Vantage

A (brief) homily for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, April 21, 2024

Acts 4:8-12, 1 Jn 3:1-2, Jn 10:11-18

Thank you for bearing with me while I’m out of town on personal business this weekend. A fuller homily — which I will preach at all Masses next weekend — will be here as usual.

A few years ago, I started having trouble with glare while driving at night. Headlights, streetlights, traffic lights: I saw them as stars, or as beams with rays shooting out in several directions.

The experience was jarring.

The experience developed slowly.

The experience was traced to a cataract that had grown in my left eye — only my left eye — and it had grown between my regular eye exams. 

Smooth and efficient surgery cured it and restored my eye to full functioning.

Simply put, I could see clearly.

Which is what St. John is promising the early church — and us — in his letter today. We will see the Christ for who and what he is.  We will see the Christ for who and what he is, clearly and in sharp focus. 

This clarity won’t happen overnight. But it will happen.

And when it does, this Scripture passage challenges us (they almost always do). 

Beloved, we are God’s children now;
what we shall be has not yet been revealed.
We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him,
for we shall see him as he is.

Once we see Jesus, once Jesus is revealed to us, as John predicts, and we are like Jesus — the “we shall be like him” part — we shouldn’t look at ourselves gleefully and celebrate our glorified bodies with wine and roses and ambrosia.

No, it’s not Big Party Time. We have work to do, now that we can see Jesus as he is. 

Being like Jesus means getting a little filthy and smelly and achy and occasionally cold and damp, because just as Jesus is both Lamb of God and Good Shepherd, we too must be both members of the flock and shepherds.  

As such, our eyes must be open, our ears must be attentive, and we must find a figurative vantage point where we can keep watch over our sisters and brothers in God’s flock.

God’s children, like us.