Sunday Sermon for April 21, 2024, the Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year B
Readings: Acts 4:8-12; 1 Jn 3:1-2; Jn 10:11-18
In the second reading today, St. John tells us one of the most important truths about ourselves that is critical for us to hear and understand. First, he speaks of the love God the Father has bestowed upon us, then he explains this statement by saying that we are children of God. It is not merely a matter of “God loves everyone” with the implication that He has no choice but to love me in some generic sense of love.
What St. John is addressing is something far more profound. We see this stated in a different way in the Gospel where Jesus, in speaking of Himself as the Good Shepherd, tells us that He knows His own and His own know Him. While this can be said of shepherds and their sheep, it can also be said about parents and their children. Parents recognize their children, not only by sight, but by the sound of their voice, by their mannerisms, and just the way they carry themselves. If a group of young parents get together, along with their infant children, when one of the babies begins to cry, each parent knows immediately if the crying child is their child or not, simply by the tone and the way the baby cries.
We are God’s children; therefore, we can say that God knows us. Of course, one could say that God knows everything, so He knows each person perfectly. While that is true, He knows us in a way that is substantially different from the way He knows all things. He knows us in a relational way, as a Father to His children. This is the extraordinary truth Jesus speaks when He teaches us to call God our Father. To be our God is objective; to be our Father is subjective.
This is something only baptized people have the privilege to say. Every person on the earth is made in the image and likeness of God, but only Christian people can call themselves children of God. We are children of God because we are members of Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God.
Think of the implications of this. For instance, in the first reading St. Peter tells the elders and the leaders of the people that the healing of a cripple was done by the power of the Holy Name of Jesus. St. Peter reminds them, and us, that they had crucified Jesus, but God raised Him from the dead; therefore, He is the means of salvation, not for a chosen few, but for the entire human race. That, again, is an objective truth. This being the case, how much more can it be said of those who are members of Jesus and children of our Heavenly Father?
This is the point our Lord makes in the Gospel reading when He says that a hireling runs away when he sees the wolf coming because the sheep are not his own. The good shepherd, Jesus says, lays down his life for his sheep. We are the Lord’s own! He did not run away; He laid down His life for His own! He even tells us that the Father loves Him because He laid down His life in order to take it up again. If the Father loves Jesus because He laid down His life, then we can begin to understand how much the Father loves those for whom Jesus laid down His life.
After all, the Father sent Jesus into the world because He wanted us to be saved from ourselves. He sent Jesus into the world because He wanted us to know how much He loves us. He sent Jesus into the world so we could experience His love and, hopefully, in receiving His love, we will make the choice to love Him in return.
To choose to love God in return seems like it should be obvious. However, we have been so profoundly affected by sin that we find it difficult to do what should be natural to us. Being made in the image and likeness of God means we are created to love and be loved. Most people do not find this nearly as simply as it sounds. But as children of God, we are to love as our Heavenly Father loves. Jesus shows us what this means: putting the beloved before the self, dying to self to live for the other, seeking only the good of the other.
This is what we will be doing for all eternity if we make it to Heaven. St. John says we are God children now, but what we shall be has not yet been revealed. However, he says, when it is revealed, we will be like God whose children we are. You are the child of God: love as God loves you!
Fr. Altier’s column appears regularly in The Wanderer, a national Catholic weekly published in St. Paul, Minn. For information about subscribing to The Wanderer, please visit www.thewandererpress.com.
