4th Sunday of Easter (Year A)

Useful points to consider:

Pope Francis, Message for the 2023 World Day of Prayer for Vocations, Rome, Saint John Lateran, 30 April 2023, Fourth Sunday of Easter.

Vocation: Grace and Mission

“I am a mission on this earth”

God’s call, we said, includes a “sending”. There is no vocation without mission. There is no happiness and full self-realization unless we offer others the new life that we have found. God’s call to love is an experience that does not allow us to remain silent. Saint Paul says, “Woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel!” (1 Cor 9:16). And the First Letter of John begins with the words, “What we have heard and seen, looked at and touched – the Word made flesh – we declare also to you, so that our joy may be complete” (cf. 1:1-4).

Five years ago, in the Apostolic Exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate, I spoke to every baptized person, saying, “You need to see the entirety of your life as a mission” (No. 23). Yes, because each and every one of us is able to say: “I am a mission on this earth; that is the reason why I am here in this world” (Evangelii Gaudium, 273).

Our shared mission as Christians is to bear joyful witness wherever we find ourselves, through our actions and words, to the experience of being with Jesus and members of his community, which is the Church.  That mission finds expression in works of material and spiritual mercy, in a welcoming and gentle way of life that reflects closeness, compassion and tenderness, in contrast to the culture of waste and indifference. By being a neighbour, like the Good Samaritan (cf. Lk 10:25-37), we come to understand the heart of our Christian vocation: to imitate Jesus Christ, who came to serve, not to be served (cf. Mk 10:45).

This missionary activity does not arise simply from our own abilities, plans and projects, nor from our sheer willpower or our efforts to practice the virtues; it is the result of a profound experience in the company of Jesus.  Only then can we testify to a Person, a Life, and thus become “apostles”. Only then can we regard ourselves as “sealed, even branded, by this mission of bringing light, blessing, enlivening, raising, healing and freeing” (Evangelii Gaudium, 273).

The Gospel icon of this experience is that of the two disciples journeying to Emmaus. After their encounter with the risen Jesus, they said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the Scriptures to us?” (Lk 24:32). In those disciples, we can see what it means to have “hearts on fire, feet on the move” [Cf. Message for World Mission Day 2023 (6 January 2023)]. This is also my fervent hope for the coming World Youth Day in Lisbon, to which I joyfully look forward, with its motto: “Mary arose and went with haste” (Lk 1:39). May every man and woman feel called to arise and go in haste, with hearts on fire.

JOHN PAUL II, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Formation of Priests in the Circumstances of the Present Day, Pastores Dabo Vobis

18. As the Council points out, “the spiritual gift which priests have received in ordination does not prepare them merely for a limited and circumscribed mission, but for the fullest, in fact the universal, mission of salvation to the end of the earth. The reason is that every priestly ministry shares in the fullness of the mission entrusted by Christ to the apostles.” By the very nature of their ministry they should therefore be penetrated and animated by a profound missionary spirit and “with that truly Catholic spirit which habitually looks beyond the boundaries of diocese, country or rite to meet the needs of the whole Church, being prepared in spirit to preach the Gospel everywhere.”

23. (…) The gift of self, which is the source and synthesis of pastoral charity, is directed toward the Church. This was true of Christ who “loved the Church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25), and the same must be true for the priest. With pastoral charity, which distinguishes the exercise of the priestly ministry as an amoris officium, “the priest, who welcomes the call to ministry, is in a position to make this a loving choice, as a result of which the Church and souls become his first interest, and with this concrete spirituality he becomes capable of loving the universal Church and that part of it entrusted to him with the deep love of a husband for his wife.” The gift of self has no limits, marked as it is by the same apostolic and missionary zeal of Christ, the good shepherd, who said: “And I have other sheep, that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd” (Jn. 10:16).

32. Membership in and dedication to a particular church does not limit the activity and life of the presbyterate to that church: A restriction of this sort is not possible, given the very nature both of the particular church and of the priestly ministry. In this regard the Council teaches that “the spiritual gift which priests received at their ordination prepares them not for any limited or narrow mission but for the widest scope of the universal mission of salvation ‘to the end of the earth’ (Acts 1:8). For every priestly ministry shares in the universality of the mission entrusted by Christ to his apostles.”

It thus follows that the spiritual life of the priest should be profoundly marked by a missionary zeal and dynamism. In the exercise of their ministry and the witness of their lives, priests have the duty to form the community entrusted to them as a truly missionary community. As I wrote in the encyclical Redemptoris Missio, “all priests must have the mind and heart of missionaries open to the needs of the Church and the world, with concern for those farthest away and especially for the non - Christian groups in their own area. They should have at heart, in their prayers and particularly at the eucharistic sacrifice, the concern of the whole Church for all of humanity.”

If the lives of priests are generously inspired by this missionary spirit, it will be easier to respond to that increasingly serious demand of the Church today which arises from the unequal distribution of the clergy. In this regard, the Council was both quite clear and forceful: “Let priests remember then that they must have at heart the care of all the churches. Hence priests belonging to dioceses which are rich in vocations should show themselves willing and ready, with the permission or at the urging of their own bishop, to exercise their ministry in other regions, missions or activities which suffer from a shortage of clergy.”

JOHN PAUL II, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Bishop, Servant of the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the Hope of the World, Pastores Gregis

22. (…) Communion, in its Trinitarian source and model, is always expressed in mission. Mission is the fruit and the logical consequence of communion. The dynamic process of communion is favoured by openness to the horizons and demands of mission, always ensuring the witness of unity so that the world may believe and making ever greater room for love, so that all people may attain to the Trinitarian unity from which they have come forth and to which they are destined. The more intense communion is, the more mission is fostered, especially when it is lived out in the poverty of love, which is the ability to go forth to meet any person or group or culture with the power of the Cross, our spes unica and the supreme witness to the love of God, which is also manifested as a universal love of our brothers and sisters.

66. In sacred Scripture the Church is compared to a flock ‘‘which God himself foretold that he would shepherd, and whose sheep, even though governed by human shepherds, are continuously led and nourished by Christ himself, the Good Shepherd and the Prince of Shepherds’’. Does not Jesus himself call his disciples a pusillus grex and exhort them not to fear but to have hope (cf. Lk 12:32)? Jesus often repeated this exhortation to his disciples: “In the world you will have fear; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world!” (Jn 16:33). As he was about to return to the Father, he washed the feet of the Apostles and said to them: “Let not your hearts be troubled,” and added: “I am the way... No one comes to the Father, but by me” (cf. Jn 14:1-6). On this “way” which is Christ, the little flock, the Church, has set out, and is led by him, the Good Shepherd, who, “when he has brought out all his own, goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice” (Jn 10:4).

In the image of Jesus Christ, and following in his footsteps, the Bishop also goes forth to proclaim him before the world as the Saviour of mankind, the Saviour of every man and woman. As a missionary of the Gospel, he acts in the name of the Church, which is an expert in humanity and close to the men and women of our time. Consequently, the Bishop, with the strength which comes from the radicalism of the Gospel, also has the duty to unmask false conceptions of man, to defend values being threatened by ideological movements and to discern the truth. With the Apostle he can repeat: “We toil and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, especially of those who believe” (1 Tim 4:10).

The Bishop’s activity should thus be marked by that parrhesía which is the fruit of the working of the Spirit (cf. Acts 4:31). Leaving behind his very self in order to proclaim Jesus Christ, the Bishop takes up his mission with confidence and courage, factus pontifex, becoming in truth a ‘‘bridge’’ which leads to every man and women. With the burning love of a shepherd he goes out in search of the sheep, following in the footsteps of Jesus who says: “I have other sheep that are not of this fold; I must bring them also and they will hear my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd” (Jn 10:16).

PAUL VI, Radio Message for the 1st World Day of Prayer for Vocations, April 11, 1964

“Pray the Lord of the harvest to send laborers” for his Church (cf. Mt 9:38).

Casting an anxious gaze over the endless expanse of green spiritual fields, which all over the world await priestly hands, the heartfelt invocation to the Lord springs from our soul, according to Christ’s invitation. Yes, today as then, “the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few” (ibid. 9:37): few, compared to the increased needs of pastoral care; few, in the face of the needs of the modern world, in the face of its quivers of restlessness, its needs for clarity and light, which require teachers and fathers who are understanding, open, updated; few, yet, in the face of those who, although distant, indifferent, or hostile, still want in the priest a living irreproachable model of the doctrine, which he professes. And above all these priestly hands are scarce in the mission fields, wherever there are people to catechize, to help, to console.

Therefore, may this Sunday, which in the Roman Liturgy takes the name of the Good Shepherd from the Gospel, see united in a single heartbeat of prayer the generous hosts of Catholics from all over the world, to invoke from the Lord the workers necessary for his harvest.