Easter 4 – 2022 (Good Shepherd Sunday)
John 10:22-30
Marian Free
In the name of God, Earth-Maker, Pain-Bearer, Life-Giver. Amen.
During the week I came across an interesting article titled: “Local carpenter spreads disinformation”. The piece imagined a newspaper article written around the time of Jesus that was seeking to discredit him and to stem the damage created by the misinformation that he was spreading. It suggested that readers head to their local synagogues to check their facts. While the article was written ‘tongue in cheek’ it does address a significant question – If a radical, disreputable person begins (convincingly) to teach things that are contradictory to the current position of the church how can the ordinary person determine what is true? This is a particularly difficult issue when the boundaries between synagogue/church and society are blurred, and when societal conventions get confused with church tradition and vice versa. It can be hard in such circumstances to determine what is culturally determined and what is determined by religious tradition.
A case in point is the debate around the ordination of women. As long ago as 1917 the Lambeth Conference affirmed that there were no theological objections to the ordination of women (which implies that there were discussions around this issue well before that time). It took another sixty years of fiercely argued debate before the first women were ordained (illegally in the United States) and legally in New Zealand and elsewhere. In Australia it was to take more than seventy years before women were made priests in 1992. People do not like change, and they certainly do not like their long-cherished ideas to be challenged. A great deal of the argument against ordaining women was irrational, based as much on societal norms as it was on theological or biblical teaching.
Congregations who had only recently allowed women to be on Parish Council, or even to act as Sides people, simply could not envisage a woman in the Sanctuary, let alone a woman as a Presider and Preacher. Faithful churchgoers were afraid that the church that they loved would be irrevocably changed if women were ordained and they resisted fiercely. (A live and contemporary issue that will be debated at this General Synod is the place of LGBTQI+ community within our churches, and in particular whether blessings of civl marriages can be conducted by our clergy.)
We can sympathise then, with the people in today’s gospel. To them Jesus was unsettling and unconventional. He was challenging accepted ways of interpreting the scriptures and he was questioning the religious establishment. He was suggesting that just because something had always been done in a particular way, it did not need to be that way forever. He demonstrated in word and deed that some things – intended to be liberating – had, over time become restrictive and even destructive.
If it took the Anglican Church 60-100 years to make up its mind about the ordination of women, it is hardly surprising that three years were not nearly enough time for Jesus’ contemporaries to adjust to his teaching! For all his miraculous acts Jesus was, to all intents and purposes, a troublemaker and a lawbreaker. He might have given sight to the man born blind, but he did so on the Sabbath showing no regard for the law or scriptures! That Jesus was divisive is indicated by the verses just prior to today’s gospel. “The Jews were divided because of these words. Many of them were saying, ‘He has a demon and is out of his mind. Why listen to him?’ Others were saying, ‘These are not the words of one who has a demon. Can a demon open the eyes of the blind?’”
Jesus has truly put the cat among the pigeons. Some among the crowds have a sense that he is someone out of the ordinary, but others find him disturbing – dangerous even. It is no wonder that they plead with him to put them out of their misery, to give them some certainty. “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly,” they beg.
It is human nature to want certainty, just as it is human nature to resist change. It is relatively easy to believe static things like scriptures, history and tradition. It is much more difficult to discern if and how God is working in the present. If only we could be sure that God was speaking, that God was endorsing change!
The crowds in today’s gospel want assurance. Despite everything they have seen and heard, they cannot allow themselves to submit to belief. They want Jesus to lay to rest all their questions and fears. But this is something that Jesus cannot do. He can’t force them to believe; a word from him will not automatically quell all their anxieties and doubts. They need to come halfway, they need to be sufficiently open to God’s presence in the world that they identify Jesus. Faith (knowing) is as much a choice, an act of will as it is a passive capitulation.
As Chelsea Harmon points out “belonging” in this passage is an action. Jesus’ sheep do not belong simply because they are somehow special, predestined to belong; “their belonging is an active belonging: hearing, following, being known (i.e., having experiences of Jesus), and being given eternal life.” Faith is not one-sided – as if God’s almighty power captures and pens the gullible and easily led. Faith is an active engagement with the living Christ who continues to erupt into our lives and expects that we will be able to discern the signs by hearing, following and allowing ourselves to experience the risen Jesus now.
This short but obscure gospel is filled with meaning. It is not about who is in and who is out as some might assume, rather it is about being open to God’s working in the present even if it is strange and new, even if the one preaching change doesn’t fit our expectations and asks us to change what we think and how we behave.
Christ is risen! Christ is active in the world today. May our belonging to the shepherd be an active belonging so that habit, suspicion, and tradition do not keep us from seeing what new thing Christ is doing in the world today. May our active belonging and openness to the risen Christ give us a willingness to follow wherever Christ is leading us however new and strange that may seem.
Tags: Active belonging, discerning different between cultural norms and religious truth, knowing Christ in the world, open to change, women's ordination
Swallowsrest 