Every Sunday after this
service we have a reception over in the parish hall. I make an effort to put in at least a brief
appearance each week, although it is harder to do so after the early service,
because the time between is short, and sometimes it is all I can do to get in a
quick trip to the bathroom. But I do enjoy going over and seeing
what’s good to eat and how folks are doing.
And often I find one or more people waiting to talk to me. The topics vary—sometimes it’s matter of
church business someone didn’t get around to bringing up with me during the
week. Sometimes it is a personal
matter, a subject of concern or a happy circumstance of life that someone wants
to tell me about. And then, every once
in a while, a person will come up to me with a theological question.
This happened to me last
Sunday, and I don’t know if this person had been looking ahead at the readings
for this week—I suppose probably not.
But it was kind of uncanny, because what she asked me was “where do you
hear the voice of Jesus?” I was taken aback
a little and had to think about it for a second, and then I gave a rather
rambling answer in which I tried to describe various contexts which I have had
the perception of what I thought might be the voice of Jesus, or at least the
presence of his mind. And I don’t know
if she was satisfied with my answer—if she wasn’t, she was polite enough not to
say so—but I do know that I wasn’t, and it wasn’t until this week, when I began
to study the gospel passage we read today, that I understood why.
You see, I think my answer was
actually kind of misleading, not because I don’t believe it’s possible to hear Jesus’
voice, or because I don’t believe I ever have, but because any expectations I
might have raised about where his voice can be heard, or how we’ll know that it
is his, are probably just going to get in the way of her hearing it. When Jesus talks about hearing his voice, as
he does in this morning’s reading from the Gospel of John, he’s not talking
about the conditions under which we might have an experience of him. He’s talking about what he has done to
establish a relationship with us.
Hearing the voice of Jesus is a function of belonging to his sheep.
When the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem
come up to Jesus in the temple they speak to him as if he owes them an
explanation. They want to know why, if
he is God’s Messiah, he won’t come right out and tell them so. But the reason they are so bent out of shape
about this is that he fails to satisfy their expectations. They have a high sense of their own place in
God’s scheme of things, and if Jesus is really here to carry out the purposes
of God, then surely he will get to work on their
agenda. And this is how we all are, more
or less, at least part of the time.
We’re not sure about Jesus because he doesn’t seem to be doing what we
think he ought to do—he’s not making us happier, or holier, or more successful.
He’s not improving the people we want
him to improve. He’s not fixing what
seems to be broken in the world, or the things that are broken in us. So it would be nice if he would say
something, to reassure us, to let us know that he is here, that is paying
attention, and does care, and will get around at some point to making things
better for us.
But Jesus says, “I did speak
to you. I did show you who I am as plain
as day, but you did not believe.” And
the point here is not that there is some kind of “believing in Jesus” that might
convince him that we are worthy of being counted among his sheep, or that we
deserve to hear his voice, and if we keep on trying we will eventually get it
right. “You do not believe,” says Jesus, “because you do not belong to my
sheep.” In other words, believing in
Jesus is something that comes about because we belong to his sheep, not the
other way around. Until we take that
initial step of trusting that he has taken us under his guidance and care,
anything we believe about him will probably be no more than our own mistaken
notion. We won’t see his works, and we
won’t hear his voice.
Believing in Jesus grows out
of accepting his love for and acceptance of us.
But how can you have that kind of trusting relationship with someone
whose voice you haven’t heard, who you don’t really know how to believe
in? Well, it’s a very important
question, and the answer isn’t the one we probably want to hear. Simply put, we have to borrow it from someone
else. We have to take someone else’s
word for it. That’s what the author of
John means when he writes, near the end of the Gospel, that this book is “written
so that you may believe.” And that’s why
Jesus doesn’t talk about being my
sheep, but about belonging to my
sheep. Because sheep belong to a flock.
This is humbling, even
humiliating for us modern people, who prize our individual autonomy and personal
authority above all. And it must be said
that belonging to Jesus’ flock does involve risk. There is the ever-present danger that those
who have leadership in the flock, who claim to hear the voice of Jesus, are
self-deceived, or worse, self-serving.
There is the risk that the flock could see their belonging as a title to
preferential treatment or a guarantee of purity, and proceed exclude, expel,
and even persecute those they decide don’t qualify. There’s the possibility that belonging to the
flock will become blurred with other exclusionary forms of belonging, with racism
or sexism, nationalism or party politics, and become just another tool of
hatred, injustice, and violence.
Christians have shown
themselves capable of creating communities of belonging like this. But so are every other kind of people, which
leads me to believe that this is an endemic problem not of being Christian but
of being human. And for all the human ailments
that afflict the church, there is still at its heart, in its constitution, you
might say, an invitation to a different mode of belonging. It is put forward for us in the Revelation to
John as a vision of the church as it will be, an image of a great throng from
every family, and language, and tribe, and nation, worshipping together before
the throne of God. It is a community guided
and protected by the lamb at the center of the throne, the slaughtered lamb who
is their shepherd, whom they trust and follow because he isn’t swayed by anyone’s
narrow and self-interested agenda, but has entrusted himself completely to
God.
The testimony of the first followers
of Jesus is that he identified himself so completely with the work of God that
he could say “I and the Father are one.”
By which he means that his personal mission is one with the creative
activity of the Father. His act of
laying down of his life for the sheep is one with God’s act of loving the world
so much that he gave his only Son, that the world might be saved through
him. This is more than simply a statement about the
divinity of Jesus, and why he was worthy to be raised from the dead. It’s an invitation to a new way of being
human, founded not on the exclusion of a vilified other—be it a sexual other, a
religious or ethnic or political other, or any other kind—but founded on the
Father’s loving embrace of all whom he has made.
This way of belonging comes
into our lives in the witness of other followers of Jesus to the fullness of
life that flows from his gift to the world of himself. It is a gift he gave without discrimination,
to hopeless sinners and self-righteous enemies and faithless disciples alike. To accept this gift is to be known by him and
to follow him, as one who belongs to his sheep.
This is how we come to believe, and to hear his voice, how we learn at
last to love as he loves. It’s how we
belong, not just to a church, or to a religion, but to the life of God, that cannot
be taken from us, and will never pass away.
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