4th Sunday of Easter (Good Shepherd Mothers)
Traditionally the 4th Sunday of Easter is known as Good Shepherd Sunday. We always hear a gospel where Jesus speaks of himself as a shepherd, just as today we hear him say, “My sheep hear my voice; I know them and they follow me”.
If we go back a few verses before those of today’s Gospel, we learn that Jesus was in Jerusalem, and that he had been confronted by a group of fellow Jews, asking him to explain himself, especially how his claims would seem to declare himself to be the Messiah.
Jesus answered, I told you, but you do not believe. More to the point, you don't want to believe. And part of the problem is that you are not among my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I lead them to eternal life (John 11:25-28).
The verses tell us Jesus was there for the annual feast of the Dedication, and that it was wintertime. So, what is the feast of the Dedication? It goes back about 200 years earlier, when Jerusalem was under control of the Seleucids and their king Antiochus Epiphanes IV. He demonstrated his power, persecuting the people and disallowing their religious practices. Worst of all, he desecrated the Temple and its altar.
In response, a group of Jews whom we’ve come to know as the Maccabees, formed a small army of religious freedom fighters, who fought for three years until achieving a miraculous victory and deliverance.
After reclaiming the Temple, it was cleansed, cleared of the items the Greeks had stored within it, and prepared for rededication. The rededication took place in the year 165 BC, on the 25th day of the Hebrew month called Kislev. The problem, however, was that the oil used for burning the sacred flame had been desecrated and could not be used. There was only enough pure oil to last for one day, and it would take a week for new oil to be processed and purified.
The Maccabees proceeded and lit the flame with the one-day supply of oil. Miraculously, the flame burned for eight days until the new sacred oil was ready for use. Each year, the Jewish people remembered this cause for celebration, which they called Hanukkah, meaning “dedication”. It was on this occasion—the annual celebration of Hanukkah—that Jesus explained his messianic identity to his accusers: I bring my sheep to eternal life, and no one can take them out of my hand.
On this Mother’s Day weekend, I find myself thinking of that oil that kept the sacred flame alive at the dedication, likening it to the nutrition to the protection our mothers provided us while in their wombs.
Despite so many differences among us, that’s one thing we all hold in common: each of us had a mother who sacrificed herself for us, carrying us in her body, accepting the uncertainty that came with the life within her, and how it might even affect her own physical well-being.
For sure, some mothers fall short (in some cases, way short) of what motherhood demands, but in whatever way those aberrations—as well as the difficult relationships any of us may have with our mothers—let us not lose sight of what God intended for motherhood within the context of the family, nor the sacrifice our mothers made for us.
The patron saint of mothers is a woman named Gianna Molla. Born in 1922 near Milan, Italy, she began studying medicine at age 20, and at the same time, was active in Catholic social justice ministries. After finishing medical school and beginning her practice as a pediatrician, she married. In the first four years of marriage, she gave birth to three children.
Two years later she became pregnant with her fourth child. In the second month of pregnancy, she learned that she had a tumor on her uterus. She was given a few options, including aborting the child. The option she chose was to have the tumor removed, to allow the baby to go full-term, knowing it could put her own health at risk, declaring that her baby’s life was more important than her own. The baby was born healthy, however due to an ensuing infection, Gianna died a week later, April 28, 1962.
She was canonized on May 16, 2004, with her husband and all four children in attendance. Her fourth child, Gianna Emanuela, today is a doctor specializing in geriatrics.
When Pope Francis came to the U.S. in 2015 for the World Meeting of Families, he invited Gianna Emanuela, to read publicly a letter that her mother had written to her father soon before they married. In the letter, she emphasized the Christian virtues necessary for marriage and called them, as a couple, to serve God in a “saintly way”.
As part of her work in Catholic Action, a twenty-something Gianna prophetically instructed young girls: “Whatever your vocation may be, it is a vocation to physical, spiritual, and moral motherhood, for God has put in us a tendency toward life…If in carrying out our vocation it should happen that we die, that would be the finest day of our life” (Magnificat, April 2017).
I believe that St. Gianna would offer the women of our culture the same message: that regardless of whether you are married, divorced, widowed or single, young or old, God has called you to give your lives in some way for the good of others—whether it’s a physical motherhood, spiritual motherhood or moral motherhood. And in doing that, life finds its greatest opportunity to flourish. St. Gianna Molla, patroness of mothers….pray for us!