Sheep Very Much With A Shepherd

Saturday of 4th Sunday in Course 2023

What is the greatest need of the teens and adults in the Western world today? The majority of them rarely or never cross the threshold of any kind of church. And they are by no means happy. We know from psychological surveys that those who are members of religion-adhering families are more likely to describe themselves as happy people. So my logic teachers would pretty universally agree from this data, that if more people were regularly worshiping in a church, fewer people would be unhappy. But St. Augustine told us fifteen centuries ago in fewer words what sociologists spend millions to know. It’s a prayer you may know: “You have created us for Yourself, Lord, and our hearts find no rest until they rest in You.”

Earlier in St. Mark’s dialogue, we see Him sending out his disciples two by two into the countryside to share the Gospel, heal the sick, and generally give the kind of hope in God’s love and intervention that characterized Jesus’s own ministry. Here we read that they have returned and have been debriefed. Jesus sees that they are happy, but exhausted, so He puts them all into a boat to go off to a cove where they can be by themselves and experience renewal. But that fell apart because the inhabitants guessed where they would be going, and got there ahead of them. But Jesus did not express any kind of weariness with the neediness of the needy. He saw that they were as confused and defenseless as a flock of sheep with no shepherd. So we’ll see Him teach and heal, and even multiply a small amount of bread and fish until it satisfied over five thousand persons. That’s what Jesus longs to do–to give us rest and nourishment and then to equip us to share the Gospel and the Bread of Life with a world of people who are starving for lack of God’s love.

Then how do we, called to be Christ’s disciples, participate in that nourishment and rest? That is why the author of the Letter to the Hebrews is so insistent on coming together weekly in our assembly, our church. What we do is, as the Acts of the Apostles tell us, hear the apostles’ teaching, enjoy fellowship, pray and break the bread. In other words, we liturgically make present the mystery of Christ. In the Eucharist, we offer the sacrifice of praise that Hebrews talks about. It is not a new sacrifice, because Christ’s Paschal three days of Passover meal, Calvary passion and Easter triumph is the only sacrifice necessary. But we lock into the mystery, the sacrament, by the breaking of the bread and the prayers. We remember and make present the mystery of our redemption and salvation, so as we pray “The Lord is my shepherd,” we know that we shall never again want, and never be a flock without our Divine Shepherd.