Portions of the Sunday Readings:
Jesus said: “Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever does not enter a sheepfold through the gate but climbs over elsewhere is a thief and a robber. But whoever enters through the gate is The Shepherd of the sheep. The Gatekeeper opens it for Him, and the sheep hear His voice, as The Shepherd calls His own sheep by name and leads them out… Whoever enters through Me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. A thief comes only to steal and slaughter and destroy; I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.”
Today’s Gospel for Good Shepherd Sunday comes from John 10, and it compares a “good” shepherd of the sheep to a thief.
He compares Jesus as one who gathers for God and leads them forward to the Paradise Gate to the Father—as a good shepherd –as opposed to someone who’s there to steal you away.
All of us practitioners in the Church know Who our Chief Shepherd is—it is our Lord Jesus Christ. It is Jesus Who speaks to us, in the special language of the soul and of Sign and Sacrament and Word to us. Jesus gives us His friendship, and meaning and strength in life. Jesus is the Shepherd who does calls for attention from His flock, not just for a Sunday assembly, but for our living every day in His care, even as we wander the fields during our week. Our prayer life is one of the key ways for us to keep attentive to this Shepherd of our souls, and then a Christian life with our brothers and sisters helping us is Him in our lives by that, and the Church overseeing things is what He has put into place to guide and shepherd us, all to keeps us focused on The Lord Jesus and His Kingdom come.
So who or what are the thieves in our story? Jesus mentions them as the opposites of what He does for us. They are the forces they want to steal our attention away from Christ and the works of His Spirit, which want to distract us away from the Jesus First living to instead falling prey to false idols of worship. These thieves come to supplant our soul with their own special false effects, looking especially to steal away our time and attention, and our health and energy if they can, all which all could have been used for The Lord and our faith lives.
What thieves? Well, the main thief to know of is the devil. That is the obvious enemy.
But let us mention three thieves that we all know way too well. One thief of our day is addictive gambling. It is a time waster, an attention grabber and a money drain on people. I am not talking of a bingo game at the senior living center or a wager with your brother if the Commanders will win and beat the bettor’s spread—that’s just small fun. Let’s just talk of the big time casinos and the sports betting enterprise that has ransacked us harder in the last two decades. As of last year, the USA grew to a number over 2000 casinos, poker rooms, and sportsbooks, capturing 40% of US adults to visit a casino annually, and much higher percentages of people better online or remotely on some game or device. It will grow to be much more, since 11 states in the US have not yet got onboard with gambling. Sports leagues like the NFL have sold out to it. When I think of the need in churches and Christian ministries being out-met by the multi-billions of spending on “nonsense,” I see that a thief has come along to take away all that money, and all that attention away from such important ‘business’ as of Faith matters. The good shepherd is here, but a thief comes in to bring terrible harm to people. Addictive gambling is awful.
Another thief of our day is addictive gaming. It is a huge, anti-social, time consumer of our younger generations, those who grew up mostly with the internet world. It is a fantasy activity, stealing its players away from real life. The gaming world and its entertainment studios have created a several hundred thousand games, with each one grabbing hold of many, many players in hours of play each week. Some are violent war games, others are sex oriented ones, others are varied fantasy escape ones. I’ll just mention one game that youth have played in the past decade, and I’ll choose it since it is not among the sick, soul-bashing, idolatrous types, but it is called Encodya. It was made ten years ago and it’s still playing people for a lot of their time. It’s by the aptly-named Chaosmonger. In its play, you have a nine-year orphan living with a clumsy Sam 53 robot. You are camped homeless in a rooftop place, living in a grim 2062 in cyber punk Neo-Berlin. It is a dark game, a point-and-click adventure game, that for an amateur player like me to play through its graphic fake and tyrannical imaginary place and then get to its fantasy finish, solving its puzzles and finding hidden objects and such—I am told that it would take me at least 20 hours for one full turn. A good player can do it in more than half that speed. No thanks, on my part. I won’t play. But I just use that one game as an example of how much attention it takes from a player’s life just in this adventure on your PC or Playstation. A Christian youth on his/her gaming probably uses about 1000% more focus on it than in prayer, bible or catechism reading, regular good reading, or family time, or time used socially in a healthier setting. Reports say that our high schoolers spend an average of roughly 47 minutes to over 1 hour per day playing such games, that is, on school days, though heavy users can spend 3–5+ hours daily or so does the Summer season users do that overtime on their screens. That gaming waste of time is not yet factoring their phone/internet time yet. There are internet addictions not even mentioned yet for this teen to young adult set–so I would comment that a Gaming Addiction is a Stealer or a Thief of the modern age—at least to our younger generations. Too much of real life is robbed away, and from attention to one’s spiritual life, which is substituted for fantasy life.
- A third Thief of our times, and going back generations in harm to society, is Addictive Substance Abuse. Here is another category where the thief comes to steal, slaughter and destroy. While Jesus can bring holiness, proper love of self, self-control or temperance, and a high satisfaction in life without other needed ‘additions’–very many people instead went looking for a big high in life that is self-administered in alcohol or drugs. Here are the numbers—in the USA in 2024 there were 28.2 million people who had a drug use disorder, while 27.9 other million people had an alcohol use disorder. On quarter of that 56 million had both disorders. 27% of young adults had a substance abuse problem, 8.5% of teens had it. Living with a person in drug or alcohol abuse brought about their own separate problem of co-dependent off behavior, spousal abuse, and adult children of alcoholics and drug addicts living in some affliction from it.
In our Parish Mission in Lent, Fr. Dominic talked in his first session of our need to know the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in our lives—to fill the soul with their Triune friendship. Then in talk two, he went through a list of about 200 things that we need healing in, as Father led an exposition of the Eucharist. He complimented our three hours of Eucharist time each Friday afternoon to avail people to Jesus time and healing, but I told him later that perhaps 75% of the parish has never attended it in the past 5 years. Yet the Mission priest thought that healing from the Eucharist exposition and repentant prayer was worth a whole session. Then in his third talk, he concentrated on the going out of Catholics with their witness to the world, with a call of loving people and saving people in Jesus’ Name from sin and its slavery, as I have mentioned three thievery ones for you today.
A spiritual song leads us out of the homily….Jesus You’re the Answer for the world today, above You there’s no other, Jesus You’re The Way. Jesus, O Good Shepherd, guide Your flock Your Way, we listen and we follow, cause Jesus You’re the Way.
Jesus is the Way. Jesus is the Way. Jesus is the Way.