The Good Shepherd
The Good Shepherd
By Fr. Louis Bethea, O.P.
Many years ago, when I was a kid, my family and I went on a pilgrimage to Rome. We were living in the Netherlands at the time, so my parents, my grandmother, my great aunt, a cousin, and the dog all piled into our family van, an old Oldsmobile Silhouette, and made the 17-hour trek to Rome.
While we were there, we visited the magnificent second-century Catacomb of St. Callixtus, which is the burial place for many of the Church’s earliest popes and martyrs. It is said that 16 popes and 50 martyrs were buried there! In one of those burial chambers, painted sometime after 175 AD, is perhaps the earliest depiction of Jesus. It is part of an ancient ceiling fresco and Christ is painted as a young shepherd. He has a pot in His right hand—perhaps of water—and His left hand holds tight to the legs of a lamb draped around His neck. It is a familiar image!
When you look closely at it, the sheep is rather small, pearly white, majestic and quiet looking. But if you know sheep, you know that this is far from reality! Sheep are dirty, big, noisy, and they smell bad! They do things that don’t make a whole lot of sense. Have you ever seen it when a flock of sheep will huddle, one on top of the other in a small corner of a pasture while an entire field remains open around them?
Sheep need someone to take care of them, to guide them, and to shepherd them. And of course, Jesus is our good shepherd, our guide Who shows us where to go and how to get there.
What does a good shepherd do? “A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (Jn 10:11).
A good shepherd “leads his flock” (Jn 10:16).
A good shepherd “knows his sheep and his sheep know him” (Jn 10:14).
And when one sheep—yes, even one single sheep goes astray, the shepherd risks his life to go find it and bring it back.
Isn’t that St. Jude? Traveling with his fellow apostle, Simon, Jude is said to have traveled throughout modern-day Iraq, Libya, Turkey, and Iran, bringing souls to Christ before his ultimate martyrdom. His love for others leaves little doubt as to why our Lord instructed St. Rita of Cascia to encourage Christians to implore his intercession for impossible causes!
Remember the words God spoke to the prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.” God knows us and He knows how to speak to us in our hearts. The question we ought to ask ourselves is this: Do we recognize His voice as it speaks in our lives and in our hearts? We know He is there, but do we pay any attention?
Being a Christian is a way of life and we can rest assured that our Savior is there for us whenever we are willing to meet Him because, as we read over and over again in Scripture, “His love endures forever” (Ps 136). Everything God does, He does out of love.
That’s why it is so important to take our faith with us when we leave the confines of our homes and churches. Whatever we do, when we let our faith in Christ permeate every corner of our lives, following Him becomes easier and easier, and when we go astray, our shepherd hoists us up on His shoulders, like in that second-century catacomb fresco, and brings us back to safety. The closer we follow Jesus, the more we become like Jesus, and when we are like Him, “we shall see Him as he is” (1 Jn 3:2). We will come to recognize the true beauty of God and our souls become beautiful, like Him. That is what we are called for, and that is where we must go.