“For the LAMB will shepherd them”–And Our New Pope Will, Too

Today’s reflection is by Bondings 2.0 contributor Michaelangelo Allocca.

Today’s liturgical readings for the Fourth Sunday of Easter are available here.

Did you ever stop to think how tired we humans must make the Holy Spirit? I myself have this feeling quite often as I engage scripture in multiple ways, and as a gay man, a member of a group often made to feel unwelcome in the Church. Quite a lot of the bible reads to me like a non-stop effort by God to tell us, “Love EVERYbody. Is that at all confusing, or unclear?” And we humans say, “Oh no, fine, we get it. … But … don’t you mean, ‘… everybody, except …’ or ‘everybody, unless …’?” And God facepalming and sighing heavily and saying, “Right. Let’s try this again …”

Today’s liturgical readings beautifully illustrate this point: three of the four are full of sheep. Only the first, from Acts, is devoid of woolly four-legged beings, and lo and behold: since it contains only humans, it is – contrasting with the other three – full of division, faction, denigration, and exclusion. The apostles themselves, and their audience, show the pattern of a world – and sadly, a Church – that insists on seeing everything in terms of Jew or Gentile, clean or unclean, gay or straight, citizen or alien, cis or trans, etc.

This lectionary set of readings is fortuitously timed, recalling how Pope Francis wanted bishops to be “shepherds with the odor of the sheep,” and smelled very sheep-y himself. Our new Pope, Leo XIV, clearly has acquired this aroma himself over the last several decades. The sheep versus human imagery in these scriptures illuminates what we often do, and how hard God works to get us to do better. Let us walk through the pasture of these texts, and then come back to the Pastor in Rome.

John’s Gospel gives us Jesus’s archetypal depiction of Himself as the Good Shepherd, source of the term “pastor” , which is simply the Latin for “shepherd.” Jesus says that his sheep are given to Him by the Father, with whom He is one, and so this unity extends to us as well.  Many other images Jesus uses in John similarly speak of the need to remain connected to Him, and through Him  both to God the Father/Mother, and to each other. 

Pope Francis

This closeness – the “style of God,” as Pope Francis often called it – is of course what the late popes meant by the ‘odor,’ which you pick up from proximity. And when Jesus speaks of His sheep, He never speaks of differences or divisions among the sheep, just one big flock: inclusive, as He always is. The only time divisions – sheep vs. goats – were mentioned, in Matthew 25:31-46, the metaphor was based on how we treated others, not on superficial divisions like race or gender or sexuality.

The Revelation reading has an interesting twist on the flock unity image: here Jesus is both sheep AND shepherd. He is the Lamb of God, and we are told, in a stunning image of closeness and unity, that the Lamb will actually be our shepherd! John the Revelator is also told that the martyrs he sees have “washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” This is an even more vivid, even slightly disturbing, image for unity with Jesus – again, a unity which knows no division or factions or segregation; all have been washed in the Blood.

Today’spsalm simply shows us, the sheep of God’s flock, singing joyfully about our presence in the divine fold. 

But where does the story from Acts fit into the pasture-picture? There is not a sheep to be seen in it – which is perhaps the problem. Against those proverbially homogeneous critters, we see humans in their most stereotypically divisive human-ness. Everyone is catalogued, labeled, and pigeonholed (by the narrator, by the apostles, and by their opponents), down to hair-splitting between “Jews” and “converts to Judaism.” The jealous, hostile enemies of Peter and Barnabas are labeled “the Jews,” as if Peter and Barnabas (not to mention Jesus) were not also Jews themselves. And Peter answers their verbal attacks with ‘you had your chance, we blew it, we will now take Jesus to the Gentiles.’ 

This divisive, othering language and thinking is all the more ironic when you realize that Acts shows us the first post-Jesus generation having the “Are we supposed to include everybody, or be a Jews-only movement?” fight again, and AGAIN. God’s angel (in Acts 8) literally throws Philip at a gentile Ethiopian, with said gentile ultimately saying, “Would you go ahead and baptize me, already???” – but this was not quite enough. In Acts 10, the Spirit yet again throws an apostle, Peter, literally into the home of a gentile Roman centurion, who similarly ends up begging for baptism for his whole household. Still again, in Acts 15, all the apostles slug it out over whether Jesus, when He said to ‘make disciples of ALL nations,’ still allowed them to exclude, or at least downgrade, some nations.

The future Pope Leo XIV pastoring people in Peru

Francis’s “Todos! Todos! Todos!” (or depending on the audience, “Tutti! Tutti! Tutti!”) showed that he heard (better than the apostles, perhaps) and tried to live the “one flock, one shepherd, welcoming and including all” message in these readings. 

Years ago I worked with Augustinians in Chicago who knew the future Leo XIV as their religious superior, and testified to his possession of ‘the odor of the sheep.’ A friend has similarly heard from her fellow Sisters of Mercy in Peru how much they, too, loved him as their pastor, and how close he was to them. 

I pray that our new shepherd will continue to show what God keeps teaching us, no matter how often we forget it.

—Michaelangelo Allocca, May 11, 2025