Longing to be guided into freedom

Let’s us pray – Lord, may the study of your word bring us closer to you and may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable to you Lord, Amen.

I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.

The message that I would like to share with you today is that – Jesus is the answer to our “longing to trust - and He will guide us into freedom, security and life in the fullest.” I would like to suggest that we all have a deep desire for the comfortable voice of God. We all have the need to trust, and we can only truly trust in someone that truly loves us, that loves us enough to want life in the fullest for us.

Imagine that you are blind, you have blind since birth. You come from a middle class family and you live with your parents in the house which has been in your family for generations. You live in the capital city and you father is a merchant of some kind. You are not able to work yourself, your blindness has made sure of that. Work is what most of your neighbours respect, so that makes you a burden to your parents. All you can do is beg. Your family is like most of your neighbours; where what fills your life is work, family life and your faith.

One day you have made your way into the middle of town, you have found you way to your usual spot, a good spot for begging and a spot where you can hear the busyness of life all around you, where you will sit there for hours, most of the day, just listening to the world around you. Out of nowhere you hear a conversation. There are some men asking a person, who is clearly their leader, they call him Jesus, why you were born blind, was it your sin or your parent’s. The leader responds by saying that it was neither but “so that the works of God might be displayed”, then something about doing the works of the one that sent Him. The voice of this Jesus is getting really close, it is a comfortable pleasant voice, he says something about being the light of the world. It is all very confusing, sounds like a prophet of some sort. Then he is touching your face, rubbing something on your eyes, it feels like mud or clay. What is going on! Then that voice again, “Go and wash in the pool of Siloam”. You are extremely confused, yet in some way comforted, you don’t know what’s going on but your eyes are feeling strange and you have mud smeared over them. All you can think of is that you will follow the words of this man and wash your eyes. And as you do this you first start to see a brightness, then, it’s a miracle! You can see. The first thing that you do is return your place. You want to find the man that healed you, but he is gone. The people are talking about you, they can see that you can see and they are not sure it is you. You tell them, of course, that it was Jesus that put clay on your eyes and told you to wash in the pool of Siloam and then you could see.

Later you are brought to the religious leaders, they want to know the story, they don’t really know you. You can tell them only what happen to you. They don’t believe you, they call your parents to identify you and tell of this miracle. Your parent’s have heard of this Jesus and his reputation that he might be the Christ, the Messiah. They know that the leaders will cast them out of the temple if they say he is the Christ, they want you to speak for yourself, they are afraid of religious leaders. You are called back, you tell your story again. You tell them plainly, you were blind and now you see, that God does not works with sinners, but with those he knows and know him, you find it amazing that this miracle could be preformed and that they would question that this Jesus was anything other then from God. They cast you out of the temple.

Shortly afterwards Jesus finds you and tells you that he is who the Pharisees feared, the Son of Man, and you are overwhelmed with thanks and belief, that he is what he says he is, and you worship him.

Jesus then says to the crowd that he came to judge the world, to bring sight to the blind - and for those that see - blindness. Some of the Pharisees that hear this, they question whether they blind? Jesus rebukes them by saying that if they were blind they would have no sin, but since they claim to see, they will remain in sin. He challenges them by accusing them of spiritual blindness. (pause)

It is this context that we find our gospel reading today. The reading by itself seems strange, we might ask why Jesus is saying what he is saying. Why is he speaking in a parable, only to speak more plainly, what is the significance with what he is saying. By itself it may seem strange, we know that it is important because it is a statement that Jesus makes about himself but why. In full context we can get some better understanding.

The passage starts with Verily, Verily or Truly, Truly or Amen, Amen – depending on which version you read. The intentional focusing and weight in the double word is to call you to something significant and the words do not introduce a fresh topic but are a continuation of what Jesus had been saying to the crowd, drawing the attention into greater focus. Jesus is saying, Listen, Listen…Then Jesus tells a parable, something familiar to people to illustrate a deeper message that might be difficult to understand.

He says that anyone that goes into a sheep’s fold, a walled pen made of reeds or stones or brick in order protect against robbers, wolves, and other beasts of prey. Anyone that goes into a sheep’s fold by any way other then the door is a thief and a robber. One would only sneak over the high walled pen for deceptive reasons. The one that goes ‘through the front door’ is a shepherd to the sheep. The doorkeeper, or junior shepherd knows the shepherd and opens the door for him. The sheep hear his voice, he calls them by name, naming sheep is a practice still done by shepherds of this part of the world. And he leads them out, He leads, the sheep follow. When he has gathered all of his own, now a sheep’s fold that is large enough to have a doorkeeper for protection would also have several flocks of sheep in which their would be different shepherds responsible for different flocks. So when the shepherd has called all his flock out of the fold, he then leads and the sheep follow. This is a middle eastern approach, in contrast to the scenes that we might have seen with a shepherd driving their sheep by the use of dogs or in one case a pig named “babe”. In the East they lead and the sheep follow. The sheep are well trained to the call and voice of the shepherd, and if a stranger tries to lead the sheep or call them by name the sheep will scatter and flee by instinct because they do not know the voice of strangers.

Now Jesus told this illustration or parable to them but they did not understand him. We, 2000 years later, with the knowledge of who Jesus truly is, we have the resurrection and with years of traditions over interpreting this and other passages to see what Jesus was doing with the story. But they did not, I mean one minute Jesus is healing a man and then telling the crowd and particularly the spiritual leaders that they are spiritually blind. The next minute he is telling some story of a shepherd and that sheep will only follow the voice of the shepherd that they know. If you are like me you have had that experience of someone telling you a story to teach you something but you lack the context as to what and why they are really telling you the story. For example if I was to tell you that “in order for you to last 10K, you need to get your nose 2-3 feet off the delta, that this will give you the legs for the final kick”, you would likely give me a puzzled look, but if I was to explain that I once raced kayaks and that long distance races were my area of strength, that the “nose” is the front of the boat and the delta is the point of the boat where the best waves come off, and what I was trying to do was give you instruction on how to ride another boat’s wash, like slip-streaming behind a big truck. That by riding a wash you are not going to work as hard and this will give you a reserve of energy to make the final sprint to the finish. And finally if I was telling you this with ‘the moral of the story’ being that “by yourself you can’t do it but with the help of others, you can.” With this fuller explanation in the expanded context you might appreciate what I was trying to say.

This is what has happened to the people in hearing Jesus’ parable; they don’t have the full context of what he is trying to tell them. So Jesus speaks more plainly. Again, he starts with the double word, to bring emphasize on what he is going to reveal, again this is part of a continuation of the previous passage.

“Amen, amen, I say to you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came (before me) are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. A thief comes to steal and kill and destroy, but I came to give life—life in all its fullness.

We all have an emptiness which we try to fill, yet end up being mislead by trying to find fullness in other things...What have you longed for? Has it been a certain sports car or SUV, or in my case some special features on a minivan… Is it a new house or apartment? Is it a person, do you long to be with someone that is special in your heart. Is food a particular weakness for you and you would really like some food served at some fancy restaurant. Do you look across the street and see the neighbour with something or other that if only you had it would make your life easier, more enjoyable, or better in some way. We all long for things that we don’t have. “The grass is always greener on the other side.”

Then have you ever worked hard to get to the other side, or to buy that special item. Did you feel complete? Did it fulfill that empty place from which the longing came from? Maybe for while… maybe the first time when you played with the new golf clubs, you were able to hit the ball farther and straighter then before. Or the food was simply delicious at that restaurant. But the feeling didn’t last, the pleasure was momentary, it somehow fell short of complete satisfaction. In a while you started longing for something else. We all have areas of weakness, areas where we long for something better.

What Jesus is doing be telling this parable of the sheep following the shepherd, is illustrating our longing to hear His comfortable voice, the voice that will bring the sheep to the pasture. To sheep, a pasture is everything that you could desire, land to run around and pasture implies natural fertility, likely water to drink and grass to eat. There is also a sense of secure boundaries of a pasture, it is not merely out of the pen or fold and into the dessert, but leading to a safe place with all your needs are provided.

In our reading for the today we have Jesus as the door to the fold, whereby Jesus is the actual thing that separates the unsafe world, which protects us… the sheep can not go over the walls but must go through Jesus, Jesus is the door to salvation... We also have the shepherd going through the door first… Jesus lived as we live, died and was the first born of creation, to be resurrected… knows each one intimately, calling them by their name, and they trust the voice that loves them…Then the shepherd leads them to the pasture. In fact it says “will come in and go out and find pasture”. It is not merely finding rest in Jesus after coming in, we will “go out and find pasture”, we can understand that we are to be a presence in the world to ‘go out and find pasture.’ In two verses John 10:9-10 we have the essence of the gospel... Salvation is through Jesus “Whoever enters through me will be saved” we are to “go out” and “Jesus came to give life—life in all its fullness”.

We are like sheep in that we have in our nature a tendency to wander, but Jesus tells us clearly who he is and like my illustration this morning with the racquets, if you want to play tennis, you need to use a tennis racquet, if you want to find God, you need to go to Jesus. Jesus is showing us in the healing of the blind man, one that would have understood the value of a trusting in a familiar voice. Contrasting that with the spiritual blindness of the Pharisees and teaching us through the illustration of the relationship of the sheep to the shepherd. We long to find the comfortable, familiar voice of the one that truly knows us and loves us. We want to be in His company. And God leads us to a freedom in and out of his protected sanctuary where His purpose for us is life in the fullest. Amen