Today’s Gospel reading is about the Good Shepherd, which is one of the most important images that our Lord Jesus Christ wants to present to us aside from his being the Light of the World and his being The Bread of Life. You can read it in John 10:1-10.
Jesus said to the Pharisees] “Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever does not enter a sheepfold through the gate but climbs over elsewhere is a thief and a robber. 2 But whoever enters through the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. 3 The gatekeeper opens it for him, and the sheep hear his voice, as he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4 When he has driven out all his own, he walks ahead of them, and the sheep follow him, because they recognize his voice. 5 But they will not follow a stranger; they will run away from him because they do not recognize the voice of strangers.
Although Jesus used this figure of speech, they did not realize what he was trying to tell them. 7 So Jesus said again, “Amen, amen, I say to you, I am the gate for the sheep. 8 All who came [before me] are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. 9 I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. 10 A thief comes only to steal and slaughter and destroy; I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.”
No doubt this story is so rich in meaning and our Lord Jesus Christ is actually giving all of us especially Catholics a stern warning to be extra careful that when we follow our servant leaders, we have to make sure that the person truly comes from Jesus Christ and vested with the full authority to lead his sheep into the sheepfold. Alas, too many Catholics whose Bibles are kept in bookshelves gathering dust suddenly shift to another Christian sect because they are filled with the teachings of those who professed to be Christians, yet they openly attack the Catholic Church whenever they can find the opportunity.
I have lost many friends who were nominal Catholics and therefore they were only Catholics in name, but then they were lured by many glib-tongued Pastors who use the Catholic Bible to “steal” the sheep that were already inside the sheepfold of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is what the Lord warns us in today’s Gospel because as he teaches us in the last paragraph of today’s Gospel, “A thief comes only to steal and slaughter and destroy.” When these people were Catholics, they had the Holy Eucharist, where in last Friday’s Bread of life discourse in John 6: 52:59 our Lord clearly said, “Unless you eat the body and drink the blood of the Son of Man, you will have no life in you. If you eat my body and my blood you will have eternal life.”
So how do you find out whether this or that Christian group belongs to Jesus Christ? Again we refer to today’s Gospel teaching by our Lord Jesus Christ who said, “But they will not follow a stranger; they will run away from him because they do not recognize the voice of strangers.” But then how can you recognize the voice of Jesus Christ if you yourselves do not know him? As St. Jerome once quipped, “Ignorance of the Bible is ignorance of Christ!”
Indeed, reading the scriptures will teach you much about the Lord that we worship. More importantly, if we frequently visit the Blessed Sacrament, we shall develop a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and that is when you would be able to discern his voice and as his sheep, you will start recognizing him in you. But if you want to double-check on whether your church comes from Jesus, just open an Almanac and check out who were the founders of the numerous religions featured in that book.
Alas, even during the time of St. Augustine, the devil already devised ways to lure Christians away from doctrines of Christianity. For instance, some early Christians even debated that our Blessed Mother Mary could not be the Mother of God because God had no beginning and no end, so she could never have been born earlier than God? But this was argued in the Council of Ephesus when she was declared “Theotokos a.k.a. Mother of God” simply by the argument that if you deny the Motherhood of Mary, you deny that our Lord Jesus Christ was True God and True Man.
As Tertullian of Carthage said about Heretics, “In order that we maybe judged to have the truth—we who walk in the rule which the Churches have handed down from the Apostles, the Apostles from Christ, and Christ from God— admit that the reasonableness of our position is clear, defining as it does that heretics ought not to be allowed to challenge (us by) an appeal to the Scriptures, since we, without using Scriptures, prove that they have nothing to do with the Scriptures. If they are heretics, they cannot be Christians, because it is not from Christ that they have gotten what they pursue of their own choosing, and from which they incur the name heretic. So ask yourself are you in the Sheepfold of our Lord Jesus Christ? I hope you are.
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