Easter 4-A  (4/13/08)              Acts 2:42-47; 1 Pt 2:19-25; Jn 10:1-10

Epiphany, South Haven                                                Fr. Joseph Neiman

Theme: “They follow him for they know his voice” (Jn 10:4)

Do you have “itching ears” (2 Tim 4:3) or do you listen to the voice “the shepherd and guardian of your souls?” (1 Pt 2:25)? What voices do you hear and follow?

Easter time, as I told you two weeks ago, is a time in which we focus on the presence and power of the risen Lord in our lives today. This Sunday the focus is on shepherding, hearing the voice of the Good Shepherd and following him.

When we hear the Gospel read, we need to ask: what are you saying to me in this passage, Lord? What do you want me to hear?

We have the metaphor of the shepherd and the sheep in this narrative, and that is only somewhat familiar to us in southwest Michigan where a few framers raise sheep. It was a very familiar metaphor in ancient Palestine, which was an agricultural society. We hear some of the images of the shepherd and the sheep in passages of Scripture. For example, we have all heard the 23rd Psalm:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
²          He makes me lie down in green pastures;
he leads me beside still waters;^*
3   he restores my soul.^*
He leads me in right paths^*
   for his name’s sake.

In a lesser known passage, the prophet Ezekiel is told by the Lord to “prophesy against the shepherds of Israel” (Ex 34:2). These were the leaders, the king, the high priests and priests, the scribes, and the elders of the people – names of people we have heard about in the recent Passion Narratives during Holy Week.

          Ezekiel writes in Chapter 34 about the failure of the shepherds of Israel to be faithful to God’s word in leading their people and to cease growing fat by plundering them:

          “For thus says the Lord God: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. ¹²As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. ¹³I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land; … there they shall lie down in good grazing land, and they shall feed on rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. ¹⁵I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God. ¹⁶I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice” (Ezekiel 34:11-17).

Parents are shepherds of their children who are on loan to them for some twenty years. Teachers are temporary shepherds. Spouses or other family members can be shepherds for us at times. Pastors are shepherds. In our tradition they are called by the titles, “Mother” or “Father” since they seek to guide their “flock” in the right pathways of life. All of us have memories of good shepherding as well as poor shepherding in our relationships with parents, teachers, and pastors.

In the gospel today, John tells us that Jesus said: “I came that (you) may have life and have it abundantly” (Jn 10:10). Parents, teachers, pastors and other shepherds seek to guide us on the path that leads to that abundant life, to become the persons we are fully a capable of becoming physically, mentally, and spiritually. But we all also fail in our shepherding.

Fr Henri Nouwen writes:

“Our most painful suffering often comes from those who love

us and those we love.  The relationships between husband and

wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters, teachers

and students, pastors and parishioners - these are where our

deepest wounds occur.  Even late in life, yes, even after

those who wounded us have long since died, we might still

need help to sort out what happened in these relationships.

The great temptation is to keep blaming those who were

closest to us for our present, condition saying:  "You made

me who I am now, and I hate who I am."  The great challenge

is to acknowledge our hurts and claim our true selves as

being more than the result of what other people do to us.

Only when we can claim our God-made selves as the true

source of our being will we be free to forgive those who

have wounded us[1].

I have often said to high school graduating classes at Baccalaureates: Thank God for the good things your parents gave you and taught you, and forgive them to those which were hurtful. You can’t continue to live blaming them for your life. It is all up to you now to become the person you are capable of becoming building on the gifts and talents they gave you. You’re in charge.

Similarly, our pastors, our priests and bishops, our spiritual leaders also bless our lives with their guidance or hurt us. Again Fr. Nouwen writes:

          “Religious leaders, priests, ministers, rabbis, and imams can

be admired and revered but also hated and despised.  We

expect that our religious leaders will bring us closer to

God through their prayers, teaching, and guidance.

Therefore, we watch their behavior carefully and listen

critically to their words.   But precisely because we

expect, often without fully realising it, to be superhuman,

we are easily disappointed or even feel betrayed when they

prove to be just as human as we are.  Thus, our unmitigated

admiration quickly turns into unrestrained anger.

Let's try to love our religious leaders, forgive them their

faults, and see them as brothers and sisters.  Then we will

enable them, in their brokenness, to lead us closer to the

heart of God”.[2]

The advice I give to graduates applies to us as members of the Church as well. We need to forgive spiritual leaders who have or continue to wound us. We have to move beyond that hurt and through our forgiving to receive healing. This action of forgiving, as I explained two weeks ago, sets us free. When we evict the one living rent free in our heads and hearts, we can experience the presence and power of the risen Lord today, now!.

We need to learn to love the Church, for better and for worse. Again I quote Fr. Nouwen:

‘Loving the Church does not require romantic emotions.  It

requires the will to see the living Christ among his people

and to love them as we want to love Christ himself.   This

is true not only for the "little" people - the poor, the

oppressed, the forgotten - but also for the "big" people who

exercise authority in the Church.

To love the Church means to be willing to meet Jesus

wherever we go in the Church.  This love doesn't mean

agreeing with or approving of everyone's ideas or behavior.

On the contrary, it can call us to confront those who hide

Christ from us.  But whether we confront or affirm,

criticize or praise, we can only become fruitful when our

words and actions come from hearts that love the Church.”[3]

Good shepherding in the family, in classrooms, and especially in the Church can lead us to experience the presence and power of the risen Lord, who, through His Holy Spirit, seeks to guide us onto the path that leads to the abundant life he promised.

But we have trouble listening to that voice of the “shepherd and guardian” of our souls, as we heard in the Letter from Peter this morning (1 Pt 2:25). Paul, writing to his assistant, Timothy, tells him to preach the Gospel no matter whether people are willing to hear it or not.

          For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, ⁴and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myth” (2 Tom 4:3-4).

Having been hurt by one shepherd can easily turn us off from listening to any shepherd who seek to guide us in Christ’s name. We easily listen instead with “itching ears” to the other voices we hear. You see we all hear voices. They are the voices of our parents or significant people in our lives, the voices speaking from our own hurtful memories, or simply the voices of our culture.

For example, our House of Bishops, Pope John Paul II, Lutheran Bishops and others spoke our clearly against our pre-emptive strike against Iraq some six years ago. They have also spoken against capital punishment. In each of these examples, they prayerfully sought to listen to the voice of the Good Shepherd and share that voice with us.

We when hear such voices, do we say something like, they just don’t understand. They are not truly informed. Clergy should stay out of politics.

But when we say these things, what voices are we listening to? Have we made serious study and analysis of the political situation or are we listen to one pundit or another? It is so easy to listen to our prejudices, our hurts, and our fears rather than seek to hear the voice of the Good Shepherd.

For your homework this week, ask yourself if you have ‘itching ears”? Do you hear only those things with which you agree in advance, which seem to fit with your pre-judgments? Or do you seek to hear the voice of the one who calls you by name and who would lead you in the “right paths”?

We develop ears to hear the voice of the Good Shepherd by knowing the words and deeds of Jesus, hearing what he teaches us in the Gospels. We develop ears to hear when we are shepherd by good teachers who seek to share the voice of the Good Shepherd they have heard by their prayer and study. We develop ears to hear when we seek the advice of wise elders, solid men and women whose wisdom, indeed, Christian wisdom, can guide us.

Which voices do you follow? Where do these voices lead you? Do you have itching ears or the ears of a disciple? Jesus said, Matthew tells us“They who have ears to hear, let them hear” (Mt 11:15).

God bless you and keep you this day and always, and remember the good Lord comes to you in shepherding that you may have life and have it abundantly, and because He loves you more that you can ask for or even imagine. Do you believe it?