A Lectio Divina Approach to the Sunday Liturgy
BREAKING THE BREAD OF THE WORD (Series 6, n. 20)
4th Sunday of Easter, Year A – April 13, 2008
“The Lord Jesus Christ is the Shepherd and Sheep Gate!”
BIBLE READINGS
Acts 2:14a, 36-41 // I Pet 2:20b-25 // Jn 10:1-10
N.B. Series 6 of BREAKING THE BREAD OF THE WORD: A LECTIO DIVINA APPROACH TO THE SUNDAY LITURGY includes a prayerful study of the Sunday liturgy of Year A from the perspective of the First Reading. For another set of reflections on the Sunday liturgy of Year A, please go to the PDDM Web Archives: WWW.PDDM.US and open Series 3.
I. BIBLICO-LITURGICAL REFLECTIONS
We continue to listen and relish the Easter proclamation about Jesus, the Servant-Son of God, who suffered and died for us and was raised by God the Father to new life by the power of the Holy Spirit. The authors of the Days of the Lord, vol. 3, remark: “To hear the proclamation of the resurrection over and over during the Sundays of Easter is essential to our faith, which needs to be strengthened by the witnessing of others’ faith, particularly the apostles. The paschal liturgies give us this gift. Therefore we must welcome and be attentive to this new proclamation of Easter.”
The Gospel reading of this Sunday – also called the “Good Shepherd Sunday” – enables us to have a deeper understanding of the Easter event by helping us contemplate the pastoral ministry of Jesus Christ, the Risen Lord (Jn 10:1-10). The evangelist John presents Jesus as both shepherd and sheep gate. As shepherd, Jesus cares for his flock and they in turn trust him completely. As a sheep gate, Jesus is the door to life and means of salvation. Through Jesus, those who wish to be saved enter the fold of which he alone is the shepherd.
The authors of the Days of the Lord, vol. 3, explicate: “Jesus is the legitimate shepherd of the flock … Jesus has passed the gate of death to enter into glory: God has made him Lord and Messiah. To proclaim his resurrection is to recognize that he is the guide in whose footsteps we must follow in order to have life, and to have it more fully. He marches at the head of the ransomed people, leading them on the road of their paschal exodus. This shepherd, whose face is worn by suffering, but also shines with light, leads us confidently on difficult paths. He watches that nothing unfortunate may happen to us. If the mist sometimes obscures our vision, his voice continues to lead us in the right direction.”
The personal response of faith to Jesus Shepherd and Sheep Gate, boldly proclaimed by Peter and the apostles to the people on Pentecost day as the Lord and Messiah, led to the remarkable growth of the Church, the flock of disciples who have embraced the Easter event of Christ’s death, resurrection and glorification. Three thousand people listening to Peter’s Easter proclamation were moved to repentance and were baptized. Through the evangelizing ministry of Peter and the apostles, the people responded to the saving call of Jesus, the Shepherd and Sheep Gate. They were moved to conversion, of which baptism was a powerful and efficacious sign.
The biblical scholar Eugene Maly comments on the First Reading from Luke’s Acts 2:14a, 36-41, which contains Peter’s address delivered on Pentecost day to a group of Jewish pilgrims to Jerusalem coming from all nations: “What Luke wants to do, and does effectively, is to dramatize the action of the Holy Spirit, the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus, and especially in our reading, the effect of all this on people when they hear the Word with open hearts … Jesus, on the occasion of his resurrection was made Lord and Messiah by God … According to the Semitic mentality, the meaning is that Jesus was manifested as exercising his lordship only after his resurrection … This effective manifestation is made evident in the response of the audience. Deeply shaken they realize they must do something. Peter says two things are necessary: reform and baptism. Reform means a reversal of one’s life goals, a radical change of heart and of one’s way of life. In its most profound sense, as here, it assumes that one is a sinner whose sole life purpose has been self-seeking satisfaction. The change must be the love of God and service of others. Baptism is the sacrament of initiation. By introducing the sinner into the life of the Trinity, it effects the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Spirit. The Spirit makes it possible to carry out the reform of one’s life.”
Indeed, salvation is mediated by Jesus, the Shepherd and Sheep Gate, and is offered to Jews and non-Jews alike as a gift through the Holy Spirit. The voice of the Shepherd resounds compassionately throughout the world and inspires a response of faith throughout time and space, and in the diversity of races and cultures. The Servant of God, Dr. Takashi Nagai, from Nagasaki, Japan is an icon of a beautiful and whole-hearted response to the life-giving call of Jesus Christ the Lord, the Shepherd and the Sheep Gate of God’s flock (cf. “The Mystic of Nagasaki” from the book “The City of Silence”, 1995, p. 100-114).
Dr. Nagai was a patriot whose Shinto family had imbued him with Nihon-teki, the expression of the Japanese spirit. He was born in 1908 and raised in Shimane Prefecture, the oldest son (he had four younger siblings) of a physician father, from whom he inherited a love for science. His mother endowed him with respect for intuition and the contemplative spirit; she taught him “how to find the universe in a bowl of rice” … His childhood years bestowed on him a love of nature, a willingness to accept communal responsibility and a familial duty, and a sense of wonder and enjoyment of the world. At twelve Takashi Nagai was sent to Matsue to attend secondary school, and in 1928 he began his medical studies at the University of Nagasaki. Science and Japanese culture, not faith, were the passions that informed his student years, and he read widely and avidly the canon of Western thought and literature that came to Japan in the wake of Meiji Restoration. His mother’s death in 1931 initiated a period of profound grief and questioning, beginning a journey of faith that was midwifed by the French mystic scientist Blaise Pascal. Attracted to Catholicism but knowing little about its belief and practices, he decided to room with a Catholic family. He was taken in by the Moriyama family, descendants of leaders of the Hidden Christian community. He began to explore Christian beliefs under their example and guidance. More decisively, he fell in love with Midori, the Moriyama’s daughter and only child.
Midori Moriyama and Takashi Nagai were married in 1934 after Nagai returned from a year of military service in Manchuria and after his conversion to Catholicism. His baptism in June 1934 caused a painful split with his father, but in a relatively short time Midori’s gentle spirit would repair that rift. Takashi and Midori Nagai had a tender and loving marriage, and she was unfailing support during the years when he devoted himself to his successful, if meagerly remunerated, research career. An illness on the eve of his medical graduation had left him deaf in one ear; unable to use a stethoscope, he developed a specialty in radiology, which had been newly introduced to Japan in the 1930’s. In 1940 he was made assistant professor and in 1945 became the dean of radiology at the University of Nagasaki.
On August 7, 1945, in response to news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Midori had taken their two children to her mother’s nearby rural home; she returned to Nagasaki the next day and was killed instantly by the bomb. Two days later, her grief-stricken husband found her charred remains in her kitchen, a rosary clasped “among the powdered bones of her right hand”. Dr. Nagai was in his office at the medical school, located between three and seven hundred meters from the epicenter, preparing for a lecture on diagnostic radiology when “the flash of blinding light took place” … Co-workers freed him from the rubble and despite his severe cuts and serious loss of blood (his right temporal artery had been cut) Dr. Nagai quickly mobilized the surviving medical personnel into an effective team to rescue the more severely injured patients and staff from the fires that destroyed the hospital in the aftermath of the bomb. For two days, before they were relieved by a military rescue team, they treated victims who laboriously made their way to the once-respected medical facility, only to find it in ruins, its few surviving physicians and nurses frustrated by their lack of medicine and instruments … On August 12, Dr. Nagai and a small group of medical workers left “the world of ashes” that was Nagasaki and made their way to the valley of Mitsuyama, noted for the healing property of its mineral springs. In Koba they established a first aid station and began walking from home to home, village to village, examining and treating the sick with the most basic of medicines. Despite hard work, sacrifice and mourning, Dr. Nagai writes of the tenderness and compassion of those days, when they were fed by farmers who had so generously opened their homes to the survivors, and how they patiently cared for hideously infected wounds and burns. “To show and receive tender care … this was our life.”
The sense of responsibility led them to make careful observations on the development of radiation disease in their patients and themselves. Dr. Nagai himself collapsed on September 26 and lay close to death; his recovery, on October 25, was considered miraculous. Shortly thereafter, he moved to the ruins of Urakami and built a small, crude shack as a home for his small family: himself, his two children, and his mother-in-law. Eventually, a group of Nagasaki carpenters built him a pilgrim hut next to the shack, and he named it Nyokodo: “Love your neighbor as yourself”. It was in that hut that the doctor became a poet, the scientist was transformed into a mystic, and the man who loved the silence and privacy of his research laboratory gave his waning strength to sustain others. His simple hut became a monastic cell in which he contemplated God and the bomb, a man of action who, through sickness and pain, practiced unceasing prayer. It was there that he was given the grace to understand the redemptive nature of suffering, that even such profound losses could be seen and accepted as a part of God’s loving Providence. (…)
Despite his progressively worsening health and the need to insure financial support for his children, Dr. Nagai assumed a greater role as a public figure. The popularity of his books resulted in a widespread correspondence, and he received numerous visitors, both the famous (Helen Keller and Emperor Hirohito) and unknown, ordinary citizens. The “Bells of Nagasaki” was made into a popular movie, and the song of the same title became Nagasaki’s unofficial city theme song. In addition to his books, he wrote countless newspaper and journal articles and gave large sums of money to help rebuild the institutions of Christian Urakami. None of this acclaim deflected from his serene acceptance of voluntary poverty or the constancy of his devotion to God, his children, and the people of vanquished Japan. Dr. Nagai received both secular and religious honors: in 1949 he became the first Christian to be honored as a National Hero of Japan because of his work toward the spiritual restoration of the country. In 1949, he received a rosary from Pope Pius XII, and it was gripped in his hand when he died on May 1, 1951. Twenty thousand mourners filled the cathedral to mourn his death, forming a three-mile procession to the graveyard where his ashes were enshrined. His tombstone bears the simple, eloquent epitaph from Luke: “We are merely servants: we have done no more than our duty.”
II. POINTS FOR THE EXAMINATION OF THE HEART
Why is Jesus our Shepherd and our Sheep Gate? Do we allow him to be our Shepherd and our Sheep Gate?
What is our response to the Easter proclamation that Jesus has been constituted Lord and Messiah at the resurrection? Do we allow the Risen Lord to shepherd us and to lead us to the pasture of eternal life? Do we totally submit to him as the Lord and the Christ of our life?
How do we resound the kindly voice of the Shepherd in today’s world and draw people to know him as the Sheep Gate that leads to eternal life? Do we endeavor to proclaim the Easter message that Jesus is indeed the Lord and the Christ? How?
III. PRAYING WITH THE WORD
Leader: Loving Father,
we thank you for the Easter gift of Jesus Christ, the Risen Lord.
He is the Good Shepherd who tenderly leads us
and diligently guards us.
We also praise you for Jesus is the Sheep Gate
who leads to eternal life and salvation.
May we continue to resound his voice in today’s world.
By our Easter witnessing,
may we enable people of all cultures and races
to respond to him in a spirit of repentance,
of which immersion into the baptismal waters is an efficacious sign.
We proclaim with faith
that Jesus is our Lord and Shepherd,
the way to heaven.
May there be but one flock and one Shepherd.
We love you and serve you,
now and forever.
Assembly: Amen.
IV. INTERIORIZATION OF THE WORD
The following is the bread of the living Word that will nourish us throughout the week. Please memorize it.
“The sheep hear his voice.” (John 10:3)
V. TOWARDS LIFE TRANSFORMATION
ACTION PLAN: Meditate on the kindness and graciousness of Christ Jesus the Lord, our Shepherd and the Sheep Gate. Through your service to the poor and pastoral care for the needy, endeavor to make the voice of Jesus heard and his love felt in the here and now. Pray for the increase and perseverance of priestly and religious vocations.
ACTION PLAN: To help us experience more deeply the transforming gift of new life by Jesus, the Risen Lord and Shepherd, make an effort to spend an hour in Eucharistic Adoration. Visit the PDDM WEB site (www.pddm.us) for the EUCHARISTIC ADORATION THROUGH THE LITURGICAL YEAR (Vol. 4, n. 20): A Weekly Pastoral Tool.
Prepared by Sr. Mary Margaret Tapang PDDM
PIAE DISCIPULAE DIVINI MAGISTRI
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