Fourth Sunday of Easter, cycle B

John 10:11-18

My father's dad, my grandfather, was the oldest child in a family of four. His parents were farmers and he had a fourth grade education in a one room school house in Wyoming. When he was fourteen he left home and took a job on a ranch in Montana. He was a cowboy, which meant that he got food and lodging and a very small salary for herding cattle, mending fences, digging holes, putting out fires – you name it. His parents were Mormons, but I don't think my grandfather ever went to a Mormon church after he left home. When he married my grandmother the ceremony took place in the rectory of the local Catholic church since in those days so called “mixed” marriages were not allowed in the church proper. My grandfather would faithfully take my grandmother to Sunday Mass as she refused to learn how to drive. He would remain in the car reading the newspaper and smoking a few cigarettes. During his lifetime he never showed any interest in religion that I'm aware of.

I learned from the nuns who taught us that “Outside the Church there was no salvation.” However, this was nuanced by the doctrine of “limbo”, a place of natural happiness open to unbaptized babies and people like Moses and Abraham and maybe by extension really good people who never heard about Jesus through no fault of their own. I learned later that this was not an official church teaching. Besides, it didn't apply to my grandfather who obviously had heard of Jesus. The other escape route was baptism of desire, which meant that you tried very hard to please God but you lived in a society where baptism was unavailable. That didn't sound like my grandfather, either; he was a nice guy who fulfilled his obligations to his family but I don't know if he ever prayed.

I remember a particular moment when I was expressing my concerns over the ultimate destiny of my grandfather's soul to my grandmother. She responded, and I think I am quoting her exactly, “If you were God would you send him to hell?” To my ten year old mind, that seemed theologically valid so I stopped worrying.

But scripture is pretty clear: Saint Peter says “there is no salvation in anyone else, for there is no other name in the whole world given to the human race by which we are to be saved.” And Jesus himself says “He who believes and is baptized will be saved” and “unless you repent you will likewise perish” and “he who eats my body and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up on the last day”. So Jesus lays the basis for sacraments. And of course Paul tells us that the members of the Church constitute the body of Christ. So salvation can only come through Jesus, and Jesus established the Church to be the vehicle for salvation. So the statement “Outside the Church there is no salvation” is true. But before Jesus established the Church, he told the Samaritan woman that salvation is from the Jews, and that is the way we can understand this statement. Today Jesus might say, “salvation is from the Catholics”.

But if Jesus is the savior of the world is he constrained so that only those who hear the gospels and receive the sacraments are saved?

One theologian says that the Church is a sign of what God does in us, rather than a requirement for meeting God. The reality is that all salvation comes from the saving death of Christ. It is by the fact of God taking our body, dying our death, and rising in Jesus that our destinies are forever changed. God now looks upon all human flesh and sees the face of the beloved Son. Now it is possible to not know this. On the other hand, to have heard this and consciously reject the possibility is another story.

Today Jesus says, “Other sheep I have who are not of this fold, and I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice and there will be one flock and one shepherd”. In every human being there is the desire for unrestricted goodness. In every mind there is a thirst for the ultimate truth. Every human heart longs to be loved. We in the Church who have met Christ know that Jesus is the answer to these longings. But for those who have not met him, they must be faithful to these longings and hope that there is an answer. The gift of faith is exactly that, a gift. But our humanity is also a gift, and it is shared and transformed by Jesus.

When you read the New Testament, you keep coming across the notion that salvation is not something we earn – it has been earned – but in some way it requires a relationship with Jesus, and that relationship transforms us. Could it be that Jesus offers that relationship to everyone, even those who don't know him as Jesus? Could my grandfather have in some way responded to Jesus but not known it in formal terms?

This of course does not let us off the hook. When we look at the apostles they went about proclaiming the good news, that there is someone who fulfills all the deepest desires of our hearts, and he can be met in the Church through the word and the sacraments. They had been transformed by this discovery and wanted to share it with everyone else. And that should be our default position as well – it is, after all, very good news and if we have any love for our friends and neighbors who aren't members of the Church it's still our duty to tell them this good news.

Jesus clearly longs for there to be one flock and one shepherd; that's the reason he took on our flesh and laid down his life for us. I would rather know this than be ignorant of it. But if he loves my grandfather as much as he loves his own mother, and he does, I suspect he will move heaven and earth to get my grandfather into his eternal company.