One of my earlier homilies for the Fourth Sunday of Easter...

We are sheep.  There is nothing wrong in admitting this.  People today often use this metaphor to denigrate others.  This is most often done in terms of a Modernist assertion of human strength and willfulness against authority, and ultimately, against the divine order.  When used negatively, to call a group of people sheep is to say that they are either too foolish or too weak to exercise their own will and desires in a violent and self-interested world.  This is the mentality of original sin: that we must have everything our own way, whether as individuals or as a small group or community.

            But we are all truly sheep.  Whether we recognize it or not, we are weak.  We are limited.  We are not the source or standard of goodness or truth.  We are not God.  We cannot be equal to Him, and we can never surpass Him.  Before Him, we are as sheep and goats.  All of the brazen rebelliousness of mankind is as the braying and bellowing of disobedient beasts before our Lord.  He created us out of love, and we thank Him too often with such unseemly and graceless disregard. 

            Our Lord uses the metaphor of sheep and goats Himself, in regard to us.  At the end of time, He will ratify our choices in life with the Final Judgment.  The penitent will be welcomed as humble sheep to His right hand.  The impenitent, the rebels, will be ushered as goats to His left hand, and then off into eternal fire.  Jesus is this Lord.  He is the Judge.

            At the same time, He is the Good Shepherd.  He loves us, and seeks to keep us together in the one flock, which is His Holy Catholic Church.  But He does this through love, through freedom, rather than by force or compulsion.  He goes out to search for the lost sheep.  Many have and will return.  But those who refuse to return to the flock wander off, to their own unhappy rewards.

            It is difficult, but we should be happy when the voices of this passing world call us sheep for believing in the Faith and seeking to worship and serve God.  We are called to be sheep.  Keep ever in mind the final reality, the Last Judgment, when we will be divided into two flocks: the holy sheep and the condemned goats.  Let us pray to be judged as worthy sheep, as humble and weak lambs in the loving embrace of our Almighty Shepherd.