22At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, 23and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. 24So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, ‘How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.’ 25Jesus answered, ‘I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; 26but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. 27My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. 28I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. 29What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. 30The Father and I are one.’
I’m still learning language. Even though I can understand or read in seven different languages, I am still learning language.
I’m learning, for example, text messaging. The one I hear most often these days is “lol.” It stands for “laughing out loud.” Presumably something funny has been uttered. lol
I’m thinking about language more these days because there is too much of a disconnect in our language. I’m thinking about language because we—you, me, we all—haven’t learned to speak it well. Frankly, and specifically, we haven’t learned “sheep.” And I think I want to learn it more.
A decade ago, a popular movie came out called “Babe.” It was about a sheep pig. Yes, a pig that learned to speak with the sheep. But the sheep had to give him the “in” to speak their language. In fact, it was one of the gifts that Babe had that none of the sheep dogs had, who only knew how to bark at the “dumb sheep,” as they called them.
But the sheep weren’t dumb. They were just not letting the dogs in on their language. They were afraid of the dogs, in fact. But they trusted Babe, and so Babe got the code of speaking the sheep’s language.
Trust. That’s the key. Building trust, nurturing trust, encouraging trust. And when you have it, you get more. You get to hear the language.
Take Jesus, for example. He not only learned the language of “sheep,” he spoke it so well that sheep rallied to him. They rallied to him even over against all the other more jealous shepherds who weren’t as fluent in “sheep.” They, it seemed, only to bark. “Dumb sheep!” they thought. But Jesus embraced these sheep. He loved them. He would sit at table and dine with them. And he didn’t say, “now if you want my company, you will have to make some changes in your life first.” Nope. He just accepted them, where they were, for who they were, where they were at.
And because that vision—yes, vision—of an all accepting Lord is so beautiful, so pastoral in the best sense of the term, I so often sigh. I sigh because I think we too easily slip into the message of barking dogs—and sometimes, I painfully and penitently ask myself whether I am too often one of them. And I find that we miss out on a most basic truth: that we are all sheep at heart. And that we all need to learn the language of one another.
We don’t speak it well. Sometimes we don’t even talk to the other sheep.
And that, brother and sister sheep, is sinful. It shows up the dark blotches on our wool. In some cases, the sheep go to other pastures where they hope they may hear the voice of the Good Shepherd, because they don’t hear it in the barking. There is a lot of barking already in the world and in the work place where one person or another is barking out orders and holding up the sheep to standards that keep them on the hoofs.
And we aren’t helping it when we as sheep fail to listen to the other sheep, fail to hear the language of one another.
I’m just talking about our fold, this little sheep ranch called “Holy Trinity.” I’m not even addressing the much bigger sheep fold of hundreds who are longing to have us speak their language and make the gospel of our Lord Jesus the Christ say to them, in word and deed, “you-are-loved.”
But it is to such unloved ones that the Shepherd Jesus the Christ speaks. His speaking on the portico of Solomon is significant. That is the place where kings spoke, and another word for kings was shepherds. As people flocked to him, they flocked to the love of this Shepherd. They flocked to this love because it was a shelter for them from all the wintry blasts of life, all the barking, even the judgments of this world.
I have found that people on their death beds and their loved ones at their funerals have longed to hear the Shepherd’s voice in the 23rd Psalm:
The Lord is my Shepherd,
I shall not be in want.
He leads me beside still waters,
He revives my soul,
He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name sake.
And then comes the harsher truths, the wintry truths, the truths about where the sheep are so often in life:
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I shall fear no evil
Your rod and your staff, they comfort me,
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
You anoint my head with oil;
My cup overflows.
And it concludes with a joyous affirmation of faith:
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
This psalm brings comfort, as it has for centuries, to people who are longing for the Lord who not only hears their language, but speaks it so well, and speaks it to the core of their beings.
It does not mean that being a sheep is easy. On the contrary, as it was for Jesus, so it is for us his sheep who follow, it is a dangerous path. It may even hasten the danger because it does not cow-tow to the barking dogs of our world.
But it does hear the Babe, the One who came as a Babe, and who endears others to trust him and entrust their whole lives to him, because He will lay down his life for the sheep. That is love.
That is the language that sheep hear.
Jesus loves you, people of God. I’m sure there’s a way to text message that. But for now, I’ll take the Easter joy of lol.