My Sheep Hear My Voice and Follow Me

I grew up in Brooklyn, NY in the 40's and ‘50s. We lived in a two–family house in the Bay Ridge area, It was a carefree time of life, a time in which doors merely marked certain boundaries. For the most part, we were not so afraid of others inappropriately crossing them. In the early years it was not always necessary to lock our doors, and when we finally did, my father kept a key in the Borden's milk box on the porch or left one with our upstairs neighbor. Even as children, we could safely come and go within the confines of our defined limitations. Playing in someone else's backyard or "alleyway" was common as there were no fences between houses on my block, just fences separating the houses on the street  around the corner, which didn't matter anyway since we were not permitted to leave our street without permission and letting our parents know. (I'm reminded of the current international crisis in Israel, Palestine, Iran and of course Ukraine...still looming but off the front page for a while. It's too bad the freedom we enjoyed in our neighborhood as children could not apply. I guess it all changed, even in our old neighborhood when people wanted what the other guy had, even if they weren't entitled because they had yet to earn it.)

Perhaps the only time in those formative years that I was aware of heightened concern for safety was during the polio epidemic. While as children, our need to process the true impact of this "plague" was limited and I suppose that was a good thing; the published photos of children in iron lungs were to this day, indelibly printed in my memory. It’s hard to contrast that time with today’s Covid19. For the most part our only news media were the radio and newspapers. In the early days of television, news broadcasts were relatively short and not very comprehensive. All in all, as long as we stayed in our “sheepfold” we, as children, went about our days without concern.

While gates and doors serve as boundaries to permit entry and exit and security, they also demarcate a safe place, home. In our Gospel (John 10: 11-18) Jesus, the Good Shepherd, is portrayed as a “gate” and a caretaker. Our frame of reference for a shepherd does not likely fit with the image of the shepherd in Jesus' time . Is there any more powerful artistic depiction of compassion in our Christian heritage than the image of Jesus the Good Shepherd ? For me it's the famous painting of Jesus with the lamb draped around his neck and over his shoulder that hung on the wall  of my grade school classroom, and depicted in our church’s stained glass window. Yet, when Jesus lived and John wrote his Gospel, shepherds were among the most disreputable and mistrusted outcasts of society. Shepherds were drifters with no fixed address and because of their occupation, they were perpetually unclean and, by definition, in violation of Jewish law. These outcasts are the very people John’s gospel is talking about. So comparing Jesus to a shepherd and then later calling this very shepherd “good” seems at the very least, a paradox.

When Jesus proclaims that “My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me” he characterizes his role as a loving protector. There were no actual gate in sheepfolds; rather, the shepherd would stand, sit or lie down at the entrance to the pasture. In this way the shepherd could serve as protector of his sheep. He knew his sheep and they knew him. John purposely contrasted Jesus, the Good Shepherd, with disreputable religious rulers of his time who exploited their congregations.

Jesus clearly spells out his role as the Father’s steward when he says I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish. No one can take them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.