Fourth Sunday of Easter: The Beating Heart of Peace
Franciscan Reflections From The Hermitage – The Beating Heart of Peace – Fourth Sunday of Easter – Jn 10:27-30
Our world is still wild and unruly, there are still questions without answers, there are still thieves and bandits in the world bent on destruction, even while most of them sit in sanitised, gilded boardrooms. To face the carnage and horrors of war and destruction in this age of the ‘global village’ has surprised and unsettled us.
Yet this too is an opportunity to look beyond the magic tricks and the illusions of what we deem good and evil, right and wrong, sin and righteousness, because as long as our righteous indignation finds the ‘good cause’ for defending, we will see an enemy that must be stopped, an enemy that must be destroyed.
Even as we grandstand and demand peace, we build our stockpiles of ‘strategic deterrents and defensive capabilities’, the basic tools needed to kill people. This is the purpose of these tools, their only purpose, the purpose for which they have been made, to kill people.
If only ‘so and so’ person would be ‘taken out of action’, if only ‘such and such’ a nation would be ‘neutralised’, if only those outsiders and foreigners would be ‘removed’… clever words and phrases that cast me in the role of good, righteous, and my violence… just and necessary.
An encounter with the Good Shepherd brings light to bear on our collective guilt and the dualism of our hardened hearts. He leads us through compassion and non-violence into the true goodness and beauty of love that is the only road, the only way, and the only power that transforms darkness into light, death into life, and despair to hope.
It is not with slogans, grandstanding, or armies and their killing tools that peace comes about. Peace begins from the heart of the Good Shepherd to my heart… to your heart…
The Good Shepherd is good not because he fixes everything but because he lays down his life for everyone. For those who fit in and those who don’t. For those who stay in the sheep pen and those who are outcasts.
Jesus is calling us to the idea that our liberation, our salvation is tied up with the salvation and liberation of all people.
Most high, glorious God, enlighten the darkness of my heart and give me, Lord, a correct faith, a certain hope, a perfect charity, sense and knowledge, so that I may carry out your holy and true command.
— St. Francis of Assisi
- 19th Sunday Reflection: What Shall We Do? - August 5, 2022
- 18th Sunday Reflection: The Parable Of The Rich Fool - July 29, 2022
- 17th Sunday Reflection: Where Is Truth Found? - July 22, 2022
