Sermons

Fourth Sunday of Easter
Sunday 25 April 2010

David Paton-Williams

Readings: John 10 v22-30

The Good Shepherd

"My sheep hear my voice. I know then and they follow me, and I will give them eternal life."

At the heart of the Christian faith is the amazing belief that God knows each one of us personally and intimately.

I'd like us to reflect on that for a few moment.

God knows you, knows every little thing about you.

There is a prayer we sometimes say at the start of services which says that to God "to all hearts are open, all desires known, and from him no secrets are hidden". There is nothing about you that God does not know.

I wonder how you feel about that. Doe that strike you as something wonderful or does it make you feel uncomfortable?

Because normally I don't think we would feel very happy about someone knowing everything about us.

In George Orwell's story 1984, Big Brother watches people 24 hours a day. And although the cameras could only see what was
on the outside of someone, everyone had to control their facial expressions and their speech, to avoid any tell-tale signs of what they were really thinking and feeling.

1984 provided a very frightening vision of the future, but we now live in a society where CCTV may film us dozens of times a day. We live in just about the most monitored society in the world. And civil liberties groups flag up worries about how much information about us is now held on computers by government and big business.

All this can feel very uncomfortable. It can seem intrusive and oppressive.

So if God knows everything about us, not only what we do but what we think and feel and dream about - does that disturb us?
Does it seem like a heavenly Big Brother?

Well I suppose it depends on what we think God is like.

If we think God is simply accumulating evidence to throw at us on Judgement Day, to bring all our secrets to light, to shame us and condemn us, then it is all going to feel pretty uncomfortable.

But that's not the picture of God that Jesus paints for us.

Certainly Jesus tells us that God knows the number of hairs on our head (and for some of us that means that he has to do a recount every morning.)

But the reason he said that was to reassure people that they matter to God, and that God cares about us, despite the way life sometimes turns out.

I watched a programme this week about a new nature warden in the outer Hebrides, he was taking over from a very experienced warden. He felt quite daunted by the task. But imagine how he would have felt if the outgoing warden had said that he knew every single grain of sand on the beach.

Of course that is impossible for a person to do - but not for an infinite God.

And that is the sort of thing Jesus is saying. He is saying the creator of the universe, perhaps the creator of an infinite number of universes, knows about this little planet - hidden away among a billion, billion, billion stars.

And that from among all the billions of creatures on this earth, God knows each one of us by name.

That's what Jesus teaches us - that God knows us and that we matter to him - how amazing is that. He knows every detail about us, not to find us out and condemn us, but because he cares so much about us.

In this vast, sometimes harsh, universe we are known and we are loved.

It is this sense that we matter to God that keeps Christians believing in a personal God - despite the way life sometimes works out.

A lot of people say that they believe something is out there, but they don't know what it is like. Well of course none of us really knows that much about God, but Jesus shows us that God is like a father with his children, a mother hen with her chicks, or as in today's reading a shepherd with his sheep.

God knows all we hope for and all that we worry about he knows our gifts and how we might use them, he knows our weaknesses and how we struggle with them, he knows our joys and sorrows and he stands by us through them all.

It was that sense of mattering to God that helped bring me back to faith when I was a young adult.

I grew up believing in God and then drifted away in my teens to explore all sorts of things and go my own way. It wasn't that I didn't believe in God it was just that God seemed a bit like the planet Mars - out there somewhere but pretty irrelevant to me.

What changed was that I began to realise that God wasn't far off and irrelevant, but that I mattered to God, that he was involved in my life, and wanted me to let him be even more involved.

God knew me, and he wanted me to know him. And knowing him meant beginning to follow him once again.

Jesus uses the image of the sheep and the shepherd.

The sheep who know the shepherd, who know that he cares for them, will follow him. And following the Good Shepherd for us means listening for his voice - in the little nudges and prompts that come to us - maybe when we are reading our bibles, maybe when we are praying, maybe in the little "coincidences" that happen in our daily lives

If we believe that God wants us to know him and follow him - then we will listen for his still small voice within us
and let him lead us where he wants us to go.

He knows us and he wants us to know him.

And that's what Jesus means when he talks about giving us "eternal life." We often think of eternal life as what God offers us when we die, but later on in John's gospel it says - this is eternal life - that we may know God and know Jesus Christ.

Eternal life is the sort of life that begins to take root in us when we know Christ for ourselves.

The God who knows us wants us to know him. The God to whom we matter, wants to matter to us. The God who loves us wants us to love him.

God does not have to be far off and remote.

Our relationship with him can be intimate and personal, and it is in that close relationship - in which we learn to love and trust and serve God, that our lives truly flourish, and we begin to discover the quality of life that Jesus calls eternal life.

 

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay