It is fairly unusual for Good Shepherd Sunday to coincide with Mother’s Day—a secular American holiday, to be sure, but to say that it has nothing to do with the Church calendar doesn’t really change its influence. Add to this the novelty and rarity of a papal conclave—or at least that’s what it was when I was first preparing this homily; now, of course, we have a new pope!—so we do have quite the competition of ideas striving for our attention.
As usual, though, divine providence can use all these things for our advantage, so I want to begin with something of a bundle of all these thoughts at once before homing in on what is ultimately my theme for the day: that the love of the Good Shepherd fills us with joy even through suffering.
On Wednesday morning I celebrated a Mass for the election of the pope. This was a first. I was—as is usually the case when encountering traditional liturgical texts for the first time in practice—moved by the words: first, the propers taken from the votive Mass of the Holy Spirit: “Let God arise and let his enemies be scattered; let them also who hate him flee before him.” That felt right somehow. And then the collect asked that God would provide to the holy Roman Church a pontiff who might please God by showing “tender care” toward us and by “studying to preserve thy people in safety.” The proper color is red, which is also famously the color for cardinals who by receiving those robes profess their willingness to die for their mother, the Church. That mother gave birth to them in the waters of baptism, which flowed from the side of Christ. Likewise, they offer themselves in love and in potential suffering in order to “birth,” in a way, that man who will succeed St. Peter as the prince of the apostolic succession.
All of this is to say that motherhood can never be very far from any real consideration of the Faith, whether in our relationship with the Church, our relationship with Our Lady, or our relationship with the sufferings of this life. For motherhood is a kind of intrinsic suffering—and I don’t mean by that that it is all pain, but that it involves willingly tying one’s well-being to the good of another, relinquishing a certain amount of control even over one’s own body.
But back to our readings of the day. In Acts, Paul and Barnabas face persecution over their proclamation of the gospel. But the passage ends with this simple statement that the disciples were “filled with joy.” Peter Kreeft gives the vivid image of this joy being “pumped in from the outside” by the Holy Spirit. In other words, the joy is a gift, not the product of hard work or thinking all the right thoughts. But it does seem to go with the suffering. Often when we look at the martyrs of the early Church in particular, it seems like the more intense the suffering, the more intensely we see the joy.
The scene from Revelation builds on this theme with the striking image of robes being washed white with the blood of the lamb. Maybe, like me, you’ve heard that image all your life, so it’s hard to settle on just how weird it is. You don’t get sparkling white cloth from blood. This isn’t some obscure natural analogy. It is, rather, a supernatural insistence that the right kind of suffering—above all the suffering of Jesus, the lamb—is productive of something very different: new life. Again we see the maternal analogy, one famously employed by Julian of Norwich, suggesting that, by his bodily suffering for us, he, who shares our nature, is like a mother whose suffering results in birth. Through the Patristic meditations on the so-called “baptism of blood,” which is to say martyrdom, we can see the red-white contrast in Revelation as a veiled sacramental affirmation that the baptism of blood is not less than the baptism of water. Both cleanse because both unite us to the sacrifice of Jesus.
All of this language of suffering is important for understanding the image of the Good Shepherd. It is a rich image, and there’s good reason that Holy Church in the modern lectionary finds a way to split up the “Good Shepherd discourse” into three distinct moments for the three-year cycle. In other years, we hear more about how the Shepherd “lays down his life” for the sheep, or how the sheep know his voice in distinction from the other false shepherds. But today we hear this short passage emphasizing the relation between the Father and the Son, along with the simple claim—opposing those looking for much more complicated reasons to reject or belief the Lord—that “I know them and they follow me.”
He knows us. That may seem either comforting or terrifying, but I think the point is that the Lord’s knowledge is inseparable from his love. The idea that God knows us, in a dispassionate intellectual way, is not very difficult to grasp or accept. We live, after all, in a world that far exceeds our understanding, so it is not that hard to imagine someone capable of knowing us better than we know ourselves. But we don’t usually think of knowledge as a kind of love.
In a common twelfth-century debate between knowledge and love, academic intellectual pursuit or affective devotional feeling, it was increasingly common, as we see today, to separate intellect and affect, knowledge and love, as separate and opposing forces, even within the realm of faith: do we, fundamentally, believe in order to understand, or do we believe in order to love?
Perhaps one of the greatest insights in that century comes from the Cistercian monk William of St. Thierry, who says, “Love is itself understanding” (Amor ipse intellectus est). This is at times interpreted as a kind of anti-intellectual escapism by which we claim experience and feeling as a kind of knowledge that trumps reason, but I think that to truly understand William’s aphorism it should also be reversed: Understanding is itself love. True knowledge isn’t some kind of abstract and disconnected compilation of information. It is always a personal encounter with truth, and ultimately an encounter with God himself or God’s creatures.
All of this is to say that when the Good Shepherd knows us, this knowledge is love. He knows us not just in the way that we know a table of figures; he knows us for our own good. Hence, “No one shall snatch them out of my hand.”
But the fact that he holds on to us in knowledge and love doesn’t translate into preserving us from all suffering. Just as Paul and Barnabas suffer, just as the martyrs in Revelation suffer, just as Our Lord and Our Lady themselves suffer, perfect love is known only in suffering.
But this is still a good place to be, in the hand of the Good Shepherd. No, he doesn’t promise to preserve us from all suffering, but he does promise to hold on to us and to love us, to bring us with him to good pasture. That is what we need. We might want to be protected from all suffering, but such protection would mean the abandonment of our humanity, the rejection of our ability to grow and mature.
May we continue to grow under the hand of the Good Shepherd all our days until he brings us at last to his Father’s house. And may our new pope, as the new vicar of that divine Good Shepherd, mold his ministry, his governance, and his love for the flock after the example of his Master.