Acts 9:36-43 Ps.23
Rev 7:9-17 John 10:22-30
A happy mother’s day today to all who have had this blessed calling in life. And yet there is an irony in our Gospel reading for Mother’s Day. Jesus said, “The Father and I are one.” So that’s what we read on Mother’s Day. It could have been more literal for Jesus to say, “My Mother Mary and I were one during the nine months of gestation.”
The other theme for this day is Jesus as the Good Shepherd, and the Lord God of the Psalmist was referred to using the metaphor of a shepherd. God made the Psalmist feel as though he were one of God’s favorite pets. And who in life better represents a good shepherd than our good mothers who nurtured us for so many years because human children in contrast to other animals are needy and more dependent for so much longer.
But I would like to speak about a saying of Jesus from John’s Gospel. Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice.” He is referring to a recognition factor in the relationship that one has with Christ.
What do we call the hearing impairment? Deafness. The kind of hearing impairment which the words of Jesus refer to is the inability to discern the spiritual within oneself and in life.
What does one hear? One hears words, but not just words, but the wisdom and understanding which comes with the words. And we all know that hearing can be very selective. When I told my dad that I was going out to mow the lawn. He jumped in with immediate praise and reinforcement. But when I ask him for five bucks, he just kept reading the paper as though he did not hear me.
Hearing the voice of Christ, has to do with our relationship within the way in which we use language. One might say, that the Gospel of John is all about the issue of language impairment.
In John’s Gospel, we are told that Christ is the Eternal Language from the beginning. Christ is the Word. And if we are going to hear the voice of Jesus the Good Shepherd, we are going to have to get our language right.
The Gospel of John is about people who do not hear the voice of Jesus because they understand only literal and empirically verifiable meanings. To hear things spiritually is to understand all the physical metaphors in John’s Gospel as bearing spiritual meaning.
The blind person in John saw Christ. The religious leaders who had physical sight, were blind spiritually.
The Samaritan woman at the well wanted her physical thirst quenched; Jesus wanted to show her the secret of having her spiritual thirst quenched.
Jesus told a very adult man, Nicodemus, that he had to be born again. But he was crassly literal and wondered about getting back into his mom’s womb.
Jesus raised a stricken child who was lifeless to new life; the spiritual life is reactivating one’s childlikeness to be able to know spontaneous joy for no other reason than the sheer consciousness of life itself.
Jesus gave Lazarus his life again, as an indication that everyone could have resurrection life within themselves even before they die.
Jesus made a lame man walk again, even as he said I am the way. I give the ability to walk in the right way.
Jesus turned water to wine, indicating that under the appearance of the ordinary we can taste the extraordinary.
Jesus met fearful and anxious fishermen on the stormy sea and showed them how to respond to both their own fearfulness and the fearful situation.
The Gospel of John with Christ as Eternal language itself, is trying to expand the disciples in their experience of language. He is trying to change their language experience by showing them that there are other ways to interpret everything. And that having faith in the Christ-Nature within oneself is the key to correct our language impairments.
To hear the voice of Jesus is not to limit ourselves to just the physical or what we register in our five senses. To hear the voice of Jesus, is to have had the experience of being overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, and to add the spiritual dimension to everything which we experience in life.
John Gospel is about arriving to an appreciation of what Paul said: What is the mystery of the ages? Christ in you, the hope of glory. The Risen Christ is the activation of the image of God upon each human being, so that we can know, see, walk, live, and hear spiritually.
And we might say, “well I’m a doubting Thomas type of person, a show-me person.” And Jesus seems to say, “Well, if you want to live on the surface with your doubts, you get to have all the side effects too. Fear, worry, anxiety, depression….all of these are because of language impairment. A disorder in interpreting the situation of one’s life as perpetually the worst case scenario.
Fear, worry, anxiety, and depression are real problems, but the root of the problems is language based. There is some truth in psychology being called the “talking cure.” What happens in therapy? One talks out how one has gotten into the habit of interpreting life situations in certain ways. The traumatic events came to interpretations and got remembered. That language interpretation of certain events gets repeated over and over again, and locked into the repetitions of our lives. And we can trapped by our seeming automatic responses. The language interpretation makes one’s body and emotions remember and be stuck on the same response of worry and fear. The language event goes deep into our body programming.
Jesus as eternal language came to let us interpret things differently in a new way, a freeing spiritual way. Jesus came to free us from our language impairments which hinder us from seeing, thinking, feeling, talking, and hearing in creative and worry-free ways.Hea
My sheep hear my voice. Why? Because they have discovered the mystery of the ages: Christ in them, the hope of glory, the hope of the faith and love which casts out worry and fear.
So why are we at Mass today? A simple meal. The bread and wine having received a full identity with the Christ nature, enters us, and it becomes us; it mixes in with the Christ nature which is already in us, and we can once again be renewed in the mystery of the ages: Christ in us, the hope of glory.
Christ in us means that we also need to be at the work of the continuous “talking cure” to heal our language impairment, when we have been interpreting our life situations in ways that make us worry, fearful, anxious, panicky, sad, or even depressed.
This is an exercise that we might use to break the spell of some harmful interpretations which have kept us imprisoned. Rather than thinking of mediation as silence without words, think about mediation as the hum of all language and words being present at once. Think of Christ as the eternal language bath. And let us take our worded interpretations which have trapped our lives in anxiety, and let that limited interpetation bathe in the ocean of the eternal word. Let those interpretation get dissolved and die in Christ who is eternal language. And from that baptism in the Eternal Word, let us arise to have receive the power of new words and new interpretations and let those new interpretations teach our bodies, minds, and feelings new patterns of reaction giving us the freedom from fear, worry, sadness, and just plain sour attitudes in our lives.
John’s Gospel reveals the great mystery of Christ as Eternal Word, Eternal Language, all within us as a mighty hum ready to dissolve all the petty interpretations in our lives which keep us trapped and defeated, sad and worried.
And if we can let Christ the Eternal Language heal our language, then we will learn the joy of hearing the voice of the Good Shepherd, saying your life is good, and because your life is good, you can learn to have a good version of everyone and everything in life because by faith you have learn the mystery of Christ in you, the hope of glory. Amen.
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