A homily for the fourth Sunday after Easter, Year A

You can watch the homily here.

Abundant life is not postponed to heaven. It begins wherever people trust love more than fear and wherever someone hears the shepherd’s voice and dares to follow.

Every year on this Fourth Sunday of Easter, the Church gives us the same image: the shepherd. It is so consistent that this day is often called “Good Shepherd Sunday.” And in this year, we hear Jesus’ words from the Gospel of John: “I am the gate for the sheep… I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

It is a tender image. Comforting. Pastoral.

But it is also more radical than we might first imagine.

Because when Jesus calls himself the gate, the shepherd, the one who lays down his life for the sheep, he is not offering sentimental religion. He is describing an entirely new kind of belonging — a community shaped not by fear or competition, but by trust, shared life, and courageous love.

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,” says the psalm today. Psalm 23 may be the most beloved text in all of scripture, but it doesn’t say, “The Lord gives me everything I desire.” It says, “I shall not want.” In the presence of this shepherd, my deepest hunger is satisfied. My anxious striving begins to soften. I am led beside still waters.

The shepherd does not eliminate the valley of the shadow of death. The shepherd walks with us through it.

This is an important distinction for us — especially now — in a time of noise and fragmentation, because there are many voices calling to us. 

Voices promising security through exclusion. 

Voices promising abundance through accumulation. 

Voices promising identity through opposition.

Jesus names those voices plainly: strangers, thieves, bandits. Not cartoon villains, but any voice that diminishes life rather than deepens it.

And then he says: “The sheep know his voice.”

The spiritual life, then, is less about mastering doctrine and more about learning to recognize a voice. 

A voice that does not shame, but calls. 

A voice that does not coerce, but invites. 

A voice that does not scatter, but gathers.

In the reading from the Acts of the Apostles, we see what happens when people begin to recognize that voice together. They devote themselves to ‘teaching and fellowship’, to ‘the breaking of bread’ and to prayers. They share their possessions. They eat with glad and generous hearts.

It sounds almost naïve to modern ears — and yet it is profoundly subversive. This is what life looks like when people trust the shepherd more than they trust their fear. It is what abundance looks like when it is no longer measured by private holdings, but by shared flourishing.

This community is not built on perfection. It is built on devotion. On practice. On showing up. On breaking bread again and again until strangers become companions.

This is still our vocation in the Church. In parishes. In religious communities. In households. We are not called to manufacture abundance. We are called to practice listening — together — for the shepherd’s voice.

The letter we know as the First Epistle of Peter adds another layer. It speaks to people who are suffering. People misunderstood, perhaps marginalized. And it describes Christ as the shepherd and guardian of our souls — the one who endures violence without returning it, who absorbs harm without becoming harm.

This is not passivity, this is a different kind of strength.

The shepherd’s authority is not domination; it is self-offering love. “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross… by his wounds you have been healed.”

The image shifts: the shepherd becomes the lamb. The leader becomes the vulnerable one. And in that reversal, we see the heart of resurrection life.

Abundance, in Jesus’ vocabulary, is not excess. It is communion. It is the freedom that comes when we are no longer organized around fear.

In many ways, this is the work of Eastertide. Like the disciples, we are learning what it means to live as people who have already passed through death with Christ. We are learning what it means to be people who move from fear into boldness. People who do not need to cling quite so tightly. People who can risk generosity because we trust the pasture is wide enough.

But if we’re honest: sometimes we don’t feel like sheep in green pastures. Sometimes we feel scattered. Overwhelmed. Pulled in competing directions.

So I think the invitation today is very simple: listen.

What voice has been shaping your inner world lately? Is it a voice of scarcity? A voice of comparison? A voice of resentment?

Or is it the quieter voice that says, “You are known. Come this way. There is enough.”

In the sacramental life of the Church — in Word and Table — we practice attuning ourselves to that voice. Week after week. We gather not because we have it all together, but because we need help remembering who our shepherd is.

And the beautiful fruit of our labor is that as we learn to recognize his voice, we begin to echo it for others.

In baptism, we are joined to Christ’s shepherding work. We become, in small ways, gates of mercy for one another. Which means that here in our own city, it may look like mentoring a young person navigating dangerous pressures. 

It may look like feeding the hungry without asking them to qualify their need. 

It may look like refusing to let rhetoric strip dignity from whole neighborhoods. 

It may look like praying not only for victims of violence, but for perpetrators as well — trusting that no one is beyond the reach of the shepherd’s voice.

This is not grand heroism. It is steady, love-led presence.

In a culture that often rewards loud certainty, the Church’s witness is often quieter: shared meals, faithful prayer, economic generosity, forgiveness practiced imperfectly but persistently.

The early community in Acts did not change the world through domination. They changed it through joy. “They ate their food with glad and generous hearts.” That gladness was itself a form of resistance — a refusal to let death have the final word.

Jesus says, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

Abundant life is not postponed to heaven. It begins wherever people trust love more than fear and wherever someone hears the shepherd’s voice and dares to follow.

May we learn again to recognize the one who calls us by name.
May we trust the gate that opens into spacious fields and walk through valleys without surrendering to despair. And may our life together become a sign — however small — that resurrection abundance is already at work among us.

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”