Fourth Sunday of Easter. Today’s readings: Acts 4: 8-12; Psalm 118:1-29; 1 John 3:1-2; John 10:11-18
In the The Mystery of Hope (1897/1910), part of a trilogy comprising The Mystery of Charity (1911), and The Mystery of the Holy Innocents (1912), Charles Péguy (1873-1914) revisits the Good Shepherd narrative, from the perspective of God. The story is generally read from the perspective of the lost sheep who becomes the object of the shepherd’s anxious preoccupation to fetch her. Redeemed and saved from a helpless and hopeless situation, the lost sheep is then united to both her shepherd and the rest of the flock.
Péguy’s poetic revisiting of the narrative reverts the perspective, taking as a starting point the impact of the lost sheep on the shepherd. From here, the lost sheep triggers in the shepherd’s heart an anxious hope that it will indeed be found again. Péguy’s reading presents a God who hopes for the salvation of the lost sheep through Jesus Christ the Good Shepherd.
In the poetic dialogue between Jeanette and Mme Gervaise, Péguy writes that “the good shepherd learned anxiety from the lost sheep” and that this “devouring anxiety in the heart of Jesus” is that of “not finding it... of never recovering it”. This anxiety is divine as much as it is “human anxiety”. For Péguy, God, the Saviour himself, “put himself in need of his creature” to be himself saved from this mortal anxiety, by hoping that it will be found and saved. Thus the hopeless sheep triggers in God hope. “He who is everything needs him who is nothing. He who can do everything needs him who can do nothing. He who is everything is nothing without him who is nothing.”
Péguy attaches himself to the 15th-century political and religious figure of Jean d’Arc, to throw light on the events of the early 20th century, where the world was falling into pieces. In 1909, Péguy himself was overwhelmed by a sense of empty helplessness, even touching the depths of hopeless despair due to the adverse national and ecclesial politique. For Péguy, salvation and hope for the future were not achievable by an astute politic, but by the mystique of just universal values necessarily embraced heroically for the construction of a hope filled future.
Touching the despairing depths of hoplessness, Péguy, disillusioned with socialism and nationalism, rediscovered the simple faith of his childhood – rather than religion – as he generally remained a non-practising Catholic. Faith led him to a loving God who never tires of being hopeful about humanity’s capacity for salvation and redemption, choosing that which is right and truthful. Péguy argues that the right to be right comes with the willingness to go all the way and pay, through steadfast love, the price for one’s choice. Hope, as Pope Benedict XVI points out in Spe salvi facti sumus, leads to heroic action.
Jesus recognises those who, like him, choose to love in hope… in a world marked by deadly hopelessness and cynicism
Today’s liturgy for the fourth Sunday of Easter speaks to us the message of hope. As one of the three Theological Virtues, hope is not mere optimism for a better future. Hope springs from the very heart of God, from the wounded heart of the Slain Lamb, crucified for its willingness to pay the price of choosing to love and to hope.
Peter proclaims the salvific kerygma that in face of homicidal and deicidal rejection of Jesus, God obstinately refuses to give in, to instead respond with the resurrection of Jesus. While the psalmist sings God’s merciful goodness and kindness towards us, the Gospel reveals to us Jesus’s readiness to lay down his life out of love, for us and our salvation.
It is in this readiness to pay the price that Jesus is recognised by the Father and by his sheep. In turn, Jesus recognises those who, like him, choose to love in hope. In this sense “only in him salvation is found” in a world marked by deadly hopelessness and cynicism.