There are some years, like this one, when Mother’s Day falls on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, also known as Good Shepherd Sunday, because of the Gospel we hear always on this day. The Sunday of the Good Shepherd is also always the World Day of Prayer for Vocations, and I’d like to say a little more about that last one. It’s probably less familiar to you than Good Shepherd Sunday, and certainly less so than Mother’s Day, but I think it gives us a good way of connecting the two. We honor our mothers because we are grateful for their example of love and devotion. But motherhood is also a vocation – that is, a calling from God to live out our Christian faith in a particular way. Mothers, and fathers, united together in marriage, commit themselves to mutual service and sacrifice, to each other and to their children. In this way, they become images of Jesus and the love that he has for the Church. And indeed, through their witness and the formation of their family, Christian mothers and fathers help to build up that Church and lead their children to Jesus the Good Shepherd.
Marriage and parenthood is the vocation most familiar to us, but there are others too, and it is to these that the Church especially draws our attention today. Male and female religious dedicate themselves to lives of prayer and service, removing themselves in some way from the rhythms of the world in order to begin living now the life of the kingdom of heaven. Those in other forms of consecrated life, such as secular institutes or consecrated virginity, are active in the world, working jobs, etc., but having personally devoted themselves to lives of prayer, obedience, and celibacy. And there are those of us called to ordained ministry – priests and deacons – who serve the family of the Church as spiritual fathers, teaching and preaching, ministering to those in need, and especially offering sacrifice and prayers to God on behalf of all his people.
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All of these vocations are essential and interconnected, and we should speak about them to each other – especially to our children and young people – so that they can discover what God is calling them to. He uses the different vocations as unique instruments aimed at the same purpose – to help us, to help all the world come to know and love his Son, Jesus Christ. As the Lord Jesus tells us in the Gospel today, God the Father has sent him to be our Shepherd, to hear his voice and follow him, as he leads us back to the Father. That is Jesus’s purpose, that is the purpose of the Church, and you might say that is the purpose for any of our lives too – for our identities and our vocations that the Lord calls us to. Spouses and parents form and raise children to know and love God; monks and nuns pray for us and on behalf of the good of all the world; priests and deacons serve the spiritual needs of the faithful and encourage them to live their faith with boldness in the world. All of these have value; none of them are more necessary than any other. And even if our lives don’t fall neatly into one of the traditional vocational callings, God still calls us to play an active role in helping each other to holiness.
This may all sound very serene in theory, but as any mother can tell you, every vocation has its ups and downs, its joys and challenges. In a certain sense, God intends it that way. In calling us to follow Jesus, he asks us to grow in our identity with his Son, our Shepherd. That means, on the one hand, finding purpose, fulfillment, and peace in our vocations, but also accepting that times of sorrow and suffering will come too. After all, Jesus the Good Shepherd is also the Lamb of God who was slain for our sins, and so our Christian lives and vocations will not be immune from sharing in his Cross. We see this most fully in the life of Mary. She who was Mother to our Lord, the Good Shepherd, was also called to share in his Cross – not by undergoing it but by sharing in it spiritually. In that way, her sufferings were joined to those of her Son and so became redemptive. So too, we, if we see our lives through the eyes of faith, we can find meaning in the challenges of our vocations, whether motherhood or whatever else. Our sufferings can be redemptive for us, in that way that they conform us more fully to Jesus himself. In that way, every moment – even the very challenging ones – has an infinite spiritual worth, if we are but willing to see it and accept it for what it is.
Friends, in his message for today’s World Day of Prayer for Vocations, Pope Francis said this:
"As Christians, we do not only receive a vocation individually; we are also called together. We are like the tiles of a mosaic. Each is lovely in itself, but only when they are put together do they form a picture. ‘Vocation’, then, it is not just about choosing this or that way of life… It is about making God’s dream come true, the great vision of fraternity that Jesus cherished when he prayed to the Father ‘that they may all be one’ (Jn 17:21)."
As we honor for our mothers today, and as we pray those serving or those called to serve in other vocations in the Church, may we recognize how God has given us, in each vocation, in each person, a help toward holiness. May our Blessed Mother Mary help us to live out faithfully the vocation that Jesus the Good Shepherd has called us to, and may we find in it always a way of hearing his voice and following him more faithfully, so that he may lead us to our Father in heaven.
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