(Listen to this homily here).
I hope the Gospel sounded familiar this morning—it was the
exact same one we heard yesterday.
I preached about the Good Shepherd yesterday—today I would like to focus
on another line.
Jesus
says, “And I
have other sheep, that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they
will heed my voice. So there shall
be one flock, one shepherd.”
We
can’t underestimate what Jesus was saying here. If you subscribe to science, humans have been around for
200,000. Thus for 198,000 years
God was building up his chosen family through his chosen people—the Jews. The Jewish worldview divided every
person into Jew or non-Jew—Gentile.
What Jesus is saying is that there were others “not of this fold” and he was opening the doors of relationship with
God to all humanity.
I
don’t think anyone here is of Jewish descent, so consider what this means for
us!
We
see Peter experiencing this radical and novel shift: “What God has made clean, you are
not to call profane…As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon [the
Gentiles] as it had upon us at the beginning…If
then God gave [the Gentiles] the same gift he gave to us when
we came to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to be able to hinder God.”
Thank
God for Jesus’ mission to bring us all into one flock. Had he not, most of us would be nothing
more than Gentiles!
We
give God thanks and praise for sending us his son to be our Good Shepherd—may we
continue to be faithful followers in this flock that crosses all humanity.
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