Fourth Sunday of Easter, rcl yr c, 2022
Acts 9:36-43; Psalm 23; Revelation 7:9-17; John 10:22-30
My sheep hear my voice
I went through the discernment process for ordination as a relatively young man, in my late mid-twenties. Part of that is going to ACPO as it’s called—the Advisory Committee on Postulants for Ordination, where a whole bunch of people that are largely hopeful about getting ordained at some point meet with a conference of people who are, much wiser than most in the ways of discerning calls to ordination. After ACPO for me came residential seminary, a kind of hothouse experience, where a whole bunch of us studied, lived, ate, prayed, and watched baseball together for three or four years, and otherwise were prepared for ordination. And now I’ve been ordained for a while, with the privilege of spending a good amount of that time in places where people are discerning vocations to the church in some way.
So over the years I’ve had the opportunity to hear a whole lot of people describe many different ways that they’ve been called to ordained ministry. Including some that would say that they’ve heard the voice of God.
Perhaps because my own call to ministry has taken place in a certain way, with a low degree of personal sense of call, and yet with a high degree, apparently, of the inevitability of my call; or, as one person has put it,“ Preston, you were dragged into ordination kicking and screaming”; perhaps because my own call to ordination had more to do with trusting the voices of friends and mentors, and less to do with hearing the voice of God, I’ve always felt a bit suspicious of those who claim that God has spoken to them directly.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly open to the possibility of this sort of experience; God communicates with us in many different ways. But I will say that I’m usually a bit relieved if someone says, “I heard the voice of God,” and they then say, “and there was also a community of people around me that affirmed what I heard.”
Jesus, though, in John’s Gospel, seems at first to have a very different take on this, Jesus seems a lot less reluctant to affirm that he would speak to those who follow him. In John’s Gospel, hearing the voice of Jesus appears to be a matter of course, and something that is not even limited to people discerning a call to ministry, but is something that all Christians should experience. “My sheep hear my voice,” says Jesus, in our Gospel reading today, as though hearing the voice of Jesus isn’t a special or rare experience, but a prerequisite to being a Christian disciple.
And I wonder if you’ve felt this way sometimes: if only God would speak clearly to me I would know what decision to make about all these difficult things, if only I could hear some divine utterance I would know how to follow Jesus, if only I could hear the voice of Jesus I would know what to do with my life. But that God seems to remain quite silent.
There are some venerable traditions of particular practices of prayer that would speak quite positively about the silence of God. The Desert Fathers,
for example, were quite suspicious when people heard the voice of God. For that tradition of prayer, what you think is the voice of God is just as likely to be a demon speaking, deceiving you; what you think is the voice of God is just as likely to be your own ego, deluding you; and even if it was truly the voice of God calling you to do some strange, wonderful, or dubious thing, you would still be just as faithful if you were simply to return to your room and pray.
After all, this is what St. Paul tells us to do in Scripture, to pray without ceasing, and if we hear of it in Scripture it would be reliable advice, wouldn’t it; and without the risk of the advice having its source rather in malevolent forces or personal delusion. Trust the Scriptures, say the Desert Fathers, even if you’re sure you’ve heard God speak directly to you; go to your room, and pray without ceasing.
You may be relieved, or maybe even disappointed, that John’s Gospel is quite close to the spirit of the Desert Fathers. That is, John’s Gospel itself is the way we hear the voice of Jesus, the Good Shepherd. We need no ethereal voice from the heavens; we have the voice of Jesus already in our hands, already in our ears, in John’s Gospel itself. David Ford puts it this way: “The Gospel of John is written to enable readers to know, through its testimony, who their true shepherd is, to learn to recognize his voice through attending to his teaching and conversations, to trust him because of who he is and what he does, and to follow him. Reading and rereading what John writes, […] is a vital way to stay attuned to the voice of the Word made flesh.”
So take heart as you try to make difficult decisions, or as you discern your ministry, or as you try to make your way through this life. Take heart, in part, in the strange discipline of the church, where we listen week by week, often repetitively, to the Holy Scriptures. Where we would hear John’s Gospel read again, and again. Take heart in the personal discipline of reading the Bible day-by-day. Repeatedly! Because this is the primary way that we would hear the voice of the shepherd.
Origen of Alexandria speaks of reading Scripture as though it were like knocking on a door and waiting for the Word of God to appear to us. Karl Barth, for his part many centuries later, would speak not so much of the importance of the words on the page of the Bible (though they are very important!) but would speak of the Bible as that which reveals the Word of God to faithful readers and listeners. The Word of God isn’t the Bible; the Word of God is Jesus, who speaks in the Bible.
So take heart, all those of us who have never had the clouds part, and God speak to us directly—take heart, perhaps, because that may be the way of deception and delusion anyway. Take heart and listen to the reading of Scripture, take heart and read the Bible! And not because the Bible is a book of rules, as though we could take a problem and find a clear solution to that problem, if only we knew where to look.
No, read John’s Gospel, read the Bible, listen to the reading of Scripture, because that’s where you will surely hear the voice of your shepherd, and where, through reading and rereading again, you will be trained in hearing that voice ever more clearly; and this by the grace of God, the grace of the Word made flesh—the Word that comes to us as a living and transforming force in the Scriptures that would reveal his voice, the voice of the true, and good shepherd; in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, AMEN.
The Revd Dr Preston DS Parsons