FEED MY SHEEP

A SERMON FOR THE 6th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

What an extraordinary thing today’s Gospel describes.  No, I don’t refer to our Lord’s miracle in feeding four thousand people with a mere seven loaves and a handful of small fish.  That was extraordinary, certainly, but it’s not what I had in mind.  What I mean by extraordinary is that four thousand people would leave their homes and follow Christ into the desert, ending up with nothing to eat and a three-day walk away from the nearest food.  What on earth would it take to make men do such a thing?  To just drop everything and act so imprudently?

Obviously, our Lord must have been no ordinary preacher.  We can certainly surmise that his charismatic personality and ability to deliver a good sermon were way above the abilities of the local rabbis.  And yet, surely, there must be more than that to take men away from their homes, their families, their livelihood, and even from the food and drink they needed to survive.  There must have been something in the message he gave them, something they could not hear anywhere else.   Something they were starved of, with a starvation worse than that of mere hunger.  Our Lord was feeding them with the divine Word of God, his own eternal Word.  He was feeding them “not by bread alone, but by every word that cometh out of the mouth of God.”  To hear those words coming from the mouth of God must surely have been worth leaving everything else behind and following our Lord into the wilderness…

What are you doing here in this church today?  What’s the matter with your local church?  Surely this isn’t the closest church to your home?  Why did you travel so far to attend Mass here?  For the same reason, surely, as these multitudes followed Christ into the desert.  Because in those other churches you can no longer find the eternal Word of God, the Word that was in the beginning with God, the Word that IS God, the Word that is made flesh in the Holy Mass and dwells amongst us in the Blessed Sacrament.

This is why we have followed Christ to this church so far from our homes.  Because we have confidence that this church is the same Church that Christ founded, and that here we may always be secure, fastened firmly to the Rock upon which he built his Church, the Rock that is St. Peter—Petrus—“Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church.” 

But before our Lord said those words to Simon Peter and gave him the papacy, what else did he say?  What did he ask Peter?  Peter had denied our Lord three times on Maundy Thursday, and now our Lord wanted to make sure of the man who would be his representative on earth and lead his Church to salvation.  In a very solemn and formal tone, our Lord asked St. Peter three questions, all of them the same:  “Simon, Son of Jonas, lovest thou me?”  St. Peter’s answer to all three questions was also the same:  “Lord, thou knowest that I love thee.”  And what instruction did the Good Shepherd then give, three times, to the first Pope?  “Feed my sheep.”

The chief duty of the successors of St. Peter is to feed Christ’s sheep.  Three times Peter was told to feed these sheep.  In other words, the Church’s role is to continue, intact and uninterrupted, the transmission to us of three things, the faith, the moral precepts and the sacraments of the Church. It is the Church’s role to feed us with the wholesome doctrine of the true faith, to feed us with the pure, unadulterated teaching of the sound moral precepts contained in the Ten Commandments, and to feed us with the infinitely abundant graces of the seven sacraments.  And it is our right as Catholics to expect that Holy Mother Church will continue to feed us, the sheep of her pasture.  The same hand of Divine Providence that gave us these instruments of salvation in the first place, faith, morals, sacraments, also gave us the Holy Catholic Church with her popes and bishops and priests as the means of delivering them to us. 

Did the successors of St. Peter succeed in feeding Christ’s sheep?  Yes, for almost two thousand years, the Church fed us with God‘s never-changing Word, her doctrines of Faith, Morals and Sacraments as revealed by God and instituted by his Son.  But then along came Vatican II, and since then almost every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God, the food to which we are entitled, has been replaced with the swill of modernism.  

How else can we possibly interpret the words of Pope Francis Bergoglio when he casually informs us that the “great majority of Catholic marriages are invalid” because the young people who make their vows before God don’t really understand what they’re saying or doing!  Actually, Catholics, even the ones left floating around in the wreckage of Vatican II, do seem to be starting to “get it.”  There was an op-ed piece on Fox News about a year ago, for example, that ended with these startling words—strong words of criticism the likes of which I had never heard outside the most vehement of traditionalist media:  “At this point it is clear, Bergoglio has repeatedly proven himself unable to lead, and is doing incalculable damage to the Church that will take decades to heal.  Pope Francis should resign, and Catholics should demand it, so the Church can begin recovering from the havoc his ill-advised and arrogant papacy has wrought.”  This is not just another example of normal, everyday criticism of authority.  This is an unprecedented condemnation of one man, the shocked acknowledgment of his utter ineptitude to act as the Vicar of Christ.

Since then, we have been witness to an ever-rising chorus of dissent in Rome against the man on whom their new “Church” is presumably built.  Perhaps we are seeing some of the same spirit that drove four thousand Jews of Palestine out of their local synagogues to follow Christ into the wilderness, the same spirit that once brought you, by the grace of God, to this temple of truth today.  For many years we have been complacent.  But when things are taken away from us, things that we have a right to, then there is no more room for complacency.  The silent and the meek, and those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, will eventually rise up and demand to be fed.

The faith can continue without the priests and the bishops, our obedience of the Ten Commandments can continue without the priests and the bishops, but the sacraments can NOT continue without them.  Without priests and bishops there can be no sacraments beyond baptism and matrimony. Christ fed the multitude with seven loaves, and now the Church’s divine mission is to feed us with the graces that flow through the seven Sacraments, and this cannot happen without priests and bishops.  It is the most important role of St. Peter’s successors to ensure that we are fed with the life-giving graces that come to us through sacraments that are certainly valid, and, most importantly of all, through that Most Blessed Sacrament that is the chief fruit of the traditional Catholic and Apostolic Mass.

Today we have come here to be fed.  Fed with the truth of the faith, yes; fed with exhortations to follow the commandments of God, yes.  But above all, we have come here to be fed with the Bread of Life, the food of our souls, the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, without which, as our Lord himself told us, we have no life in us.  We have followed our Lord this far.  Now he is waiting for us, doing his best to make sure we are provided with the food we need, in this wilderness we call “life.”  Let’s make sure from now on that we receive our Holy Communion regularly and worthily, so that we can finally make it through the desert of life to our home in heaven, without fainting on the way.