The Fourth Sunday of Easter
(Annual Catholic Appeal)
April 26, 2015
Listen to today's homily (mp3
file)
I’ve
got a deal for you this morning. I’m hoping it’s one you can’t refuse – one you
don’t refuse. I’m supposed to speak to you today about the Annual Catholic
Appeal. So here’s the deal: if I don’t devote my homily to the Appeal as I have
every year for the past two-and-a-half decades, will you agree to give to the
Appeal? Give generously? That’s the deal. And even if you don’t agree, I’m
still not going to do the Appeal pitch. All I’m going to do is tell you that
it’s important and remind you about the rebate. Everything you give to the
Appeal over and above the $357,000 goal set by the Archdiocese comes back to us,
and we will use it to support our fabulous Cathedral music program. It’s a major
part of our annual budget and a favorite part of the Cathedral and it needs your
support. Deal? Done!
Now, let me keep my end of the bargain by shifting
gears and telling you about a priest I greatly admire. He’s an English Dominican
by the name of Timothy Radcliffe, a popular writer, former Master General of the
worldwide Dominicans. Fr. Radcliffe preached the Tre Ore service here on Good
Friday of 2003. In one of his books he writes compellingly about the beauty of
God. “I know,” he says, “that to keep alive a sense of the transcendent
beauty of God, I need the obvious forms of beauty around me: sunlight
streaming into the cloister on a spring morning; the frescoes of Giotto or Fra
Angelico; the blue windows of Chartres; the music of Mozart; an occasional dose
of English countryside; the company of beautiful, bright people. But,” he
goes on to say, “my eyes also need educating so as to see God’s beauty when it
is concealed in the apparently ugly. That’s where compassion comes in.
Compassion trains me to see the loveliness of God in unexpected places.”
Father Radcliffe then goes on to tell just how
difficult this is for him. “On my extended trips around the world to visit
brother Dominicans, I have found myself shutting my eyes to ugliness which I
find almost too terrible to behold: people mutilated by war in Rwanda;
deformed beggars in Calcutta’s railroad station; a convicted murderer behind
prison bars, a young person dying from AIDS. And he concludes, “I hope,
with grace, to learn to see God’s hidden beauty there one day, too....”
When I read those words, I found myself hearing them as
something of a commentary on the parable of the Good Shepherd. Jesus
contrasts the good shepherd with the hireling. The hireling is a fair
weather shepherd. He’s there for the good times, but he runs from danger
and from problems of any sort. The good shepherd, on the other hand, is
always there for all the sheep but the ones in danger and trouble, the ones who
are ugly and unlovable -- he has a special love for these. He seeks them
out and, amazingly, lays down his life for them.
“I am the good shepherd,” Jesus says. “I know my
sheep and I lay down my life for them.” I find it amazing that if he
really knows his sheep, this shepherd could actually lay down his life for them.
If he really knows his sheep, knows us, doesn’t he know too much? Doesn’t
he know all the flaws, the sins, the dreary compromises, the meanness, the
downright ‘unloveliness?’ Yes! But he also knows the good, this good
shepherd does: he knows the deep-down goodness planted there by God. He
knows the hope that springs eternal, the faith that struggles to hold on, the
love that in its nobler moments is capable of great sacrifice. And he sees
in all this wretched yet glorious humanity -- our humanity -- he sees what
Timothy Radcliffe calls the hidden beauty of God.
My friends, we are made in the image and likeness of
God. Sometimes, because of our own sinful choices, and sometimes simply
because of the ravages of life over which we have little or no control, that
divine image can get blurred: it can become difficult, if not impossible, to
see. But the Good Shepherd never loses sight of it. The Good Shepherd has
eyes to see the spark of divinity within each of us.
“I am the good shepherd. I know my sheep. I
lay down my life for my sheep.” I believe the Good Shepherd is able to lay
down his life for his sheep because he sees in his sheep -- sees in each of us
-- what we so often fail to see: “the hidden beauty of God.”
Now let me take this out of the realm of theory.
As with all the parables of Jesus, this one is meant to get translated into the
now. And this is where I must confess to you, my friends, how personally
challenging I find the parable. I am called to be a shepherd in the
Church, a pastor. And I find it pretty easy to see the face of God in many
people, maybe even most people. My challenge is to see the divine face in
the angry, disgruntled parishioner, the anonymous letter writer, the demanding
mentally ill person, the turned-off teenager, the rigid reactionary. Yet
that is what I am called to do. And, in fact, it is what we are all called
to do. We do have our work cut out for us, don’t we!
May Jesus the Good Shepherd give us eyes to see the
hidden beauty that only God sees, and hearts to love all those whom God loves -
and never stops loving – no matter what!
Father Michael G. Ryan
