MAY 6, 2026 FATHER PETER TURRONE
“I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me.”
The Lord says so many beautiful things in scripture, and everything he says is always tied to from the New Testament to the Old Testament.
And when we hear, at a certain point, when the Lord is speaking to the prophets of the time and saying, “Look, care for my people,” and they weren’t doing what they were supposed to, the Lord said, “I myself will come and shepherd my people.” And we can see this beautiful prophecy being fulfilled in Christ.
So he says, “I am.” So, over and over, we keep hearing, “I am, I am.” And as I’ve mentioned before, and many others have as well, so the “I am” brings us back to the moment when the Lord speaks through the burning bush to Moses, “I am who I am.” And now, he reveals one aspect of that remarkable identity, and he says, “I am the good shepherd.”
So, what does it mean to be a good shepherd? Well, I don’t know how many people have had experience of caring for animals. Again, I was a missionary in Mongolia. I didn’t care for the lambs and things, but I would see them and I’d see the goats, and I’d see how they reacted with the shepherds.
For us, they would ignore us totally. But once the shepherd or the shepherdess would call them, they would come forth. There was this familiarity between them.
So, Jesus is saying that he is the good shepherd. We belong to him. We’re his sheep and he owns us. And he owns us, he bought us through the shedding of his blood, right, as we hear in Scripture. So, by his passion, his death, his resurrection, right, and his ascension into heaven, by taking us all for himself, we belong to him.
And as a shepherd, it means that a shepherd is someone who’s taking us on a journey. So, we don’t just kind of stand there, stagnant in our lives, but the Lord came to take us somewhere. And where is that? He came to take us to heaven, to prepare us for the new heavens and the new earth.
And he leads us through this life. And he leads us through our baptism, through the Sacraments, through Reconciliation. When we’re lost, he comes to take us and gather us back in the fold. He offers himself to us in the Eucharist. He gives himself to us fully.
So, he’s present and he knows us by name, right? He knows us by name.
So, somebody who does something for work, right, if it’s a job, it’s a different experience than when you’re giving your life to this purpose, to this mission because you’re willing to suffer for them, you’re willing to lay down your life for them. It’s very different than to kind of doing what you have to do and then leaving afterwards.
The Lord doesn’t do that. And the sheep know when somebody does something, when they’re there for a job, as opposed to someone who is the shepherd of this flock, in this case, for the community, for the church.
When we hear Jesus, when he speaks, so we can see in him, again, the perfect example for all of us, so what it means to lay down one’s life. And the laying down of one’s life, as Paul tells Timothy, will always involve suffering. So, it always involves suffering.
So, why is there this element of suffering? Why does St. Paul say that? Well, think about it. If you do something just for work and you’re doing something just so you can get paid, then you’re not really—you could be doing an incredible job, but are you putting your whole life and your heart into your work? That’s something to think about, especially when this regards the ministry, when it regards to the matters of the faith.
But when you do something, when you love someone, so when you love God, and then you love the people that you’re called to shepherd on his behalf, then that means that there’s a risk, and that risk is that it’s gonna be rejected.
So, anyone who’s tried to love recognizes that you’re going to suffer. So, it’s laying down one’s life. Paul says, “And take part of this suffering for the sake of the Gospel.”
So, we have, by no other thing other than the grace of God, not because we deserve it, but the Lord lays his life down, he gives himself to us, this grace, this new life. So, we’re called to go and to proclaim this to others.
So, when you’re in love with someone and you’ve come to discover the precious pearl, you want to share that with other people. But what happens? Well, there’s going to be times when other people are going to be cold, or indifferent, or very angry.
So, Jesus experienced that himself as God in the flesh. How much more are his disciples and those he sends off on his behalf in the world? St. Paul says, “Look,” he goes, “do the right thing. Go and preach what has been handed on to us.” There were people—there will be people that are going to accept it and there are other people that will reject it or they’ll be angry about it.
So, why is that? Well, you look back 2000 years ago, you look back what’s happening in society nowadays. So, you can look and see, well, look, there is this anger, at times, that is being directed towards the church because the Good News, which is good, but it’s not easy, calls us to question how we live and how we think.
And as St. Paul was saying, and as we can experience today, people want—some people are not always interested in the truth. They want novel ideas. It just sounds the same.
As one young man said to me, and a good guy, but he’s still confused and trying to find his way, he said to me, “Yeah,” he goes, “I’ve heard it all before. I know the Gospel inside out.”
It’s like, well, to hear the Gospel is one thing, to listen to it is another. And the message is coming from God. It’s the Lord himself who speaks. And what he has to say is beautiful. And he’s the one that gives us life.
So, we have to look to the Lord because, if we don’t have Jesus in the centre of our lives, my brothers and sisters, who are we going to be following? Social media? Influencers? That’s the reality.
People can say, and I’ve heard many people say to me, “Oh, the church wants to control your life, our lives. The church doesn’t want us to have this freedom.”
No, no. The church wants to preserve our freedom, and that’s why she speaks the truth in charity, and she does it with humility and with patience. And yeah, we’re going to be rejected, but that’s life.
The thing is, we pray for our brothers and sisters who reject the message, but we know that the message is life because it’s God who’s speaking. These are not the opinions of people, but it’s God himself.
And the Lord continues to send men and women. In this case, he sent St. François de Laval, this great man who was in France. He’s the patron of the bishops in Canada.
Like you look at his life. So, he lived a relatively comfortable life for the 17th century in France. Came from a noble family, a good and a holy man.
But what happened? You can see a man with a heart for God because, when he’s reading these testimonies of the Jesuit martyrs in Canada, he was so moved by their experiences that he said, “I have this desire to go, I want to go.”
But as we heard in the collect, in the opening prayer, we heard very clearly, so the desire that he had in his heart did not just come from anywhere; it was the Holy Spirit inside of him that was working.
And we said, I prayed, it was the Father who sent him to Canada. So, the Father inspired St. François de Laval to want to come here, and he did, and he came to this vast new territory. And Jesus says in the Gospel, he goes, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also andthey will listen to my voice.”
So, St. François de Laval was sent by God to Canada, where he laboured for many years, the most vast territory in North America that he was in charge of, and he did it with complete and total fidelity. He did it with a deep love for God and for the people that he served. And he did it with a lot of suffering, but with great love.
And he understood what it meant to follow Jesus, because he was such a good shepherd, because he followed the Good Shepherd, and he followed the example of St. Paul.
In the letter, in the instructions that he wrote to his missionaries, he wrote something in 1668, and again, this is like something inspired directly from St. Paul and from the Lord himself.
He says, “We must earn love through gentleness, patience, and charity. Through gentleness, patience, and charity.”
So, we must speak the truth in charity, gentleness, and with great patience. In the same way the Good Shepherd is patient with us, we must be patient with other people, but we still must proclaim the fullness of the message.
So, I encourage you, pray for our bishops, pray that they have the strength and the peace. They do so much work, so many things behind the scenes that we’re not aware of, but we need to sustain them as the body of Christ through our sacrifices, our fasts, our prayers, the rosary and the Eucharist, that God give them strength and peace to know how to proclaim the message to the world that is hurting and yet, so desperately needs the Good Shepherd.
