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Commentaries on Deuteronomy 4:32-34,39-40, Romans 8:14-17, Matthew 28:16-20 Read The Most Holy Trinity (Year B) »

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Our Lady of the Way (Madonna della Strada) is a feast celebrated by the Society of Jesus in its communities, schools and parishes.

The first Jesuit church in Rome was called Madonna della Strada. When Ignatius and his companions came to Rome in 1537-38, they celebrated Mass in this church, heard confessions, preached, and taught catechism to children. Witnessing the good accomplished, the pastor of the church entered the Jesuits and asked the pope to place the church under the Society’s care in 1542.

It was before the image of Our Lady in this church that many early Jesuits pronounced their vows and prayed before departing for foreign lands. When the original church was replaced by the Church of the Gesù (Chiesa del Gesù), the image of Our Lady was placed in a special chapel. This title of Our Lady echoes the perduring Ignatian motif of the pilgrim and of the Society as a “pathway to God” (see Exposcit Debitum 1550, Formula of the Institute), as well as the words of Jesus, who called himself:

…the Way, the Truth, and the Life… (John 14:6)

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Commentary on Acts 2:1-11; 1 Corinthians 12:3-7,12-13; John 20:19-23

Today we celebrate what is often called the birthday of the Church.  Happy birthday to all!  We also bring to completion our celebration of the Paschal Mystery—the suffering, death, resurrection, ascension and coming of the Spirit on Jesus’ disciples.

Although this ‘mystery’ is really one great reality, we have stretched its celebration over a period of more than seven weeks.  That such a time frame is not to be too excessively emphasised as historical fact is indicated by the two very different accounts of the giving of the Spirit we have in the readings of today’s Mass.

Full of symbols
Most of us are more familiar with the account given in the Acts of the Apostles, which is the First Reading of today’s Mass.  In this account, the Apostles are all gathered in one room at the time of the Jewish feast of Pentecost, which in the Jewish calendar traditionally falls 50 days after the Passover (or Easter in our Christian calendar).

What follows is a scene filled with scriptural symbols.  First, there is the sound of a mighty wind from heaven filling the whole house.  The word in Greek (pneuma) for ‘spirit’ and ‘wind’ is the same, so the wind clearly indicates the Spirit of God.

Then there appeared tongues of fire which rested on the head of each one present.  Again we have a symbol of God’s presence.  We remember Moses speaking to God out of the bush which was on fire.  We remember that, as the Israelites wandered through the desert, they were accompanied during the night by a pillar of fire—God was with them.  All present are then filled with the Spirit. The sign of this presence is their ability to speak in different languages.

A message for all
Immediately, the Apostles go out and begin to speak to the crowds of people.  Jerusalem is filled with Jewish and convert visitors from all over the Mediterranean, from Asia Minor, Egypt and North Africa, even Rome, to celebrate the feast.  These people are amazed to hear men, who are clearly relatively unlettered people from the province of Galilee, speaking to them in so many languages.

The meaning is clear.  What the Apostles are preaching is a message destined for the whole world and not just for one people.  A long time ago, as described in the book of Genesis, men tried to build a tower right up to heaven.  For such arrogance they were punished by having to speak in a myriad of languages unintelligible to others.  Humanity became deeply divided.

Today, Babel is reversed.  All are speaking and hearing the message with full understanding; people are being brought together in unity under God.

Full of fear
The Gospel today has a quite different account of the coming of the Spirit on the disciples.  It is the evening of Easter Sunday and the disciples are in a room, with the doors firmly locked.  As accomplices in the work of the executed criminal, Jesus, they are afraid they are the next to be arrested.  The authorities would surely want to nip this subversive group in the bud before it gets out of control.  Fear and anxiety are the prevailing moods among them.

All of a sudden, Jesus is there in their midst and greets them with “Shalom”:

Peace be with you.

It is the normal Jewish greeting, but it has a fuller significance here.  Earlier, at the Last Supper, Jesus had promised that he would bring peace, a very special kind of peace, to his disciples.  A peace they could not get anywhere else and a peace that no one and nothing could take away from them.

Now, he brings that peace to this highly fearful group. In the Greek text, “Peace with you” has no verb.  It can be read either as a wish or a statement of fact.  It is something of both.

Jesus then shows them the wounds in his hands and side.  There can be no doubt: it is the crucified Jesus himself, risen from the dead.  As their fear changes to an unspeakable joy, Jesus again wishes them peace.

Receiving a mission
And then he gives their mission:

As the Father has sent me, so I send you.

Their mission is the same as his; they are to continue doing what he did.

Then he breathes on them.  Breath symbolises life.  In the creation story, God breathed over the waters.  He also breathed on to the clay of the ground and formed the first human being.  Today he breathes on his disciples and gives them a new life, making them a new creation, giving them the life of his Spirit, saying:

Receive the Holy Spirit.

Then he goes on to say:

If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.

This is no mere juridical authority in which people are declared free of guilt.  It is much more than that. The disciples are being given the authority to bring people back to God, to reconcile those who have become separated from their God to renew their unity with the Beginning and the End of their lives.  They also have the authority to decide which people are not yet ready for reconciliation.

Ultimate mission
This is ultimately the mission of the Church—to bring people to God.  It is not primarily to make converts to Christianity or to build up the Church, but to work with God in building the Kingdom.  The Kingdom realised is the whole world acknowledging the Lordship of God our Creator and people directing their lives to be one with him.

This was the mission given by Jesus to his disciples and the same mission has been given to each one of us.  So, as soon as a person becomes reconciled with God as Lord and Jesus as Saviour, that person in turn accepts the obligation to become a reconciler of others.

Special gifts
So, today’s Second Reading speaks of the gifts that the Spirit of God and Jesus gives to each one for this work.  We are not all called to the same thing in the same way: 

…there are varieties of gifts but the same Spirit, and there are varieties of services but the same Lord, and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.

We all have exactly the same ultimate goal, energised from the same Source, but with our different qualities of character and ability, and depending on the environmental situation in which we find ourselves, we aim at that goal in different ways.

Working together in different ways towards a common aim, Paul compares us to a human body.  It consists of many parts, but each part is ordered to the well-being of the whole.  That should be a picture of the Christian community, of our diocese and of each parish and of each community within a parish.  We are all equal in dignity—Jew or Greek, slave or citizen, man or woman, cleric or lay—but different in calling and manner of service.

On this feast of Pentecost, as we celebrate the formation and the mission of the whole Christian community, we also need to reflect on the particular role that God has for me and the particular contribution that I can make to the corporate mission of the Church and of the particular group with which I am involved.

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Commentary on Acts 1:15-17,20-26; John 15:9-17

The First Reading is taken from the Acts of the Apostles and recounts the choosing of Matthias to fill the vacant place left by the treachery and death of Judas.  This took place soon after the ascension of Jesus, but before the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost (following the timetable of Luke in Acts).

Matthias (who may have been one of the 72 disciples mentioned by Luke in his Gospel) then took over with the other Eleven the responsibility of an Apostle, which was to hand on, with accuracy and in its entirety, the message of Jesus’ life, teaching, suffering, death and resurrection as the Incarnate Son of God.  This is what we now call ‘Tradition’ with a capital ‘T’.  There were, of course, later traditions which became part of the life of the Church which did not have the status of Apostolic Tradition.

Perhaps the very heart of that Tradition is expressed in the Gospel reading.  It is part of the long discourse at the Last Supper which is recorded for us in John.  It begins with Jesus saying:

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.

The word for ‘love’ throughout the passage in the original Greek is agape.  This is a very special kind of love.  It is not a grasping, clinging love.  On the contrary, it is an outreaching love, unconditionally wanting the well-being of the other.  This is the love which the Father extends to Jesus and it is the love that Jesus extends to us.  And we are to “abide” or remain (a favourite Johannine word) in that agape-love.

And how are we to stay in that love?  We do it by keeping the commandments of Jesus, just as Jesus himself remains in his Father’s love by keeping his Father’s commandments.  And what are these commandments?  They are not the Commandments of the Old Testament; in fact, there is only one, and it is all-embracing:

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

The whole of the Gospel, the whole of the teaching of Jesus is there.  If that was all we had of the Gospel, it would be enough.

And Jesus goes further:

No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

This is the degree of agape-love which Jesus will soon show. And who are his friends? He says:

You are my friends if you do what I command you.

That is, friends are all those who unconditionally extend agape to their brothers and sisters.  And if that is the measure of Jesus’ love for us, it is also to be the measure of our love for others.  If we all kept this commandment, our world would be transformed!  We would become a world of people who spend their lives caring for each other’s needs.

But there is another definition of Jesus’ friends:

…I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.

And the most precious thing he has told us is that central command of agape-love.  To have heard that message is a huge privilege, but also a huge responsibility, because it is a message that the whole world needs to hear.  As Jesus put it himself:

By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

This is to be the distinctive mark of our communities.  Would it describe mine?

This is the message that Matthias and his fellow-Apostles inherited and which they passed on.  It is for us to spread the same message and it is done most effectively, not by words, but by the witness of how we live our lives and interact with one another.

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Commentary on 1 John 5:1-5; Matthew 10:22-25

The Gospel reading reflects the life experience of Athanasius.  It comes from the 10th chapter of Matthew and is part of the second of the five discourses which Jesus gives in this Gospel. In this discourse, Jesus gives his disciples instructions as he sends them out on their mission to do the same work that he himself is doing.

In today’s reading, we read that part of the discourse where Jesus warns his disciples about the kind of reception their message is likely to get. Although it is a message of love and compassion and solidarity, Jesus tells them:

…you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.

At the same time, if they meet with opposition they are not to expose themselves unnecessarily to danger:

When they persecute you in this town, flee to the next, for truly I tell you, you will not have finished going through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.

And the Apostles are to do what Jesus himself did. The Gospel shows more than once that Jesus did not act recklessly in the face of danger. It was only “when his time had come”, that he faced the inevitable end. And, even then, we see him in the Garden begging his Father not to have to go through with it, until it was clear to him that this was his Father’s will.

In the life of Athanasius, we see the same. Again and again, he faced hatred and hostility in maintaining the integrity of the gospel message. Again and again, he was driven into exile only to return once again to his diocese. He took refuge with the monks in the desert or in Rome. But what is clear, he never compromised in his fidelity to his Lord and the gospel. He would totally identify with the words of Jesus today:

A disciple is not above the teacher nor a slave above the master; it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher and the slave like the master.

And so Athanasius, the disciple, lived only to be like his Teacher.

It is in the First Reading from the 1st Letter of John that we see what made Athanasius so committed and so loyal:

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child.

It was this belief that Jesus is truly the Son of God, sharing the Divine Nature, that Athanasius so strongly defended against Arius and his followers, and for which he suffered so much. And so the reading ends with the words:

Who is it who conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?

This belief would be laid out during the First Council of Nicaea (in modern Turkey) held in 325 and attended by Athanasius. It was the first ecumenical council of the whole Christian Church and, as mentioned, produced the Nicene Creed which we recite on Sundays and bigger feasts.

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Commentaries on 1 John 3:14-18; Matthew 25:31-40

It would be difficult to find a more appropriate Gospel passage with which to honour St John of God.  It is the final section of chapter 25 in Matthew, a chapter which deals with the end times and about being prepared for the time when we will come face to face with our final appraisal. The chapter begins with the parable of the ten bridesmaids—five of them who took precautions to be ready whenever the bridegroom would arrive, and five who made no preparations and were caught off guard and so excluded from the wedding celebrations.

The second is the parable of the talents where three people are entrusted with different amounts by their superior and told to trade with them until he returned, whenever that would be.  Two of the servants used their capital very well and even doubled it.  But the third, hid his in the ground, afraid even to lose what he had.  When the master returned, this last had nothing to offer except the original sum he had been given.

The last part of the chapter (which forms today’s Gospel) is not exactly a parable, but an imagined enactment of our final calling to account at the end of our lives.  People are going to be divided into two groups, just as a shepherd divides off the sheep from the goats.

The sheep are first called forward and invited into God’s Kingdom.  What is interesting are the reasons why they have earned this reward.  If, left to ourselves, we were asked the kind of expectations God would have of us at the end of our lives, I wonder what kind of things would we bring up?  Would we say, for instance, that we never missed Mass, that we went to confession regularly, that we practised all kinds of prayers and devotions, that we kept the Commandment with great fidelity, were very conscientious in our work and so on?   On what basis are the sheep called in this story? 

Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world, for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’

Apparently, the ‘sheep’ are very surprised to hear this and ask:

Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?

And the King will say to them:

Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.

There is no mention of spiritual practices, or even of Mass, and no mention of keeping the Commandments.  There is no mention of God!  In fact, the two great acts which the Gospel emphasises are love and service of one another and that is exactly what is described here, for:

By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. (John 13:35)

Once love and service are taken care of nothing else really matters.  That is not to say that we can forget about Mass and prayer—not at all.  But it is the love and service of each other that must come first.  And it is on that that we will be measured. St John of the God, of course, was outstanding in his care and compassion for the sick poor and the abandoned.

The First Reading from the First Letter of John is saying exactly the same thing in slightly different words:

We know that we have passed from death to life because we love the brothers and sisters.

And to love, of course, is not just to have nice feelings towards them, but to do much more, to serve them in all their real needs:

Whoever does not love abides in death. All who hate a brother or sister are murderers, and you know that murderers do not have eternal life abiding in them.

As our example, we need look no further than Jesus himself who laid down his life out of love for us.  And we need to do the same not just for Jesus, but for Jesus present in all our brothers and sisters.  There is no short cut to Jesus, bypassing those around us:

How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?

So the writer says:

Little children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth.

It is very easy to make all kinds of proclamations of love to Jesus in our prayers, but unless they are backed up by solid deeds of service, especially to the needy, they are very hollow indeed. St John of God has much to teach us about all of this.

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John (João Cidade) was born on 8 March, 1495, in Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal.  His family, formerly well-off, had fallen on hard times, but was deeply religious.  His mother died when he was very young, and his father then entered a monastery.

But even before that, John ran away with a priest who had inspired him with stories of adventurous new worlds to be explored.  He would never see his parents again.  The priest and the boy begged their way from place to place and then John fell sick.  The manager of an estate who helped restore his health adopted John as his son.  Until the age of 27, John worked as a shepherd on the estate.  Urged to marry his employer’s daughter, whom he loved as his own sister, John ran away to join the army of Charles V in a war against France.  He was a typical soldier of his day—gambling, drinking and plundering.  One day, near the French lines, he was thrown from his horse.  Afraid of capture, he looked back over his life and decided on a radical change.

On his return to his unit, his fellow soldiers, while accepting his conversion, were not happy at his imposing its restrictions on them.  They tricked him into deserting in order to go to the help of a needy person.  He should have been hanged for this, but he escaped with being beaten, stripped and thrown out of the army.  After a short stint back at his shepherding work, he enlisted in another war and, when that was over, went looking for his parents only to find both had died.  Now 38 years old, he decided he should go to Africa to buy back Christian prisoners.

While waiting for a ship at Gibraltar, he came to the help of a noble family being exiled to Africa for political reasons.  He volunteered to be their servant.  On reaching Africa, the family became sick and John both nursed them and worked to earn money to feed them.  His Catholic employers on a building project treated the workers so badly that John’s faith was threatened.  He was advised by a priest not to blame his faith and to go back to Spain, which he did, but only after the noble family had received pardons.

Back in Spain, he laboured as a dockworker by day, and visited churches and read spiritual books by night.  The books gave him such satisfaction that he now became a pedlar of religious books, going from town to town.  At the age of 41, a vision led him to Granada where he continued to sell books.  Then on 20 January, the feast of St Sebastian, after hearing a sermon by St John of Avila, he experienced a major conversion. 

John of Avila would become his spiritual director and encourage him in his desire to work for the poor.  But people around him thought he had gone mad.  He destroyed all the secular books in his shop, and gave away the religious books and all his money.  His weeping and torn clothes made him the target of jokes and insults.

Sympathetic friends brought him to a hospital where he was put in with people suffering from mental illness.  Here he experienced the standard treatment of the time—he was tied down and whipped daily. His director came to visit and said his penance had been sufficient. After 40 days (like his Lord in the desert), he had John moved to a better part of the hospital.

Now, with more freedom, although still a patient, he began to help other patients.  The hospital was glad to have unpaid nursing help, and were not too happy when he went off to start a hospital of his own.  From that time onward, he vowed to devote the rest of his life to the sick and the poor, and under better conditions than he had experienced.

However, people still saw him as a kind of madman, and it did not help when he tried to raise finances for his project by selling wood in the city square.  In the evenings, he would take his meagre earnings to provide food and comfort to the homeless.  His first hospital was in the abandoned buildings and bridges of Granada.  Then a chance came for him to rent a house, although he had no money to equip it.  After going out begging for money, he would carry sick patients back on his shoulders.  He would dress their wounds and mend their clothes, devoting his nights to prayer. Instead of peddling goods, he took anything he was given —scraps of goods, clothing, anything at all.  Some time later, he was able to move his ‘hospital’ to an old Carmelite monastery and used part of it as a shelter for the homeless.  He was accused of pampering troublemakers, to which he would reply that the only bad character he knew was himself!

One remarkable instance was when he single-handedly rescued patients, as well as much of the bedding and blankets, from the main hospital after it had caught fire, while others looked on doing nothing.  His final escape from the building was regarded as little short of a miracle.

Gradually a dedicated circle of people were attracted to John and the work he was doing. He organised them into the Order of Hospitallers, now better known as the Brothers Hospitallers of St John of God, who care for the sick in countries around the world.

Not unexpectedly, his death came about out of his impetuous urge to help others.  While collecting valuable driftwood from the river in flood, one of his helpers fell into the water.  John immediately jumped in to rescue him.  The boy could not be saved and John himself contracted pneumonia.  He died on his 55th birthday, 8 March, 1550.

John was canonised by Pope Alexander VIII in 1690, and later named patron saint of hospitals, the sick, nurses, firefighters, alcoholics, and booksellers. One mark of honour to his labours is that his congregation has been officially entrusted with the medical care of the Pope.

From the time he was a young boy until the day of his death, John followed the impulses of his heart. The challenge for him was to follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit rather than his own inclinations. But unlike many who act impulsively, when John made a decision, no matter how quickly, he stuck with it, no matter what the hardship.

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Commentaryon St John Ogilvie SJ, Priest and Martyr: Read St John Ogilvie SJ, Priest and Martyr (Optional memorial; Scotland: Feast) »

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Blaise is believed to have been a physician and bishop of Sebaste in Armenia, and to have been put to death under the Emperor Licinius and the prefect Agricolaus in the early 4th century. There is no evidence of a cult in either the East or West prior to the 8th century, and the accounts written in Lives in Greek and Latin are believed to be purely fictitious.

But according to these, he was the son of rich and noble Christians, and was consecrated bishop at a very young age. After becoming a bishop, a new persecution of Christians began and he received a message from God to take refuge in the hills. While there, a woman brought him her son, who was near death because of a fish bone stuck in his throat. Blaise restored the boy back to health.

Later, men hunting in the mountains came on a cave surrounded by wild animals who were sick.  Blaise walked among them unafraid and cured their illnesses.  Recognising Blaise as a bishop, he was captured and brought back for trial.  On the way, he persuaded a wolf to release a pig belonging to a poor woman. When Blaise was sentenced to be starved to death, the woman, in gratitude, sneaked into the prison with food and candles.

The tradition says he was martyred by being beaten, attacked with iron carding combs and finally beheaded. Now, at the annual blessing of throats on his feast day, two candles tied together in the shape of a ‘V’ are used in the ritual. In Latin, the blessing prayer is:

Per intercessionem Sancti Blasii liberet te Deus a malo gutteris et a quovis alio malo.

This translates as:

“May God at the intercession of Saint Blaise preserve you from troubles of the throat and every other evil.”

Water with the blessing of St Blaise is also given to sick cattle. Because the iron combs with which he was tortured were similar in appearance to wool-combs, for a long time, Blaise was the patron of wool-combers.

He is also patron saint of the city of Dubrovnik (where he is known as Sveti Vlaho) since 972 AD. Here, on 3 February, the relics of the saint, his head, a piece of bone from his throat and his right and left hands, are paraded in reliquaries.

Blaise is also listed as one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. The shrine at Canterbury in England claimed to have his relics and at least four miracles were recorded as happening there. The last one of these was dated 1451.

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Commentary on 1 Peter 5:1-4; Psalm 22; Matthew 16:13-19

The Gospel from St Matthew records a dramatic moment in the relationship between Jesus and his disciples. They are at Caesarea Philippi, an area which significantly was home to both Jews and Gentiles, and Jesus begins by asking them what they heard people saying about him. They gave various answers, such as that he might be John the Baptist (returned from the dead after his beheading by Herod), or Elijah (who was expected to return to earth to herald the imminent coming of the Messiah), or Jeremiah or one of the other prophets. Jesus then asks them:

But who do you say that I am?

It is Simon who speaks up:

You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.

It was a very special moment for all of them. Up to this, the man whom they had simply called ‘Rabbi’ or ‘Teacher’ was now acknowledged as no less than the Messiah, the Christ, the one anointed as the Saviour-King of Israel.

In reply, Jesus tells Simon that what he has said are not simply his own words, but are a revelation of God to him:

Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you but my Father in heaven.

There then comes the solemn mandate and promise. Simon is now given a new name:

And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.

There is a play on the words ‘Peter’ and ‘rock’. The word for ‘rock’ in Greek is petra and Peter is Petros. There is an irony in the name because it carries more than one meaning. For Peter is called to be the firm foundation of the new community, but before that happens, he shows himself to be a stumbling block trying to frustrate the mission of his Master; he shows himself to be one of the weakest of the disciples.

Nevertheless, Jesus gives him his mission:

I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven [of God], and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven [i.e. by God], and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

After Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, it is his community under the unifying leadership of Peter which will have the mandate to continue the work and mission of Jesus. They will be, literally, the voice of Jesus.

In the First Reading (from the First Letter of Peter—although almost certainly not written by him), we have advice on how Church authority is to be exercised. Peter speaks to community leaders as a fellow “elder”, and as one who was a personal witness of the sufferings of Jesus—hence looking forward to share in his risen glory. He tells them to take care of their flocks as good shepherds, drawing them, but not forcing them, and not pursuing their own personal gain, but rather with enthusiasm for their flocks’ well-being:

Do not lord it over those in your charge, but be examples to the flock.

These words are applicable to every position of leadership in the Church be it pope, bishop, priest or lay leader. Then:

…when the chief shepherd appears, you will win the crown of glory that never fades away.

So, the overall message of today’s feast is of generous and eager cooperation of all members of the Christian community in building up the Body of Christ as a sacrament of the Kingdom throughout the world.