Fourth Sunday of Easter (A): John 10:1-10
As very young children, our first encounter with the world was mediated by our parents. For a time, our parents were our world, for all intents and purposes. We assumed that their way – whether it was how they cooked steak, cut grass or made beds – was the natural way, the only way to do those things. If we encountered other children from other families who had different ways, our first impulse was to assume that our family’s way was the right one.
This principle also applies to our first encounter with faith or religion. As children, we began by assuming that our parents’ faith – or their attitude to faith or religion – was the correct one. Our parents’ faith was right because it was our parents’ one.
However, we soon encountered other children, and other people, who had different religions and different attitudes to faith and religion in general. We could not dismiss them all as “bad” people. Some of them were, as far as we could tell, as good as we were, if not better – at least in some ways.
This experience of multiple religions – multiple spiritualities – multiple definitions of God and the meaning and purpose of life – leaves us open to some explanations that our culture offers us. One option is atheism. All our religions and spiritualities point, at most, to unfulfilled needs and desires in our own minds. They correspond to nothing in reality. Another option is agnosticism. There may be something “out there” to which our religions point, but we can’t know what it might be. So choose something; it doesn’t matter what. One answer is as good – or as limited – as another. A third, closely related option is relativism. There really is no objective truth. Everything depends on one’s own point of view.
The interesting thing is that many people who choose one of the above options will point to science as somehow superior to religion or faith. However, science presupposes that there is an objective reality that we can discover and study and learn about, a reality that is “out there”, whatever our attitudes might be about it. If this is so, then we can come up with theories that are, at the very least, closer to objective reality than others. Science rejects relativism or agnosticism in principle. Reality is out there, and it is, in principle, knowable. We can make mistakes in our theories and then refine them, but that doesn’t mean that there is no objective reality. On the contrary, it means that we know objective reality a little better than we did.
If science rejects relativism and agnosticism in principle, why are these notions so prevalent – even insisted upon – on our society? For two reasons, basically. One: they leave each one of us seemingly in charge. We are the customers, and isn’t the customer always right? Doesn’t our society worship choice for its own sake? Doesn’t ‘choice’ make us “like gods, who know what is good and what is bad”, without anyone else telling us so?
But this first reason is an illusion, a mirage, that we are being sold. The real reason is the second: without a firm grasp of objective spiritual reality, we become far more vulnerable to the marketers of our time. We lose perspective. We lose a sense of grounding in ultimate reality. Therefore, we become much easier prey for marketers of all kinds – much more susceptible to being sold any bill of goods whatsoever. Indeed, isn’t this what is happening now? Look around.
In contrast, Catholic Christian faith makes some exclusive claims. Yes, Vatican II acknowledged that there was some truth, some grace, in other religions, and that the Holy Spirit is somehow active in many ways beyond the Church itself. However, the Council continued to insist on some basic exclusive claims. It could do no other. We claim that our faith, like our science, points to objective reality. We believe in one God. This God created all that is and sustains it in being. When humanity sinned and fell short of its God-given vocation, God did not abandon us. God took the initiative, once again. Ultimately, God chose a particular people – Israel – and began to reveal himself more specifically to them. Finally, in the fullness of time, God the Father sent his Son. Jesus is conceived through the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus is not simply one human among others, or one teacher among others. Jesus is both truly human and truly divine – the Son. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, we are reconciled to the Father, made part of the Body of the Son, and filled with the Holy Spirit. Even if we recognize elements of truth in other religions, all these elements must point here and flow from here. There is one Lord, Paul tells us, one faith, and one baptism. All this is given to us by grace. We could not invent it or choose it merely on our own steam.
Jesus makes some exclusive claims about himself and his mission in the Gospels. Some of the more explicit ones are in the Gospel of John, though the same ones can be found, at least implicitly, in every Gospel.
In this Sunday’s Gospel reading, Jesus calls himself the gate. We must enter through him to find pasture, salvation, and fullness of life. He also calls himself the shepherd of the sheep. Anyone else who gets in to the flock in any other way is not the true shepherd and will only harm the sheep.
Such claims can only be scandalous to many in today’s society. These claims mean that we are not choosers in the end; we are chosen. We are not in charge, as the marketers of our time want us to think (so that they can then more easily make us into their sheep). No, the Lord has chosen us. Ultimate Reality has come to us, so to speak. Once we accept being chosen, however, something unexpected (to this society) happens. Being chosen by the Lord does not enslave us, as the marketers of our day want to do. Being chosen – and accepting our being chosen – frees us. The Lord doesn’t want to profit from us. Rather, the Lord wants to give us his very life. He wants to free us from the fears that today’s marketers seek to use and exploit. He wants us to know that he comes to us in joy and in sorrow, in pleasant times and in pain. Nothing can separate us from the Lord. He wants us to know and believe that even death does not have the last word. He wants us to trust that he truly is the Good Shepherd, who always gives his life for his sheep, that we might have abundant life – both now and beyond death.
Why, then, do we resist this gift of abundant life? The illusion of being in the driver’s seat in life is very tempting. As long as we think we are there, nothing can make any claims on us. But if God is all that we Catholic Christians believe God is, then God can – and does – make claims on us. Jesus calls himself the way, the truth, and the life. We belong to him, then. The only response that makes any sense is to give everything over to him. Everything. No exceptions. But, those who have done so will tell us that what we have thus given is as nothing compared to what God, in turn, gives to anyone who says yes to him.