Hearing the Voice of the Shepherd
Easter IV; April 29, 2007
John 10:22-30
Now that the Presidential campaign is well underway – at least here in Iowa – the issues facing us as a nation are being thoroughly explored and thoroughly obscured; we ask candidates for their proposals with respect to health care, or the war in Iraq, or tax policy, or trade, and so forth. And it is a good thing to ask, but as a guy from Pennsylvania who spent a lot of my adult life in Ohio, I’m having a hard time caring very much right now, with the General Election still a bit more than eighteen months away.
Christian folks, generally speaking, want to make decisions about public issues based on what Jesus teaches us and leads us to believe to be important. So, although the issues swirling through today’s reading are many, the question I ask of the text is in response to the statement of Jesus in verse 27: “My sheep hear my voice.” “How?” is my question. How do we hear the voice of the Shepherd?
Let’s cut away some stuff first. Sometimes you will hear, “If Jesus were here, he would say…” Do not simply accept such a statement on face value. What leads the speaker to come to that conclusion? Does the speaker really know the mind of Jesus that well, or does the speaker merely want to claim messianic sanction for a personal belief? How do we know, for instance, that Jesus would oppose the death penalty or that Jesus would support it? Writers of letters to the editor of the World-Herald certainly seem to know. And they know what Jesus has to say about embryonic stem cell research and whether women should be able to choose to have an abortion.
I am not claiming that you cannot know the mind of Jesus on these and similar matters; I’ll say more about that soon. I am claiming, rather, that simply saying it’s so doesn’t make it so.
Another thing we trot out – and I have done this myself, alas – is the argument from absence. That is, if Jesus didn’t say anything about it directly, then he must not have an opinion on it. Those of us who support the full inclusion of homosexual persons in the life of Church and society are among those most guilty of that. It’s true: in the Gospels, Jesus never said anything about homosexuality. He also never said anything about the right to vote or about the faithful conduct of foreign policy. That does not mean he doesn’t have an opinion on those matters.
Now, to answer my own question – How do we hear the voice of the Shepherd? – I will do three things with you. The first is to talk about the importance of relationship in order to be sensitive to the Shepherd’s voice. Second, I will talk about sources for encountering that voice. And third, a principle for interpreting what you discover.
When Jesus talks about the sheep hearing his voice, his emphasis is on the matter of belonging to him. His issue in this text is explaining to his opponents why they don’t get who he is or what he’s about. They don’t get him because they don’t belong to him; his own sheep, however, hear his voice and follow his way. So the first thing to keep in mind is that to hear what Jesus has to say about something requires having a relationship with him. Relationship with Jesus is not so difficult as it may appear. Obviously you are not going to take him out to lunch, or meet him for golf on your day off. But you can spend time with him in prayer, and in reading the Gospels, and in sharing in his Holy Supper. I remember hearing a man say that the reason he loved the Lord’s Supper so much was it was his chance to have dinner with his best friend.
The other side of relationship with Jesus is participating in the life of his people. The Church is called the Body of Christ because it is the embodiment of the presence of Christ on earth, as imperfect as we are. No, I don’t mean stately buildings or saintly leaders: I mean Christian folks, getting together to do work projects or have supper or read the Bible or chat about life over coffee and, of course, getting together to sing the praises of God and share around the Table.
In this particular instance, when Christ says, “I and the Father are one,” he is not making a profound theological statement. I looked it up; no less an authority than John Calvin says the same thing. Jesus makes that point at other places in the Bible. Here, rather, the context and the words chosen make it clear that Jesus is saying that his work on earth is God’s work on earth; to hear his voice is to hear the voice of God. You and I might put our index and middle fingers together and say, “God and I are like that” and be saying the same thing. So, for Jesus, it begins with that sense of relationship, with living the life of God and attending to the work of God, and so for you and me to hear the voice of the Shepherd in such a way as to make intelligent decisions about morality or public policy we must first be in relationship with the Shepherd, living the Shepherd’s life in the world and attending to the Shepherd’s work in the world.
Unless you are given the spiritual gift of prophecy, you probably do not hear the Shepherd’s voice directly in your mind. Now, don’t think I’m being sarcastic, because I know people who have the gift of prophecy and I think they do hear the voice of the Shepherd in certain limited ways. I do not have that gift, so I must seek more conventional ways to hear the voice of the Shepherd, ways that I commend to you.
The first source for seeking the voice of the Shepherd is, of course, the Bible: not only the Gospels, but the entire Bible. Although Jesus is more directly revealed in the Gospels, Reformed Christians, at least, believe that the entire Bible is God’s witness to Jesus as the Messiah. So if Jesus never says anything directly in Matthew, Mark, Luke or John about the matter under concern, that does not mean he does not have an opinion: look in the Epistles and in the Old Testament. God is one and Jesus is the revealer of the work of God, so what is said elsewhere is a clue to the mind of Christ.
Now, before you start to get in your huff and drive off in it, remember that there is no such thing as reading the Bible without interpretation. Oh, some people claim to read it literally, but they are fooling themselves. Simply reading it in English rather than in the original language is interpreting it. You also interpret by deciding what kind of text you are reading and how, therefore, you should read it. Or you interpret by deciding that all texts are the same and should be read the same. Let’s suppose you have on your bookshelf at home the following: the latest Sue Grafton mystery novel (What letter of the alphabet is she up to now?), this week’s Time magazine, the owner’s manual for your new DVD player and recorder, a book of essays by P. J. O’Rourke, and Soap Opera Digest. Do you read all of them the same way? Do you not – perhaps unconsciously – get yourself in a different frame of mind for P. J. O’Rourke than you do for the owner’s manual? Yet some people claim to read all the books of the Bible – letters, prophecy, gospels, poetry, narrative – in exactly the same way and they have the gall to call their reading “literal.” By refusing to read the books of the Bible in the form in which they were written and instead imposing a flatness and sameness on them, they are interpreting the Bible very radically.
Another source for hearing the voice of the Shepherd is the multitude of theological and ethical statements produced by faithful Christian people over the years. Certainly, there is nothing in the Bible about embryonic stem cell research, but there is plenty about the value of life and the meaning of humanity and the search for wisdom and the attention to health and well-being. Faithful people, struggling prayerfully with biblical texts, produce remarkable work advising the people of God on the voice of the Shepherd. Some of those works are produced by our own General Assembly committees and task forces.
So, to hear the voice of the Shepherd, have a relationship with the Shepherd, and look in the Scriptures and the work of faithful followers for sources of the words of the Shepherd. And, in understanding the Shepherd’s way for us, be guided by this rule: the rule of love.
The rule of love has been our principle for interpreting the Bible throughout our history.* That is, whenever you are seeking to hear the voice of the Shepherd on a particular question and you study a text to illumine the answer, you will have a number of ways of understanding that text. Ask yourself, “Which interpretation most moves us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves?”
The rule of love is difficult to apply and we can still tussle with each other over which interpretation of Scripture is the most loving. That does not excuse us from using the rule. This insight should help: Jesus rarely spoke of the importance of loving humanity in the abstract or of loving the cosmos; he spoke instead of loving particular people. Love your neighbor; love your enemies; love one another. These are all things he said. Love people, love them as individuals, all of them and each of them.
So, when we have to make decisions about life in the Church or about public policy, we can listen for the voice of the Shepherd and follow him. Do that: belong to him and to one another; study the sources for understanding; and apply the rule of love.
Speak to us, our Shepherd, and give us courage to follow. Amen.
Robert A. Keefer
Westminster Presbyterian Church
Clarinda, Iowa
* A good exposition on the rule of love and other guidelines for understanding the Bible is in Presbyterian Understanding and Use of Holy Scripture (position paper of the 123rd General Assembly of the PCUS, 1983), pp. 13-14. You can get it at www.pcusa.org/oga/publications/scripture-use.pdf.