Jesus Reveals God to Us 5/7/06
by Fr.Gus Carter

Today is called "Good Shepherd Sunday." We reflect in a special way on Jesus' statement, "I am the Good Shepherd. I know mine and mine know me." At the Last Super Jesus declared, "I have called you friends because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father." We believe that God knows us intimately. Jesus reveals in a human way details of the inner life of God. This allows us to establish an intimate relationship with our Creator.

Catholics are aware of how important it is to know Jesus. Some years ago a survey asked Catholics what they most like to hear in preaching. The most common response was that they wanted to know Jesus better. Intimate knowledge of Jesus is revealed especially in the Gospels. We see Jesus acting; we hear his words. This is the way we get to know anyone. We observe his or her behavior. We listen to what is said.

Jesus revealed his consciousness in the prayer "Our Father." He gave this prayer to his followers as their unique way of addressing God. In this prayer Jesus revealed his understanding of God. He called God, the Father, "Abba." In the language Jesus spoke "abba" was the name for "father" in the intimacy of family life, equivalent to our "daddy." In this form of address we are given a model of what our relationship with God should be. We can reflect on the best aspects of our relationship with our parents to help us have a sense of what our relationship with God should be. Parents can reflect on their love for their children as a way of knowing how God sees them. In all our ways of knowing God we take the best aspects of particular comparisons and eliminate the negative side. I say this because I heard a story about a juvenile delinquent being taught the "Our Father." His reaction was, "I hate my father." The teacher cast around in his life to find a better model. The young man came to accept "the Lord is my probation officer."

In many parts of the Bible we are asked to use our human experiences as a way of knowing God. The prophet Isaiah wrote the famous lines, "Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you." We can take the best experiences of parents' love for their children and apply them to the way the Lord regards us his children. The Song of Songs uses the experiences of a young man and a young woman in love to sharpen our sense of God's love for us and how it can feel to love God in return. Yahweh called Himself the groom of Israel. Husbands and wives can take their best experiences of love for each other and apply it to their love relationship with God.

We know that our vocation is to be Christ-like. We are to speak and act as Jesus did. Throughout the Gospels we find Jesus a man of prayer. He went into the desert to pray before he began his public ministry. Gethsemane, we are told, was a place where Jesus was accustomed to go for prayer. He took several of the apostles up a mountain to pray. Mark tells us, "Rising very early before dawn, he left and went off to a deserted place where he prayed." Regarding prayer Jesus said, "Ask and you will receive; seek and you will find: knock and the door will be opened." We are invited to have the same trust in our prayers as Jesus did. In another place in the Gospel Jesus told his disciples, "If you know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him." Luke mentions that Jesus "went according to his custom into the synagogue on the Sabbath day." Jesus was faithful to his religious duties.

Jesus told us to "Be compassionate as your heavenly Father is compassionate." In performing his miracles Jesus often added a touch of tenderness. We read that when he cured the widow's son, "He gave him to his mother." After curing the daughter of Jairus, "He then directed that she should be given something to eat." We know that Jesus "had pity on the crowd because they were like sheep without a shepherd." In the end he gave his life for his sheep.

We know that one of the chief ways of praying is to read the Gospels and reflect on what Jesus is doing and saying. Then we ask ourselves, "How does this affect me? In the light of the way Jesus was, how should I act. As part of our prayer life, we must always express our desire to be Christlike and think about how that applies in our lives.