“Lead my sheep: Mary and the Church that are born from the Resurrected.”

III Sunday of Easter, Year C offers us the conclusion of the Gospel of John: the appearance of the Risen Lord by the Sea of Galilee, the miraculous catch of fish, the breakfast by the fire, and above all, Peter’s rehabilitation and his mission. “Feed my sheep”: here, visibly, the pastoral structure of the Church is born. And Mary, Mother of the Church, is not absent from this birth: her spiritual motherhood, entrusted on the Cross (John 19:26-27), is the affective and contemplative dimension without which the Petrine structure risks reducing itself to mere administration.I. The Dawn of the Risen One“When it began to dawn” (John 21:4), dawn in John is the time of Paschal appearances. Mary Magdalene found the tomb empty at dawn (John 20:1). The disciples on the sea found the Risen Lord at dawn. The Paschal dawn is the time of encounter with the Living Lord, the moment when the night of the tomb is resolved into light that no death can extinguish. The recurrence of this motif in the Fourth Gospel is not casual: dawn is the symbol of Resurrection both in nature and in faith, and John insists on situating the encounters with the Risen One at this liminal moment between night and day.The Marian tradition sees Mary as the perfect dawn, the one who precedes and announces the Sun. This image, coming from the Fathers (Jerome, Ambrose), was taken up by Benedict XVI in *Verbum Domini* (n. 88): “Mary is the perfect model of how the Word of God transforms human life”. On the Paschal dawn, Mary is the creature who first, in total faith, even without sensory vision, received the Resurrection. Her faith on Holy Saturday, the darkest day, was the dawn that preceded the public manifestation of the Risen One. In this sense, Mary is the “Paschal dawn” most profoundly: not the one who sees the Risen One first with her eyes, but the one who awaits Him with the most faithful faith in the darkest night.*”But the disciples did not recognize that it was Jesus” (John 21:4): The Risen One is both the same and different. The glorified body that appears by the lake is the same body Mary conceived in Bethlehem and which was crucified on the Cross, but transfigured, glorified, not immediately recognizable in the morning light. This initial “unrecognition” preceding recognition is a pattern in the appearances of the Risen One: the disciples of Emmaus did not recognize him on the road (Luke 24:16). Mary Magdalene took him for a gardener (John 20:15). The Risen One reveals himself progressively to those willing to recognize him, and the proper disposition is faith, not sight.”“The miraculous catch of fish that precedes the recognition (John 21:6-7) has the structure of a new eucharistic sign: the disciples, who had worked all night without catching anything, are directed by the Risen One and obtain a catch they could not have achieved on their own. The ‘beloved disciple,’ figure of contemplative love, recognizes the Lord before Peter (John 21:7). This precedence of contemplative love over Peter’s action is one of the major themes of Johannine ecclesiology: the loving vision precedes the pastoral action. The heart that recognizes the Lord guides the hand that steers the ship.”

II. “Do you love me?” – The love that reconstitutes

The triple question of Jesus to Peter, «Do you love me?» corresponds symmetrically to the triple denial. The structure of the dialogue is of an extraordinary psychological and theological density: the love that reconstitutes what fear destroyed. Peter, who had denied three times by the light of a charcoal fire (Jo 18:18, 25, 27), is invited to confess his love three times by another light of a charcoal fire (Jo 21:9). The symmetry is not accidental: John deliberately builds this parallel to show that the Resurrection undoes not only death, but also denials and human betrayals. The love of the Risen One is stronger than sin.The progression of love verbs in the original Greek dialogue is debated by exegetes. Jesus asks with agapas me (a total giving love) in the first two times, and Peter responds with philō se (a friendship love). In the third time, Jesus descends to Peter’s level and asks also with phileis me, and Peter “became sorrowful” (Jo 21:17). The “descent” of Jesus to Peter’s level is not a capitulation: it is the pastoral kenosis of love that begins where the other is, not where we wish they were. Jesus does not ask Peter a love he does not yet have. He accepts Peter’s love and builds upon it the mission.Mariology here finds a mirror of its existence. Mary never denied. She never abandoned. But the love she represents, the love that stays, that does not flee, that is with the Cross, is the model in which Peter, after the Resurrection, is called to conform. The petrine love, the love of the shepherd who becomes responsible for the sheep, needs to be nourished by the Marian love, the contemplative love that never leaves the Son’s side. The structure of the Church is, in this sense, the articulation between the petrine actively principled and the Marian contemplatively principled.Hans Urs von Balthasar, in *Der antirömische Affekt*, distinguishes systematically between the “Petrine principle” and the “Joanic-Marian principle” within the Church. The first organizes, governs, and decides. The second contemplates, loves, and testifies. Neither is dispensable: without the Petrine principle, the Church dissolves into devotional sentimentalism. Without the Joanic-Marian principle, the Petrine principle degenerates into pure bureaucracy or the exercise of power. The balance between the two is the perpetual challenge of ecclesiology and the concrete life of the Church in every historical period.

III. “Pasce oves meas”: The Pastoral Mission and the Maternal Model

The mission entrusted to Peter, “apascenta as minhas ovelhas” (feed my sheep), is not a self-reference: it feeds Christ’s sheep, not his own. Peter does not receive a flock of his own. He receives the responsibility of caring for someone else’s flock. This structure of service, pastoral in nature as service in the name of another, defines the essence of hierarchical ministry in the Church. The pastor is always a vicary, not a proprietor. He always acts in the name and with the authority of Christ, not by right of his own.The nascent Church, as depicted in the first chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, has a fundamentally maternal structure: it welcomes, nourishes, cares for, and generates life. The supreme model of this maternal ecclesiology is Mary. Paul VI, upon concluding the third session of the Second Vatican Council (November 21, 1964), proclaimed Mary “Mãe da Igreja” (Mother of the Church). This proclamation was not an arbitrary decision: it synthesized a tradition that runs through the Fathers, the Liturgy, and the great medieval theologians. The Church that “apascenta” (feeds) Christ’s sheep learns from Mary how to do so: with maternal love, patience, and the willingness to offer herself as nourishment.John Paul II, in *Redemptoris Mater*,

In n. 24, this dimension of Mary’s motherhood is developed: Mary is Mother of Christ and, in Christ, mother of all members of His Body. This motherhood is not merely metaphorical; it is a spiritual reality that has concrete effects on the life of the Church. Mary who intercedes for the Church, who accompanies the shepherds in their mission, who presents the needs of the flock to the Son, this active and intercessory Mary is the ultimate foundation of all pastoral ecclesial activity, prior and superior to any legal or canonical structure.

The Acts of the Apostles (1:14) describe the period between the Ascension and Pentecost: the apostles, including Peter, gathered in the Cenacle, persevering in prayer “with Mary, mother of Jesus”. The beginning of the apostolic ministry occurs under Mary’s maternal gaze. This conjunction, Mary and Peter, motherhood and primacy, love and structure, is one of the most fertile themes in contemporary ecclesiology. The Church that “feeds Christ’s sheep” does so better when it does so with Mary’s disposition, with love that does not calculate, with patience that does not grow weary, with intercession that does not resign itself.

IV. The prophecy of martyrdom and the freedom of love

Jo 21:18-19 contains a raw and direct prophecy: “When you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will bind you and carry you off where you do not wish to go”. The following of Christ for Peter will culminate in martyrdom, in a death that mirrors the Master’s death. And immediately: “I said this to show by what death you will glorify God. And after saying this, he added: Follow me” (Jo 21:19). The final “follow me” is not a tranquilizing invitation. It is a radical call that implies the totality of life, including its loss.

Mary lived the most radical “follow me” before Peter: she followed the Son from the Annunciation to Calvary, without choosing the terms of the following. The sword of Simeon (Lk 2:35) was her prophecy of martyrdom, not the physical martyrdom, but the martyrdom of the heart that suffers with and through the Son. Christian spiritual tradition identified Mary as the first “spiritual martyr,” not because she had shed her blood, but because the love that united her to the Son made her a participant in his suffering to such a profound degree that no other human being can compare.The freedom of love that Peter is called to exercise in “follow me” has in Mary its most perfect model. She did not follow the Son because she was compelled or because she had no choice: she followed him with total freedom, which was renewed at every step of the way. Mary’s freedom is particularly visible in the moments when the following was most difficult: when Simeon prophesied the sword (Lk 2:35), when Jesus stayed in the Temple without warning (Lk 2:49-50), when public ministry distanced her from immediate proximity to the Son, when Calvary became the reality she had to accept. In each of these moments, Mary chose freely to continue following, and this freedom makes her following a model of inestimable value for all those called to “follow me” of the Risen One.The conclusion of the Gospel of John, “there are yet many other things that Jesus did” (Jo 21:25), suggests that the story told is only the beginning of a longer story that continues in the Church and in each generation. Mary, who keeps in her heart what the Gospels did not record, is the guardian of this unwritten memory, the mediator of the living tradition that the Spirit continues to activate in the community of the faithful throughout history. The “feed my sheep” of Jo 21 is not exhausted with Peter: it continues in each shepherd who, loving Christ, cares for his flock with the maternal love that Mary learned.The Risen One who asks “do you love me?” and who sends to feed the sheep gives birth to a Church that has Mary as a model of faithful love. May this Third Sunday of Easter deepen in us faith in one who is at once Mother of Christ and Mother of the Church.