Readings: Acts 4.8-12 / Psalm 118.1,8-9, 21-23, 26, 28, 29 (R/v 22) / 1 John 3.1-2 / John 10.11-18
Consider how mottos impact the way we live:
“You’re a great way to fly”: and so, the Singapore Girl makes sure your SQ flight is memorable.
“Be Prepared”: and so, boy scouts and girl guides live in readiness to do their duty.
“No pain, no gain”: and so, many athletes spend hours training to excel in sports.
“By giving mercy and by choosing”: and so, we better understand why Francis proclaims God’s mercy to the saintly and the sinful.
These mottos of a business, a uniform group, of athletes and a pope tell us something about how mottos encapsulate the beliefs and ideals each of them holds dear. Their mottos guide them to live and work, to play and pray. Mottos are helpful: they are like a GPS or a compass that enable one to find her direction, and finding it, to steer herself towards her desired destination.
What is your motto in life and faith? How is it guiding you?
Today is Vocation Sunday. It is a good day to reflect on these questions about mottos and our Christian vocation. What is the Christian vocation? How are we living it? Are we guided by a motto as we live out our Christian vocation? Whose motto guides us? And if the risen Jesus did leave us a motto for our life and faith, for our Christian vocation, what is it?
The word “vocation” is too often mistakenly associated only with religious life and the priesthood. Christian married life and Christian single life are also worthy vocations in our Church.
“Vocation” is a word society also uses to describe how some work are not jobs or tasks but a calling: teaching, nursing, cooking, painting, even parenting come to mind.
If so many things can be called vocation, what then is really at the heart of vocation? Vocation is not about doing, as it is about being. It is about living in a particular way and for a specific purpose. For Christians, it must be about living with God and for God. As Christians, we understand “vocation” as living in holiness to praise, reverence and serve God. We do this best in community, and by caring for God’s people.
Being holy is living with God and in God’s ways. But how are we to be holy?
The Greek word for “vocation” gives us one answer: “klay’-sis” means a calling, a summons. For Christians, vocation must be about listening to God’s call, responding to it, and living God’s call fully in our lives. The Gospel writers in particular use “klay’-sis” to describe God’s call to humankind. This is why Jesus calls us to God through his preaching and teaching, his healing and caring.
But what are we to trying to really hear in God’s invitation to us? It is this: God’s motto for us to live life fully and happily.
And, in today’s gospel story, Jesus invites us to discover again this motto to help us understand and live the purpose of Christian life.
Jesus compares the good shepherd to a mere hired hand. The good shepherd cares about the sheep; he lays down his life for them. The hired one is mainly interested in getting paid; he cares for himself and runs away when wolves attack, leaving his sheep in danger.
Aren’t you and I sometimes like the hired hand? Don’t we put own wants and preferences head of God’s desires for us and of the hopes others have in us? I suspect we do this because we feel we have to hold on tightly to various handles for the good life. Handles like career and assets to assure us security in life. Handles like looks and honors to protect our reputation. Handles like money for home and education to safeguard our families. Even handles like giving enough to charity, making enough sacrifices, saying enough prayers to ensure we will get to heaven.
What do you and I own that we cannot lose? I suspect much; and so, we grab our own handles tightly to hold on. The more we do this, however, the more we take the road downwards to become like the hired hand: not just self-centered but also irresponsible towards family and friends, employees and superiors, the poor and the needy, God entrusts into our care.
If the hired hand had a motto, it could well be “Grab and Keep.” This is why Jesus offers us the counter example of the good shepherd; he lives and serves by a different motto.
The good shepherd knows his sheep intimately; this is why he can lay down his life for them. His sheep are not his possessions or handles to grab and keep. Rather, they are like handles he is called to open; indeed, his life is a calling to attend to these sheep who are like handles to doors he must open to new rooms and new possibilities. And don’t shepherds who are good open gates and fences to lead their sheep out of the paddocks to greener pastures, to better life? Their lives are at the service of those they serve. This is what the vocation of shepherding is about.
How can the good shepherd do this? Because at the heart of shepherding is real love.
Real love lets go, receiving humbly, giving humbly.* There is nothing to grab and posses about real love. Instead, it is about receiving and letting go. Real love – which is rooted in God’s Love – is what empowers the shepherd to love his sheep into his self-sacrifice for them. Such love recognizes that all one has received comes from God as gift, and that it becomes truly one's gift when it is given away. The good shepherd knows this. We know this kind of love too. Isn’t this the Christian love you and I wish to have and to practice in daily life?
The motto of the good shepherd then is “Receive and Let Go.”
I’d like to suggest that this is the motto Jesus wants us to remember from today’s gospel story but, more so, to live each day of our lives.
Why? Because this motto will help us to love, like the good shepherd does: selflessly sharing what we have received from God. This is how we can better live holier lives in God. But this is a dangerous motto to live by: it will ask us to die to ourselves, to those parts of us that grab and keep.
I’d like to believe Jesus lived out this motto: he received life and love from God, and on the Cross he gave them away for us to have God’s life and love. If we live by this motto, our vocation – whatever form it takes – will truly become Christ-like. Yes, Christian vocation must be about letting go of what we have first received from God so that someone else can also have life in God.
This is why the Good Shepherd can risk his life for his sheep. And this is why we must dare to waste our redeemed lives in Jesus on others who are in need of Easter life and Easter joy.
Then, you and I, and all we share our Christian life and faith with, will truly come to know the richness of the gift the good shepherd's motto is. And it is this: that it is only in dying that we are born into eternal life.
*Inspired in parts by John Foley, SJ
Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
Photo: www.thebridgemaker.com
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