As we celebrate Good Shepherd Sunday I’m reflecting this image from today’s gospel:
“The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep.”
As Father Denis McBride’s reflects the Good Shepherd presents a model of leadership based on “physical involvement and self-sacrificial love.” The leadership of the Good Shepherd is inclusive; he abandons no one. He gently draws anyone who strays or is excluded back into the community.
This model contains a challenge for us, Fr Denis carries on:
“The good shepherd challenges our own way of leaving people for lost: “I have come to seek out and save the lost.” Probably all of us know two or three people who have lost their sense of belonging, who feel they have no community to belong to.”
His words raise the question of who we allow to be lost. The harsh circumstances that have become normalised in the past few years have pushed more and more people to the margins. Our modern way of living leaves many people excluded, marginalised, judged and excluded, both in society and in our churches.
The call of the Good Shepherd compels us to become aware of those people. It compels us to risk reaching out and finding ways of welcoming them back in, however uncomfortable and costly that might feel.
So this Sunday’s gospel comes with a very particular call to us Christians to look for those who are marginalised by and within our church communities. The Good Shepherd challenges us to seek out those people, asking what they need, showing them they are welcome and leading them back into the community.
As we move through Eastertide where are you being invited to reach out to those on the margins?