“Where angels fear to trod”
By Rev. Michael Stonhouse
Meditation – Sunday, May 11, 2025
John 10: 22-30 (Forward, p. 13) CEV p. 1115
Jesus has His way of wading into controversy. It was ‘bad enough’ that He claimed to be a shepherd, the good shepherd, in contrast to the thieves and robbers who came only to pillage and harm the sheep, and the hirelings, the paid workers, who in it only for themselves and the wages they earn. And, given that the prophet Ezekiel (Ezekiel 34: 1-10) had earlier described the leaders of Israel in these terms, the common people would surely have ‘caught the drift’ of Jesus’ remarks—and would the governing elite. And most certainly those in charge, the governing elite, would not, to quote Queen Victoria, ‘been amused.’
Jesus, however, doesn’t end there. He similarly dismisses many of the common people, those who were clamoring for a definite answer to whether He was the Messiah or not, by asserting that they simply will not listen or believe in Him. They have chosen not to as a deliberate act of the will. And this is precisely because they are not of His flock, not His sheep. To put it plainly, they are not people that God had given over to Him. (To many, of course, this will raise that unsolvable, intractable problem, the tension between free will/ choice and predestination/ God’s sovereign decision. It seems as if both are at play here.) Anyway, He goes on to say that no one can snatch them out of my hands. God’s chosen ones are safe with Him. But, seeing that some in His audience are most certainly excluded, I am sure that this too served to rile up certain people.
However, with Jesus, there is one last volley: “I am one with the Father”, He says. This really riles up the crowd, for they, quite correctly, see this as a claim to be none other than God. No wonder they wanted to stone Him for blasphemy!
Here, then, it really comes down to a choice, two choices in fact. Firstly, there is the choice as to whether we will believe Jesus as the One that He
says He is, in other words, the Son of God, the Messiah. And secondly, there is the choice as to whether we will listen to Him, believe or trust in Him, and follow and obey Him. Regardless of God’s part in this decision, it is still very much ‘up to us.’ Will we trust in the One who deeply cares for us and is there for us, or not? It’s a crucial question, one that we must all answer some time or other.
Forward notes: “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me (verse 27).
“Really listening is deceptively difficult. The scene of a group of teenagers (or really, people of any age!) lost in their own minds, nodding along in the middle of a lecture or conversation but not really hearing any of it, has risen to the level of overused movie cliché for a reason. Our world is filled with ‘conversations’ that are actually no more than two people giving prepared monologues in turns.
“True listening requires both serious attention and concerted effort. To really listen, we need to get out of our own heads; we need to set aside thinking through what we have planned later. Really listening asks us to put aside what we want to say and what we think should be said so that we can listen to what’s actually being said.
“Relationships are only possible with true listening. Our relationship with God is no different. We know the Lord’s voice. Amid the noise of our world, the difficult part is finding the time to sit in stillness and listen.”
Moving Forward: “Set a timer for five minutes of silence. Listen for God’s voice.”
A concluding note: Today’s author claims that ‘we know the Lord’s voice.’ I’m not sure that this is entirely true, true for everyone. I believe that we are ‘trained’ to know and recognize His voice’. We are trained by the liturgy, by hymns, by preaching and teaching, by the reading and study of Scripture, by prayer, by experience, and by the words and influence of others around us. Sheep and cattle learn the voice of their shepherds and herdsmen from their superiors and I think that the same is true for us. We need to learn up this most important thing for ourselves.