesus leaves the narrow path of salvation to reach out and touch those at the edges or who are simply in the wrong place, which is why his reminder that there are other folds and other sheep is so important. The Sheep that know him have a relationship with the Shepherd, but it cannot be a blind or childish intimacy.

Those in other folds and flocks have important questions to ask of us about our doubt and trust of Christ. Monsignor Quixote, Graham Greene's unlikely hero in the novel of the same name has this to say: "The Lord is my shepherd." But if we are sheep why in heaven's name should we trust our shepherd? He's going to guard us from the wolves all right, oh yes, but only so that he can sell us later to the butcher."

Harsh? No! When we meet the Shepherd we have to ask the same question: What are we here for? Can we truly know you Lord? The answer is something we have to discover, find the true heart of the Shepherd. This is part of our vocation, before we can become anything else we have to learn to be truly human, so that emptied out like Christ we find His heart, our task is to go beyond division, to love as Christ does, that all may be one.

After Monsignor Quixote dies, his friend reflects on a truth that is so much a part of who we are in Jesus: "The Mayor didn't speak again before they reached Orense; an idea quite strange to him had lodged in his brain. Why is it that the hate of man - even of a man like Franco - dies with his death, and yet love, the love which he had begun to feel for Father Quixote, seemed now to live and grow in spite of the final separation and the final silence - for how long, he wondered with a kind of fear, was it possible for that love of his to continue? And to what end?" (Graham Green Monsignor Quixote).

Well, in Christ, as the mayor discovered, we know the answer and the end!

Lectio.

"Beloved, we are God's children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed* we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is." (I Jn 3:2)

Fr Robin Gibbons is an Eastern Rite Catholic Chaplain for the Melkites in the UK. He is also an Ecumenical Canon of Christ Church, Oxford.