April 12,2008
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April 12,2008
John 10: 1-10
Connie May 3/113/08
Drawing with permission by Fr. Robert Beck
ENTERING THE SCENE:
It seems to be getting more and more difficult to tell who is a real leader and who is a “robber/thief”. With focus groups and spin masters, keeping people “on message”; a message they have tested with sophisticated machines to pander to our fears and wants, we in our busy lives often feel overwhelmed when it comes time to choose. But Jesus gives us the secret if we but listen. He says a true leader/shepherd, is one whose main goal is to provide our freedom to come in and go out and find pasture: in other words to live full and meaningful lives. If we find that the ones we choose only provide that for themselves at our expense, we have now an opportunity to learn and choose differently. And His sheep are quick learners, they aren’t fooled easily. They know His voice. Now listen carefully to His voice and see what you might learn.
John 10:1-10 1 I tell you the truth, the man who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber. 2 The man who enters by the gate is the shepherd of his sheep. 3 The watchman opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4 When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. 5 But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger's voice." 6 Jesus used this figure of speech, but they did not understand what he was telling them. 7 Therefore Jesus said again, "I tell you the truth, I am the gate for the sheep. 8 All who ever came before me were thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. 9 I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. He will come in and go out, and find pasture. 10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
DISCUSSION QUESTION: Good shepherds go ahead of their sheep because they have proved themselves to the sheep as someone who wants their well being. How good am I at knowing the voice of my Shepherd?
PRAYER: Lord, I come again to this familiar reading with a lot more life experience since the last time I reflected on these words. I sometimes wonder how good a student/listener I am. That becomes most painfully apparent when I find myself in a “here I am again” box of pain. Help me to listen carefully to what that pain is trying to teach me, so that I can more easily identify the thieves and robbers in my life. Help me to trust that you are guarding the gate of my soul, and that with you I will have life to its fullest. Amen.
WORD STUDY AND QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION:
I TELL YOU THE TRUTH: Today, we might say, listen up this is really important for your well being.
What is your initial response to someone when they say “listen up”? Does your response depend on who is speaking?
SHEEP: Sheep were very valuable to the life and well being of people in Jesus’ day. They were a source of food, clothing and shelter. There was a strong interdependence between the people and their sheep.
If someone were to call you a sheep today, would you like it? Do you ever experience interdependence with God by way of the shepherd/sheep parables?
GATE: Sheep from many flocks were pastured together in a safe place with a watchman sleeping in the gate.
Is there anyone on watch at the ‘gate’ for you now? If so, who is it?
SHEPHERD: By the time of Jesus, the role of shepherd had changed from the guardian/nurturer of the sheep to the user of the sheep.
Have you ever experienced someone who pretended to be something that they were not? If so, what did you learn from that experience?
THEIF / ROBBER / STRANGER / BEFORE ME: A shepherd was seen as a thief, robber, and a person of dubious character. (See below)
What is Jesus teaching the people/us with this advice?
WATCHMAN: A watchman was the person designated by many shepherds to guard the flocks as they rested for the night. The watchman often had to defend the sheep from predators.
Who are the watchmen and women of today’s sheep?
LISTEN / KNOW: Since the sheep were mixed together for the night, the individual shepherds would use a specific cry to call them out for the days pasturing.
How has your listening to God’ voice, helped you to know that voice when it calls?
VOICE: A person’s voice is like a fingerprint for recognition.
In what ways are you able to hear Jesus’ voice in studying scripture?
NAME: Each shepherd had their own mark on their sheep. In smaller flocks they often were also given names.
What does this tell you about Jesus as a shepherd? Do you image yourself as a named sheep?
LEADS THEM OUT / BROUGHT OUT / GOES ON AHEAD / ENTERS THROUGH ME: Our faith life is a process where we are lead by someone who has gone ahead, who then admits us through their teaching or witness.
Who has or is shepherding you as you deepen your faith? Are you shepherding anyone?
FOLLOW / COME IN AND GO OUT: The sheep are free to come and go in safety as long as they follow their shepherd.
Can you see how living within (follow) Jesus’ truth enables you to ‘come in and go out’ freely?
RUN AWAY: Learning to run from those who have ulterior motives is an important skill.
In what ways do you sense an ulterior motive so that you can ‘run away’ from it?
DO NOT RECOGNIZE / FIGURE OF SPEECH / DID NOT UNDERSTAND: Jesus uses metaphors or figures of speech a lot in his teaching. Often people fail to recognize or understand right away.
How does a metaphor or figure of speech challenge the listener to go deeper into the truth? How does it protect the one who is not ready yet to hear the truth?
FIND PASTURE / HAVE LIFE / HAVE IT TO THE FULL: Jesus reveals that our lives are created by God to be lives of fullness.
Does the promise of your resurrection enable you to go out and live life fully?
STEAL / KILL / DESTROY: Fear can steal, kill, and destroy our ability to have a full life.
Have you given anyone or anything the power to steal, kill, or destroy your ability to live life to its fullness? How can this scripture help you to recognize that fear and overcome it?
PARALLEL TEXTS: Jn. 10:1f // Jer. 23:1f; Ezek. 34:1f; Jn. 10:4 // Mi. 2:12f; Jn. 10:9 // Ps. 23:1f; Is. 49:9f;
OTHER TEXTS OF THE WEEK: Acts 2:14, 36-41; Ps. 23:1-6; 1 Pt. 2:20-25; Jn. 10:1-10;
Revised Common Lectionary: Acts 2:42-27; Ps. 23; 1 Pt. 2:19-25; Jn. 10: 1-10;
SUPPORTIVE INFORMATION:
There is no simple truth, here or anywhere else. Truth is painfully complex (as are we) and truth is always bigger than our capacity to absorb and integrate it. To be open to truth is to be perpetually stretched and perpetually in tension, at least this side of eternity. And that's true in terms of the seeming opposition between these voices. At times they are in real opposition and we can't have it both ways, but have to choose one to the detriment of the other. Truth has real boundaries and there's a danger in letting it mean everything. But there's an equal danger in letting it mean too little, of reducing a full truth to a half-truth - and nowhere, at least in the spiritual life, is this danger greater than in our tendency to let either of these voices completely blot out the other.
Check out the entire column at: Rolheiser, Fr. Ron. Conflicting Voices
Despite our Lord's warnings and intimations, the wary Apostles didn't know what was happening. The uncomfortable feeling we have that it's not going as it should is the best proof that it's still going on in our day.
"Happy the servant whose master returns and find them up and ready!" Those who are of God hear His words"--living words that are being spoken to us right now; enlightening words that tell us about God and ourselves; dynamic words that reveal us to ourselves and sound the strongest call to conversion: disturbing, discomfiting words for those who grasp them, expose their mind to them and really try to live by them.
"Those who are of God..." When we love, we understand.
"Many refused to head Him because their works were evil."
"His sheep know His voice and follow Him."
God's words are efficacious, too, because they free us from our shamming and our hypocrisy. What time and energy we used to spend putting on our mask and fitting our costume! He's finally ripped them off of us, and now we're free-- free to do something else, ready to perform another way: His way.
Louis Evely, That Man is You. Paulist Press, NY 1963. Pages 56-57.
Jesus' natural fear of death assures us that he took on the full human condition. Ernest Becker says, "The human animal is characterized by two great fears that other animals are protected from: the fear of death and the fear of life." See Becker, The Denial of Death, p. 53. Jesus also feared life, as we all do. He had to overcome his fear of living life fully, using all his gifts, living with great passion, with all his senses keenly awakened. We fear life because living fully costs so much. It means standing out from the crowd as a unique individual, risking others' censure. While each human has a unique voiceprint and fingerprints, we all fear being unique. We shrink back from both death and life. Once Jesus had transformed these two fears into twin dynamic energies, he was able to continuously give the gift of life. He called himself the bread of life and said he had come that all might have life and have it in great abundance.
Hays, Edward. The Gospel of Gabriel. Forest of Peace Books, Easton, KS. 1996. Pages239-140.
“I AM
THE GATE
Gates / Both welcome and forbid / and sometimes / Require a price to pass through. / Considering my whole life / What is BEING SAFE? / What is the price for me / to enter through the gate? / WHOEVER ENTERS THROUGH ME WILL BE SAFE.”
“I CAME SO THT THEY MAY HAVE LIFE…AND / What gets in the way / of my enjoying my life? / What? / Why / do I / allow it? / For surely / To be fragmented, blunted, diminished, / Is NOT the reason for my existence. / What / might I change / to / HAVE IT MORE ABUNDANTLY.”
Halpin, Marlene, Dominican. Leading Prayer: Plain and Simple. Dubuque, IA. Brown Pub. 1990. Page 102.
"The real sin against the Holy Spirit is refusing to recognize, with 'theological' joy, some concrete liberation that is taking place before one's very eyes." (Juan Luis Segundo)
As one who has taught the Gospel of John for more than 40 years, I used to struggle with Jesus’ words, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6), because it sounds at first as if Jesus were the exclusive way to God. But as I reflected on it in the context of the Gospel of John, I found that this Gospel of John, I found that this Gospel speaks very little about our way to God and everything about God’s way to us and to the whole world. This means that Jesus is “way…truth…life,” not because he is the exclusive way to God but because he embodies and articulates God’s inclusive way to all of humanity. Paul L. Hammer
The highest happiness of man…is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
In the Middle East some shepherds walk before their sheep and call them with a peculiar cry. Voice recognition is therefore more than simply knowing the voice of the shepherd. All shepherds were viewed as thieves, as men who exposed their women to shame by leaving them uncared for while they pastured the sheep, and as immoral men who found pleasure in sheep while absent from their wives.
Pilch, John J. The Cultural World of Jesus-Cycle A. The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN. 1995. Page 76.
For a good understanding of the shepherd metaphor see: Keller, Phillip. A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23. Grand Rapids, MI. Zondervan Pub.. 1970.
What had happened was that which Jesus had often warned his followers to avoid: turning his teachings into a religion like that practiced by the scribes, Pharisees and lawyers. When he commanded his followers to go out to all nations, he was telling them to take his life and light to the cultures of the world. His teaching was not to become a cult or a substitute culture or a reason to be separated, chosen people apart from the world-place in which they lived. They were to go to what was there to inform it, purify it from within and life it to the full human dignity and to present it to God, the Father of all peoples and cultures “I have come so that they may have life and have it to the full” (Jn 10:10).
Heaps, John. A Love That Dares to Question: A Bishop Challenges His Church. Grand Rapids, MI. Eerdmans Pub. Col. 1998. . Pages 12-13.
And what is the purpose of this Easter Saturday lifestyle, this closeness to our fellow citizens in the earthly community, however different and distant from us, who are more our real neighbors in Christ that those congenial to us and just like us with whom we happily volunteer to be associated? Of course, in love’s logic, response to human need has its own raison d etre, without ulterior goal or external rationale. It is certainly not to liberate and unify them by our efforts and ideals that we seek to love our neighbors as ourselves –as if God’s kingdom were of our own building or its coming determined by our own schedule. Rather, we love them to make manifest a sign that God is lovingly, redemptively at work among them, having become identified with the godless, the godforsaken, and the dead. The goal of mission and of service is not to improve the world and create utopia on earth; it is that the world may believe and know, know that God loves the world and has sent the Son to deliver it fro perishing to everlasting and abundant life (Jn. 10: 10).
Lewis, Alan E. Between Cross and Resurrection. Grand Rapids, MI. Eerdmans. 2001. Pages 456-7.
Leadership (as opposed to tyranny) happens only where there is virtue, and reverence is the virtue on which leadership most depends. Pg. 165
Woodruff, Paul. Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue. NY. Oxford Univ. Press. 2001.
Let your first rule of action be to trust in God as if success depended entirely on yourself and not on him: but use all your efforts as if God alone did everything, and yourself nothing. Ignatius Loyola
Let your first rule of action be to trust in God as if success depended entirely on yourself and not on him: but use all your efforts as if God alone did everything and yourself nothing. Ignatius Loyola
Real life comes to be itself precisely in moving beyond the limits of control and certainty. Trust is integral to real life. We have an inner need to trust, to believe, to live in a mutual recognition with others. Interdependency cannot happen without it. This interdependency is energized by the unpredictable and new which occurs when separate beings merge and form a new reality. This is life which comes to itself beyond the predictable, secure, and controllable. Fr. David Bock
SUGGESTED READINGS:
Mitchell, Stephen. The Enlightened Heart. Harper & Row, NY. 1989. The Great Way: Page 46.
Janice Grana Ed. Images. St. Mary's College Press, Winona MN 1976. A GIFT: Page 65. ENDINGS: Page 83. EVERY NEW DAY I HAVE A NEW CHANCE: Page 140