Good Shepherd Sunday | The abundant pastures of the Good Shepherd

By: Fr. Brian Daley, Class of 2025

Jesus always found creative ways to appeal to his listeners when he wanted to call them higher. One of those appealing words of choice today is “abundance.” In the gospel, Jesus appeals to us as a “shepherd” who will lead us to pasture…which also seems to be a place where we can have “life”…and if “life” itself weren’t enough, ”to have it more abundantly.”

Abundance is secure: full food jars and stocked shelves, lots of yard space between the house and the road for kids to run around. Abundance is also beautiful! We camp and hike just to witness to the abundance of wide open fields, massive waterfalls, a sky lit up with stars. We don’t like crowds, but we’d probably (hopefully) choose a restaurant with an abundance of people over an empty smelly one.

As part of his notorious child-like plan to help humans explore the universe, Elon Musk’s new “Terafab” AI chip space company has as its advertising statement, “amazing abundance”, promising that “literally any need you possibly want can be met.” Jesus could simply speak to his listeners about abundance as having “literally any need we want being met.”

But as Jesus knows, we have the twofold problem of not having abundance, and not wanting abundance in a way that is good for us. One might infer, therefore, that God simply does not want us to have abundance, or that for humans to have abundance is wrong. But abundance “flows” in the steps of God himself (Ps 65:11). The grandness of natural beauty and abundance seem to go hand in hand. What are and where are these verdant pastures of abundance toward which the Good Shepherd wishes to lead his sheep?

The good kind of abundance is not just a lot of anything we might find appealing. The meaning of the word for pasture (nomē) in Greek is used to refer to a specific place or region where this nourishment can be found. It isn’t just any place where we might find sustenance according to what we think satisfies, or what might appear as a “delight to the eyes.” Someone already tried that and the experiment failed catastrophically. There is always more to behold than what meets the eye. Jesus wants to show us to this nourishment by appealing to the goodness of abundance. But by virtue of there being a specific place where this abundance is found, there must also be a specific way to gain access to it.

Jesus does something a bit confusing on purpose to make us think. He appeals to himself with two metaphors that appear incompatible: “shepherd” and the second we just alluded to, which is “gate” or way.

It can be confusing to try to think of Jesus as at once a “gate” and a “shepherd”. A gate cannot be a shepherd; a builder cannot be a house. Something appears out of whack. One way to resolve this is to think about his two natures as God and man. We can apply the “gate” idea to his “Divine” nature and the “shepherd” one to his human nature. As the “divine gate”, Jesus isn’t just the rule-maker for the flock. He is the literal mode, or way by

which the flock enters into the fold to find protection and leaves to become nourished amid abundance. The Son of God, Jesus, is also the wisdom of God. And the wisdom of God established the “rules” or patterns of “nature”. The gate is Jesus not in a legalistic sense, but more in a 2+2=4 kind of sense. It was designed that way and was always meant to be that way. Jesus as the Good Shepherd isn’t trying to reinvent the rulebook for the sheep. He wants to restore the good that was already there in the flock and help it to flourish amid an abundance beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.

Further, being in the flock isn’t just about community. The sheepfold isn’t the “Jesus club.” His flock already desires community by nature. A human shepherd maintains a flock more than he forms it. Forming a flock isn’t a problem for sheep. All sheep want to do that by nature. If community were the end goal in itself, why not just jump over the side of the gate like the thief would and join the club? Because it’s not about just joining the club. It’s about having life and having it more abundantly amid “verdant pastures.”

If we think of the flock as the Body of Christ, the way to join is Baptism. To enter the fold is also to be clothed in the character of the Good Shepherd. And to take on this character is also to share in the obedience of Christ to the will of the Father. The way to abundant life and the way of filial obedience are the same. The obedience part really unlocks the way to the verdant pastures.

Recall the word for pasture nomē. We said this word emphasizes not just any mode of finding nourishment or anything we find nourishing. It identifies a particular place, which also implies a particular way to get there. If you take this word and look at its verb root, ”nomizō”, it literally means to regard as custom. Jesus does not want us to think of him as an overhauler of custom, but to think (nomizō) that he has “come not to abolish…but to fulfill.” And the fulfillment? Himself. As the gate, he is the way. As the shepherd, he is the voice that guides. And the abundant pasture? Well, he’s that too. The bread that comes down from heaven is not just abundant. For a soul made to crave the infinite, only Infinite can satisfy. Nothing less than the pasture that leads to the Eucharistic table, the Eternal Banquet of Abundance, will suffice.