An excerpt from the homily given at the diaconate ordination of eight Jesuit men at St Iganatius, Stamford Hill, on 25th February 2017.
There was a parish which invited a famous actor to come and recite some of their favourite writings. The actor recited all different kinds of texts.
As the evening neared its end, he said he would recite just one more. They asked him to recite Psalm 23, the Lord is my shepherd.
‘I will,’ he said, ‘on one condition: that the lady over there recites it after me.’
He recited it; and everyone applauded. She recited it; and everyone cried.
‘What was the difference?’ they asked him.
‘The difference,’ he said, ‘is that I know the psalm; she knows the shepherd.’
Know the shepherd. That’s the message to take from this story.
Dear Alphonse, Anthony Paul, Mikael, Nilan, Roy Alex, Sandeep, Swaminathan and Thomas, if there’s one thing I want you to take from this celebration is that you need to know the shepherd. Get to know the shepherd and he will make you into a shepherd after his own heart.
The passage chosen for your first reading reminds you he has always known you, even before you were formed in your mother’s womb.
‘Lord, I do not know how to speak,’ says the prophet. I think that all of us here who are shepherds, pastors, whatever our stage of ministry, will know the prophet’s reluctance to speak. But spend time with the shepherd and the fear to speak will subside: gently he’ll speak to you the words you need to utter.
What you are about today is deeply prophetic in itself, not least the promise you make to be celibate: ‘to remain celibate for the sake of the kingdom’.
Dear ordinands, if there’s one thing you will remember about your diaconal ordination, it’s the steep steps which you ascended to the sanctuary. I was moved, when I visited the Holy Land recently, to see the very steps Jesus descended to cross the Kidron Valley.
‘Can these be the actual stones?’ I asked my guide. He was quite a sceptic; so I expected him to say, ‘You wish.’
‘But no,’ he replied, ‘these will be the very steps that Jesus descended as he left the Upper Room to cross the Kidron Valley.’
And ascended again, I thought. Because he came back up these same steps, then, when he was brought from Gethsemane to the house of Caiaphas.
As I contemplated these stones, it occurred to me that, when he descended them, he descended them a free man but when he next ascended them a few hours later he ascended them held, bound, and committed.
Dear ordinands, you too will ascend these steps in total freedom. When you descend them, you will have been changed: not held or bound but most certainly committed: committed now to go wherever the Good Shepherd needs you and leads you. And I hope you feel the same joy as we do in seeing you commit yourselves so freely to work of the Shepherd.