Many years ago, during my high school days at Quigley Seminary in Chicago, I spent several summers working at the Brookfield Zoo.

In particular, in the smaller enclave known as the “Children’s Zoo,” where, due to age and lack of training in wild animal care, we were relegated to the animal husbandry of cleaning up after the farm animals. While all the animals were messy, if there were awards for the messiest, the “smart” pigs took it in an oink. When it came to innocent stupidity, the sheep had it, four bags full.

Whenever I read the Scriptural parables about sheep and how easily they get lost, wandering off without paying attention, those “zoo years” come back to mind, making me wonder why Jesus calls us his sheep. On the other hand, surveying myself during this past Lenten season, I can see his point. I need him as a shepherd, and more.

It’s a bit odd, but on the fourth Sunday of Easter, a day commonly called “Good Shepherd Sunday,” Jesus does not call himself a shepherd. That he is a shepherd, there is no doubt. But that is not his point, this time.

Jesus calls himself the gate: “Amen, amen, I say to you, I am the gate for the sheep.” What Jesus describes in this lesson, is not about sheep, but about people. Jesus describes the shepherd and sheep relationship as one of intimacy and dependence and mutual trust in order to give us insight into God’s will for our relationship with one another.

Unfortunately, in this “culture of death,” people are too often viewed in the inconvenience of their life, from beginning to end, by ethnic, racial, religious, and social categories that herd them into thousands, more or less, here or there, more or less.

To this, Jesus says, simply, “I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. A thief comes only to steal and slaughter and destroy; I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.”

Jesus is the way out of “stupid is as stupid does” and, more importantly, the way into his ministry of loving service.

The custom of need has designated this fourth Sunday of Easter as the World Day of Prayer for Vocations to the priesthood. Pray that the voice of Jesus can and will be heard by men who are being guided by the Good Shepherd through the gate of intimacy and trust to share in the one priesthood of Jesus Christ.

Pray for us, your priests, who must continually respond to Jesus, the Good Shepherd, who is for each of us, the gate to a precious life of service.

Pray for us, your priests, that we may not forget that, while we are to lead God’s chosen people, we ourselves also must enter through him, the gate, for a more abundant life.

Pray for us, your priests, that we may accept ourselves as the Good Shepherd’s beloved, whom he loves tenderly from the gate of his cross, the entrance to his resurrection.

Pray for us, your priests, that none of us will go “astray like sheep, each following his own way,” (Isaiah 53.6), but that we will always enter the gate of our Shepherd and guardian of our souls.