3rd Sunday after Pentecost 3.7.11 Individual sheep
If we go into or any crowded place there would be lots of people around and most of them we would not know personally. We would not know their names, nor anything about them except for certain generalisations we could make.
It would be a strange thing if we could walk among a large group of people and we found that we knew the name of every person there; and not only their names but everything about them, even their innermost thoughts, fears, hopes, joys and sorrows!
It would be amazing to know all that. There is Someone who does, of course – the Good Shepherd, who knows His sheep, and also those are not His sheep but should be. The ones who are not presently His are the lost ones, for whom He goes searching.
There must be a lot of lost sheep in our present world. If ‘lost’ means anyone who does not fully belong to the flock of Christ, does not give explicit loyalty and obedience to Him, then it must mean most people in the world.
Even if we did know all those people in the crowded place it would not necessarily mean that we loved them as well. But in God’s case, yes, He does that too. He has a personal , vital interest there. His love is infinite, passionate.
To us other people can be just there, of no particular significance. It is hard for us to imagine the burning love of the Sacred Heart, caring so much for each one. But if we think of how important we regard our own lives that gives a clue. Every person in the crowd is just like us insofar as each one regards his/her life as very important. God can see that and He agrees it is important.
He loves each person and desires the salvation of that soul. Every soul is meant to be in the orbit of the Sacred Heart, keeping close at all times.
A planet is happy if it stays in its proper orbit, drawing life from the star to which it is attached. If it loses its orbit it loses everything. So with us – if we stay close to the Good Shepherd we have everything. Away from Him we are in chaos.
Our Lord seeks to bring peace and harmony into the lives of each person but many will reject His efforts, either deliberately or simply through neglect.
Others, like us, will want to cooperate but we make things harder due to our sins and inconsistent behaviour.
What can we do? For ourselves, clean up our own backyard and get our response right. Climb into our orbit. It is not dull to be in a fixed path. There we find stability, the basis to develop our true selves.
For the other people in the crowd - we desire their salvation. We believe in their importance, not necessarily their goodness; acknowledging that they were designed by God to live with Him for all eternity. So there must be something good there. No one is predestined for hell.
We hope they find their place. Increasing the overall harmony. Let us make music together, we could say. The bigger the choir the better it sounds; the better our world becomes.
We desire this – to the point that we will pray for it and make sacrifices for it to happen.
Think of saints like St Francis Xavier who travelled to evangelise complete strangers on the other side of the world. It would have been easy for him to stay home, as it is for us. But he realized their importance simply because they were human and he made sacrifices to bring them the Gospel.
Who cares about all those other people in the world? God does, and so therefore should we.
May the Good Shepherd continue to find, and keep, every lost soul.
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