The Shepherd Who Mends

Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year A · Good Shepherd Sunday · April 26, 2026

First Reading: Acts 2:14a, 36–41
Second Reading: 1 Peter 2:20b–25
Gospel: John 10:1–10
Full text on USCCB: bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/042626.cfm

---

The Voice We Have Been Waiting For

We live in such a loud and overwhelming world. Everywhere we turn, there is a new voice. An influencer on our screens, a quick video for every problem, a confident expert for every subject under the sun. It can feel exhausting, and it shows just how much we all crave real, authentic guidance. Every single one of us longs for a gentle, guiding hand and a voice we can truly trust, a voice of blessed assurance.

Today, in our Gospel, that voice speaks directly to us. Jesus tells us, gently, I am the good shepherd. My sheep hear my voice (Jn 10:11; 10:27). And when we quiet ourselves, our weary hearts know that this is the very voice we have been waiting for.

The Shepherd Who Mends

But there is something we often forget about the work of a shepherd. We tend to picture a shepherd only as the provider, the one who leads us to green pastures, and as the protector, the one who fights off the wolf. We picture him less often as the mender, the restorer. And yet, in the prophet Ezekiel, the Lord himself names this as part of the shepherd’s essential work. I will bind up the injured. I will strengthen the weak (Ezek 34:16). The Shepherd is not only the one who walks ahead of us and the one who stands between us and danger. He is also the one who kneels beside us when we have been hurt, binds the wound, and helps us stand up again. He calls us back to abundant life by helping us recover and become whole. To help us recover from injury, and to gently move us toward repairing and mending our relationships, is one of the most significant works he does for us.

And so our Good Shepherd has come to do more than guide and defend us. He has come to mend us. Life does not just happen to us. It happens between us. His sheep, the good sheep, listen to His voice and return to a flock, not to solitariness; to a life of communion and community, not to a life of loneliness. We need each other. And living with each other comes with its own joys and its own troubles. Let us speak of the troubles. We get hurt. We often find ourselves wounded, even by those living under the same roof. And looking around our parish community this morning, it is a simple, shared truth that every relationship here has suffered a wound somewhere along the way.

Even the world of psychology now tells us that every relationship is an endless rhythm of harmony, disharmony, and repair. We do get hurt, especially by those closest to us. There are misunderstandings, careless words, slights that wound us more deeply than the speaker ever realised. (And here, dear friends, I want to say something carefully. There are relationships where someone is genuinely being harmed, where there is violence, or constant cruelty, or the slow wearing down of a person’s dignity, and these wounds do great damage. If any of us is in such a relationship, please seek help. That is your right, and the Gospel honours it. But I want to speak this morning of the other wounds too, the ordinary ones, the times we feel unseen, unheard, disrespected, unrecognised. These wounds, when we do not resolve them, when we keep them playing in our minds, when we expend our energy on them year after year, do their own quiet damage. In the long run, the harm they cause is no less real.)
The secret of any lasting relationship, a marriage, a family, a deep friendship, is the willingness to seek repair gently after a hurtful moment. When people say relationships take work, this is what we need to understand: the tender work of tending to a wound when it happens, before it grows into deep resentment.

This is the very pattern of God’s own heart for us. He loves us, we break away, and He comes forward to mend us back together.

Listen again to the fuller promise the Lord makes through Ezekiel. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured (Ezek 34:15-16). The Great I Am becomes the Great I Will, stepping in to bandage our spiritual wounds Himself. The Shepherd is not afraid of our brokenness. His hands are healing hands, perfectly suited to mend what is torn in our lives.

And Scripture shows us there is nowhere He will not go to do this work. Think of Nineveh. The brutal enemy city that no one wanted saved. Yet God sent the prophet Jonah to call them back, and when they heard the warning, they accepted the invitation to be mended. They immediately turned to Him in repentance, putting on sackcloth from the greatest to the least (Jonah 3:5-8). Our God is so eager to mend us, even those we might consider arch-enemies, even the ones we have completely written off.

Brothers, What Shall We Do?

We see this perfectly fulfilled in our first reading at Pentecost. Here is the Good Shepherd Himself, through the Apostles, offering the gift of repair to the very people who had clamoured for His crucifixion. Peter stands before the very crowd that, just fifty days earlier, had shouted for the blood of the Messiah. Peter courageously says: This Jesus whom you crucified, God has made Lord and Christ (Acts 2:36). He speaks the painful truth, but he also offers the grace, the opportunity to repair. And then, he waits.

Slow down now, dear friends, and look at what happens next. The crowd, after hearing Peter, does not walk out. They do not get defensive or pick up stones. Instead, pierced with conviction, they are cut to the heart, and their very first words are words of fraternal union: Brothers, what shall we do? (Acts 2:37). Having just realised their terrible mistake, they do not deny it. They simply ask to be mended. And three thousand of them accepted that repair through baptism, that very day (Acts 2:41).

This is the reality we are invited into this morning. The Shepherd is standing here right now, longing to mend our injuries so we can experience His abundant life. But the wounded sheep has a part to play too. We have to stop running. We have to stand still and gently allow His hand to come close. That small act of consent, that quiet surrender, is itself a movement of the Holy Spirit within us.

I know this can be hard. Something inside us naturally resists. Often, it is our pain. The wound is real, and letting anyone touch it hurts, so we keep it closed off, even from the Shepherd. Sometimes, it is our ego. We do not want to admit we are injured or that we need help, so we present a brave but false face to the world that cannot be healed because it is not real. And sometimes, it is our pride. We know exactly who hurt us, and we would rather be right than reconciled. We stubbornly wait for the other person to make the first move.

Pain, ego, pride. They are heavy, closed doors in our hearts. But the Shepherd never breaks the door down. He stands outside, waiting patiently, holding out hands that still bear the marks of the nails, gently asking us to let Him in. The crowd at Pentecost opened that door. They did not get stuck in the rupture or say the damage was too great. They simply asked for help, and the Shepherd mended them.

So let us examine our own lives today. The Shepherd looks upon us with great love, seeing the silent wounds we carry that no one else sees. The marriage that has been hurting for far too long. The siblings who have not spoken in years. The child we have not quite welcomed back home. These are real injuries, and Jesus does not minimise them. He knows exactly what it feels like to be hurt by the people He loves.

Today, He is asking you, gently: will you let me mend you? Will you set down the pain, the ego, and the pride just long enough to take that first step toward healing?

And what does that look like, in practice? It looks like coming to confession this week, even after a long absence, and letting the Shepherd touch the wound we have been hiding. It looks like saying to a trusted friend, I have been carrying this for too long. It looks like sending one small message to the person we have stopped speaking to. Not a long explanation. Not the grand reconciliation. Just three words that say, I was wrong, or, I have been thinking of you. The mending begins with the smallest movement. The Shepherd does the rest.

Imagine if we walked out of these doors today and chose to do that small, hard, holy work of letting the Shepherd mend a relationship through us.

As we approach His table now, let the words of the Psalm wash over you: The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want (Ps 23:1). He has everything we need. The mending is already in His hands. In the Eucharist we are about to receive in a few moments, the Wounded One offers His broken body to mend ours. May we open our hearts this morning, and simply let Him.