Dear Brothers and Sisters,
The Lord wants to be our shepherd. How often do we act and think as someone who has no shepherd? So many people act like sheep without a shepherd, or you could even say we are like sheep with bad shepherds. The gospel says that he is a good shepherd; he wants to be our shepherd, and he wants us to be his sheep.
Sheep are animals that obey that are part of a community that belong to a group and when it is alone, it gets lost, and the wolf comes and eats her up. This is why the Lord calls us to live as sheep with a shepherd. And not to let ourselves go on our own, because we don’t know how to be content; we don’t know how to love. We don’t know how to lead our lives or to have discernment. We lack so much and that is why we need a good shepherd. There have been good shepherds who have many times guided our life and we have allowed them to do so. Bad shepherds are not really interested in us. They don’t know how to lead us. They lead us to chasing money or vanity or living in a disordered way. They leave us drained, but the Lord has the greatest mercy for us as we see in this gospel.
He looks at the disciple and us with compassion and wants to go to a quiet place to rest. But what happens? Many people arrive, who are in need, people who need to be loved like we do. The world needs to be loved. We can only find that love in Jesus Christ. He is the only one who can really help us, who can love us as we are. He is our shepherd and through him, we can love other sheep and even become shepherds who can lead others to that love of Jesus Christ.
The Lord, in the midst of his desire to go away and to rest with his disciples, sees a multitude of people and looks at them with compassion. He had pity on them because he sees their suffering, their reality and ours. Christ understands everything that we are going through perfectly and he does not judge us. He takes our place and puts himself on the cross for us. But our tendency is to always rely on ourselves and think that we need to suffer, we need to get on the cross, we need to do so many things. I have to love God, and I have to love this brother; ok, but we cannot do so on our strength. Christ suffers for us but he more importantly he suffers with us!
Hopefully we can discover that Christianity is to allow Christ to do it for us. Let Christ lead us, then he can make us good and faithful servants and able to fulfill the sermon on the mount. Let him do the work. He will make us docile sheep so that we do his will, and he does this by loving us. He loves you at the most unexpected times when you think that no one else loves you, when you feel let down and alone or frustrated, when you feel depressed and that you have been forgotten and unloved. At that moment you can experience that the Lord begins to be your shepherd, if you let him.
Allow him to make you a holy man or woman. Allow him to make you a Christian. He will convert the goat in us. We are crazy goats always trying to do our will and he will turn you into docile sheep capable even of giving your life as he gave it for us. May the Lord grant us this grace to give our life as Christ has given his so that we can be Christians in a world that is looking for love.