SOLEMNITY OF CHIRST THE KING
Induction of Fr Tom Ryan
19 November 2005

Sometimes it is easy to see ourselves in that first reading – wandering in mist and darkness, lost, wounded and weak. Of course there are times when things seem fairly good, but we always remain uneasily aware that, just over the horizon, things that we fear, things we feel we could never bear, may be lurking – bereavement, illness, disasters and suffering of all kinds.

An extraordinary thing about what we are doing here – celebrating the Eucharist – is that it is the only situation in our lives when we come together ready to acknowledge to one another the real truth about ourselves – our vulnerability, our weakness, our failures, our mortality. We begin by asking the Lord to have mercy on us and by confessing to God and to our brothers and sisters.

We can be honest about ourselves, our need of God’s mercy, and our need of one another, because of the assurance we are given in the first reading. God is looking after his flock, keeping us in his sight, looking for us, rescuing us, bandaging us and giving us strength. God will be a true shepherd for all of us, even for those of us who may from time to time be foolish enough to think that we can do pretty well on our own!

In the Mass we celebrate our belief that God’s promise has been fulfilled beyond all our hopes. It is not just that God will seek us when we are lost and bandage us when we are wounded. As the second reading tells us, all the enemies have been put under the feel of Jesus – even the last enemy, death. God is our shepherd. God’s care and love were shown above all when his Son died for us, and when he rose as the first fruits of a new creation. All humanity from the beginning was subject to death and suffering and evil, now, in Christ, we will be brought to a life beyond everything we fear, everything that diminishes us.

But it is important that we come together to celebrate. We cannot just sit back and wait for the day when we will see the full glory of that new creation, when God is all in all. We come together because it is together that we hear that Good News in our families, in our schools and in the whole life of the parish. We come together because it is together that we try to live and share and grow in understanding of the Good News and in closeness to Christ our King.

We come together because receiving the Good News means realising that God has sent his Son to be the divine Shepherd among us, and we are meant to be shepherds to one another – looking out for one another, rescuing, bandaging and strengthening one another. Jesus left us in no doubt about that in the Gospel. We are to give food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty, to welcome strangers and those who have nothing, to visit those who are alone, sick or in prison. Insofar as we do that, or neglect to do it, for one of the least members of his family, we do or fail to do it to him.

Today, the feast of the parish and the day of the induction of your new Parish Priest, is a day for reflecting on what it means to be a parish. Here at Mass we gather all that activity – the love and the care and the anxieties that we have for family and neighbours, for our community, for or our whole society, for those who are deprived or for those who are in any kind of difficulties in the parish, in the city, and further afield. We offer all of that to God, who shepherds us, as part of our cooperation in his care and mercy. We offer it through with and in his Son who leads his people in the Eucharist and in our lives. And we draw strength to continue and to deepen our efforts in the coming week.

Today we think particularly of the role that the Parish Priest has in bringing God’s shepherding love to the parish. We think with gratitude of the work of Father Des McAuliffe and we pray for him as he moves to a new ministry in Bruree. We welcome Father Tom Ryan (we might say Tom Ryan II) as Parish Priest. We will symbolise that role in the handing over of the Book of the Gospels, because he is to be a preacher of the word, of the stole because he is to celebrate the sacraments and of the keys of the church because he is to care for the structures of the parish and for the community which the structures exist to serve.

I will mention just one aspect of that role. What gives us the strength to be a community that is honest about our need for God, what encourages us to work at the task of being shepherds for one another and the wider community, even when the tide is flowing against us and we seem to be achieving little, is hope.

It will be Fr Tom’s task, along with Fr Richie, to help keep the hope of Christ alive in this parish community. He will do so in his preaching – trying to deepen our confidence that Christ is the first fruits who is drawing everything to himself. That is why no attempt to do good is ever wasted, that is why reaching out to other people is never a hopeless effort. He will try to awaken and strengthen hope in the celebration of the liturgy of the Eucharist and the other sacraments. There we meet and are touched by Christ who already lives in the glory and fulfilment that we cannot even imagine, but which is the answer to every longing. He will do it in his leadership in the life of the parish and in his ability to recognise and encourage the gifts and activities by which the hope of God’s promise is made to live among you and by which that hope is spread.

We are all meant to share in the shepherding of the Father and of Christ our Good Shepherd and the King. As the priests of the parish try to express and strengthen that hope in their ministry, you in turn will strengthen and encourage them. And all of us will, please God, grow in our care for one another. May the life of the parish always be sustained by the knowledge that God looks after his flock and that Christ, raised from the dead, is the first fruits of the life in which we hope to share together, when Christ the King gathers this parish dedicated to him into his kingdom.

+Donal Murray
Bishop of Limerick