John 10:22-30

For this week’s Easter reflection allow me to dare a thought. Not that this thought would have been daring in, say, the third century CE. Not after Origen. Here’s the thought: there is a dimensionality to resurrection. It’s as if resurrection is the sudden intrusion of another dimension into our solidly three-dimensional space (or four-dimensional, if you include time). 

Consider the resurrection stories again. The stories often include some element of Jesus as both here and not here. Is it the Lord? Or isn’t it? Mary Magdalene in the John 20 story takes Jesus for the gardener (John 20:15). Only when he calls her name does Jesus come into focus. 

Or Luke. In Luke’s 24nd chapter, two disciples are on their way home in deep grief for what has transpired in Jerusalem—the crucifixion of Jesus. They meet a stranger. The stranger is a teacher, a rabbi. He explains the scriptures to them, but explanation is not enough. Theology is not enough, Luke seems to be suggesting. He remains a stranger until he breaks bread with them, until something slides open, and in the eucharistic act, they see him for who he is. 

Or the story we looked at last week, the story of the breakfast on the beach in John 21. The story goes along as if Jesus’ resurrected presence was quite ordinary when suddenly the gospel writer slips into the text a shadow of doubt: “None of the disciples was brave enough to ask him, ‘Who are you,’ knowing that it was the Lord” (21:12). They know; they don’t know. And then we notice that throughout the story there is something crazily askew, as if space and time had been subtly altered. Those 153 fish.

Paul also works with the idea of dimensionality in 1 Corinthians 2. The theme in the opening section of the epistle is that the wisdom of God sometimes looks like foolishness. With that in mind, he notes that while among them, he limited his preaching to the crucified Jesus (vss. 1-5). But if the Corinthians are looking for something more, he can give them more. To this point, Paul says, he has been talking on the level of psychikos—the human dimension. But there is another dimension, pneumatikos—the divine dimension. Like a third dimension in a two-dimensional world, those who know only two-dimensional space will find this new dimension utterly puzzling and counter-intuitive.

The psychikos person cannot grasp that which belongs to [the dimension of] the divine spirit. It will seem foolishness to them; they will not be able to understand, for it can only be discerned by those who have experienced it [pneumatikōs]. (2:14)

The gospel for today, John 10:22-30, is part of a larger discourse in which Jesus riffs on the ancient image of the shepherd, used from time immemorial for kings. He introduces the image of shepherd earlier in the chapter, contrasting thieves with the shepherd. The gatekeeper opens the door for the shepherd, who goes through, and calls out his own sheep (10:1-6). The image must have been familiar. Where I grew up, it was not sheep but dairy cows. The farmer would stand in the doorway of the barn and holler, “Come, Boss,” and the cows would come running. 

In today’s gospel, Jesus, in a dispute with religious leaders, returns to the shepherd image. He notes that they cannot hear what he is saying because “they are not among his sheep. My sheep hear my voice” (10:26-7). 

We’ve heard this story so often we fail to see the deep question in it: who is it that hears the voice of Jesus? This question is more difficult than it may at first seem. Think about our own time. There are many who claim to hear the voice of Jesus. But is the voice they hear the voice of Jesus? Or quite another voice?

Go back to the resurrection stories with which we began. How do those to whom Jesus appears recognize him? In a gesture, a characteristically Jesus movement, something which connects the Jesus standing before them with the Jesus they knew, the resurrected Jesus with the Jesus of Nazareth. For Mary, it was way he said her name. For two walking to Emmaus, it was the way he broke bread. For the disciples on the beach in Galilee, it was the fish.

For us, it’s the voice. The Risen Lord comes to us characteristically in the voice. How do we recognize his voice? We recognize because we know what Jesus sounds like. We know from the testimony of the gospel writers—the apostolic testimony. But, more than that, in the community of faith we have come to hear his voice in the voice of others. 

Like all resurrection appearances, there is often a suddenness to this voice. We are listening to someone, a preacher perhaps or perhaps not, and suddenly we think, “That sounds like Jesus.” No, better, “That is Jesus.” Paul would call this a pneumatikos moment, a moment when, as it were, the heavens open up, and we stand in the presence of the Lord.

These moments require two things: memory and immediacy. Memory: it’s from the memory of the faithful throughout history that we recognize the voice of the shepherd. And immediacy, the Easter openness to Jesus present to us here and now, calling us to come.

Dairy cows photo by Vito Natale on Unsplash