Daily Reflection Monday of the Fourth Week of Easter

Today’s first reading from the beginning of Acts 11 continues the story that began in chapter 10 with Peter’s vision of the animals lowered from heaven and then the centurion Cornelius sending for him that culminates in the Holy Spirit falling upon the Gentiles there also that amazed Peter and his disciples. Today Peter tells that story to the incredulous Jewish converts back in Jerusalem who then also agree that the Gentiles too are to receive the Gospel. This all comes to its full conclusion in Acts 15 and the momentous Council of Jerusalem, the first council in the Church’s history, where the Apostles agreed that the Gentile converts should not be forced to keep the Mosaic Law.
 
That was an exceedingly important decision in the Church’s history, perhaps the greatest ever. Without it, Christianity would have remained but another Jewish sect, as it were, and would have vanished with the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. We can certainly see the power of the Holy Spirit here in the earliest Church. There is also the whole question of the baptism in the Spirit that Acts speaks of here but which we can’t possibly discuss now.
 
In today’s gospel passage we jump from John 6 to John 10 and another of the great “I am” statements of Jesus in that gospel account. At the end of John 8 Jesus tells the Pharisees, “Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham came to be, I am,” which led them to try to stone Jesus for the first time (the second will occur at the end of chapter 10). At the beginning of chapter 10 he tells them that “I am the sheepgate,” (at the end of that passage and immediately before today’s he also told them that, “I came that they may have life; life in its fulness”) and here in today’s reading he says, in what is probably the most well-known of John’s “I am” statements, “I am the good shepherd who lays done his life for the sheep.”
 
That Jesus calls himself the good shepherd, thus implying that we are the sheep of his fold, is most significant. It immediately calls to mind the great Twenty-Third Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing I shall want.” That Psalm, amid all its wonderful promises (only goodness and kindness shall follow me all the days of my life), also states that, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for you are at my side.” Jesus, the Good Shepherd, is always at our side.
 
The primary characteristic of sheep here is that they always follow the shepherd. They ask no questions and seek no answers, they simply follow. They do not ask, “Why are we going this way? or “That way looks better.” They do not say anything, they just follow their shepherd without reservation wherever the shepherd shall lead them. And sheep who wander off from the flock suffer all manner of disasters. They fall off cliffs, they become entangled in briars, or they are devoured by wolves.
 
If we seek to follow Jesus wherever he leads us, we can never go wrong, there would be nothing to fear. If we put all our trust in him and allow him to take us there, we will be laid down in the green grass beside the restful waters. Our souls will be restored, we will receive the anointing and our cup will overflow, dwelling in the house of the Lord forever. Only Jesus knows the paths we are meant for, only he knows the way. Let it be our Easter prayer that we give up any pretense that we know where to go or how to get there and surrender ourselves to the lead of our Good Shepherd who came precisely to show us the way. For as he also told us in his final “I am” statement the night before he died when he said to Thomas who had cried out that he did not know the way, “I am the way, and the truth and the life! No one comes to the Father except through me.”