Richard Bollman, S.J.
SCRIPTURE COMMENT: 4th Sunday of Easter, Year B
Acts 4:8-12; 1John 3:1-2; John 10:11-18
I need to fill you in on the background of the opening selection from Acts.
You hear the voice of Peter speaking in his defense at a trial.
There had been a lame beggar near the Temple gate,
and he had asked for spare change from some of the Jesus disciples,
who didn’t have gold or silver to offer him.
But they said, "we’ll give you what we can:
in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, get up and walk."
That led to the arrest of the disciples,
since they had used the name of Jesus, something they were forbidden to do.
And of course, they destabilized society by setting loose
this new power in the community, toward healing and walking on your own.
In the Gospel, the power is released in a similar way,
by our willingness and our ability to hear the voice of Jesus directly.
That felt connection, and the commitment of Jesus to us,
is the heart of this parable of the Good Shepherd.
Between these two narratives comes a word from John’s Letter to the Church
about the Fatherhood of God.
A later generation might also want to speak of God’s motherhood,
but the main point here is the status of children of God:
we are inheritors of the divine, adopted into a situation
where our future is beyond imagining,
to be drawn to see God and to be like God.
All this is a spelling out of the Easter experience
as it was understood in the earliest days.
HOMILY. 4th Sunday of Easter.
"The Voice of the Inner Christ"
"I know my own, and my own know me."
Those that I want to bring into my flock, Jesus says,
"will listen to my voice."
This refers to a mutuality of knowing, an inner recognition,
a voice of the Shepherd that is not heard shouted in the streets
but rather within the mind, heart, soul, of one who believes.
We hear a lot of voices,
but the voice of Jesus is recognizable in the midst of them all,
and it is the one to trust.
So I ask myself, what is this inner voice of Jesus, this voice of the Christ.
And I asked around, even yesterday. A woman friend said,
"well to begin with, the voice is going to sound like your own voice:
it comes in your own language, your own sense of things.
But," she went on, "I’d think of it as the voice of your own True Nature."
This phrase was helpful to collect my own thoughts.
It’s hard, often enough, to sort through all that we carry in our heads,
all the obsessions that disturb us at work or the breakfast table,
but sometimes you get an appetite to just hear the truth,
one true word. You listen in the muddle.
It’s like behind the dark network of stuff, there is this invitation,
this light that comes, and it comes often enough in words.
This voice of our own True Nature;
it has a way of showing up.
I remember driving out to visit family one night,
my nephew: his four sons were home together,
from college, jobs out of town,
and I hadn’t been there in more than a year.
Things like this make me anxious: you say "yes," but how will it go?
People in my family don’t know much what I do for a living, what I think.
I have these internal voices as I drive: "be careful not to get into politics,
figure out something to say about sports figures, teams, questions to ask."
And while walking up to the door, ground zero,
working hard to relax and appear natural,
I heard distinctly this voice, in my own language and tone,
but coming from a different place.
"Look, Richard, they invited you, they really want to see you.
Just plunge right in. And take an interest."
I think that small word was my Good Shepherd talking,
my True Nature, the inner Christ.
For one thing, I remember it right now, the chilly night,
that word coming as I stood at the door and then rang the bell.
And it was years ago. It remains a kind of bellwether for me,
a way to know when I’m on track or not.
And another reason: the results were really full of life.
You see, our true nature wants to open us up to possibility
in the present moment we’re living.
And the word came, as I said, from a part of my being
that I do not directly control.
It came from the inner friend, the one who saves.
The voice of Jesus is NOT some carping mildly pushy voice
that you don’t really want to listen to.
One retreat director liked to ask,
"just who is this Jesus Christ you talk about?
Would you want to go on vacation with him?"
My God, even to share a room!
Do you know a Christ who would say,
"well, this is a great place we’ve got, but isn’t it a little expensive?
And I wonder, couldn’t you get up just a little earlier
so we’d have more time to hike?"
Or you come in after a nice golf game and dinner and you get,
"you could have been more kind to that waitress,
she was just doing her best. Don’t you ever try to be charitable"?
That isn’t the voice of any good shepherd, but more my own carping self.
I want to stay with that, be clear about that,
the heart of Jesus does not speak from some cranky place
reminding us how wrong and stupid we are.
Rather it is a voice of surprising friendly assurance, revelation, affection.
We are delighted to listen to it.
It is the voice of our true nature.
And there is one thing more: it can move us into risk.
Look at what happened to Peter before the court of the Sanhedrin.
He knew what to say, but it came from a deeper place,
the Spirit gave him words to speak
very directly about the healing that had happened.
And he plunged in, whether it meant prison or freedom,
And it turned out to mean both: prison AND freedom.
Here is one story like that, among many I’ve heard.
Marcia was a woman I met on retreat, over the course of 30 days at Milford.
She came from the Philippines and as she arrived
she spoke of a notice she had received from her community
assigning her to a leadership position, something she dreaded,
being right in the middle of many factions and tensions--
stresses in religious life, politics, and poverty.
Prayer on these things was difficult, impossible.
She prayed to escape her reality, working hard.
She was a restless and unresigned woman for several days.
And then a friend from her country sent a box,
a small box wrapped in newspaper, and it contained
the ashes of Mt. Pinatubo. A volcano that had erupted not long before.
I remember getting ashes in the mail from friends in Washington
after Mt. St. Helen’s exploded. It was a kind souvenir.
Marcia’s friend knew nothing of her appointment or her apprehensions.
But the ashes in a little box spoke to her.
Or they released in her a deeper voice, her own mutuality
with the Christ of her life, suffering in her people.
This was a place and a word she did not control, but she heard it.
She began to feel drawn to affirm her own future,
even in the ashes of her country.
And a dream came, in which she saw herself in a valley
at the edge of her convent’s property, south of Manila,
and from the house and the hill, there came pouring out
this rushing stream of water that caught her up,
pushed her powerfully, but did not drown her.
She felt alive and amazed by the abundance of the water.
The dream was beyond her direct control,
but as you know, dreams come from ourselves,
genuinely from our True Nature.
"The one who is a hireling," Jesus says, "sees trouble coming and flees.
But I am the Shepherd, the inner Christ, and I know my own
and they know me." And I am with you in the heart of it.
That voice speaks to the truth of your life,
pulls together strands from your past,
plunges you into the present moment,
and assures you of life, even happiness, even in difficult times.
That’s why this Good Shepherd story comes in Easter time.
This mutuality with the inner Christ, our true nature you may call it,
is the gift of the risen life, the awakened life.
The risen life, is not a joy that occurs at the end of things,
it is more like living and being in life in this moment,
living in bliss, living in happiness, not pursuing it.
Even in the suffering of what is and what has to be,
right there the voice speaks to you, opening your own soul.
It was this way from the beginning.
He showed them his wounds, and is also willing to touch our own.
Knowing us so well, that close, and never running away.