Hearing the Shepherd’s Voice

In every age, God’s people have had to decide which voices they will follow. We live in a world that shouts at us—voices of fear, drama, division, and just plain crazy swirl around us every day. Into that noise, today’s Gospel from Saint John speaks a simple but life‑changing truth: the sheep know the shepherd’s voice.^[1][2]

John’s Gospel, the last to be written, is always inviting us to listen beneath the surface of the story, to hear something deeper about who Jesus really is. In this Good Shepherd passage, John reminds a rejected community—and us—that in the midst of all the clamor, there is one voice that does not deceive, one voice that does not use us, one voice that leads not to death but to life. That voice belongs to Jesus, the Good Shepherd and the sheep gate, who knows us, calls us by name, and decides who is truly “in” or “out.”

From there, we can begin to see how this Gospel speaks directly into the experience of John’s community, cast out of the synagogue yet held fast in the heart of Christ, and how it speaks into our own struggle to tune out the noise and listen for the one voice that gives life.

“I Am”: God’s Name on Jesus’ Lips

John’s Gospel is full of those great “I am” statements that teach us who is really speaking when we hear the shepherd’s voice. We know that “I am” is God’s name revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures—“I am who am.” So when Jesus says, “I am the bread of life, I am the shepherd, I am the gate, I am the way, I am the truth,” he is not just tossing around poetic language; he is claiming the divine name as he calls us.

Over and over again, John gives us this drumbeat: “I am, I am, I am.” It is a powerful way of connecting Jesus to the Father. The community hearing John’s Gospel would have recognized immediately that Jesus is not just a wise rabbi or a miracle worker. He is the very presence of God walking among them, speaking with God’s own authority, inviting them to trust his voice above every other.

A Community That Has Been Rejected

Underneath today’s Gospel is a very real, painful situation that could easily drown out the gentle voice of the shepherd. John’s community is being pushed out of the synagogue. In our world, we might “church shop” a little—try this parish, then that one—but in those days, your synagogue was your extended family, your social world, your identity, your home. To be rejected by your synagogue was to be cut off from where you belong.

That is what John’s community is living. They are no longer welcome. They are being told, “You are out; you do not belong here.” That theme of rejection is woven all through John’s Gospel. You can hear it echoing in the story of the man born blind in chapter nine, which really sets up what we hear today in chapter ten—a story about which voice you trust when the “religious” voices throw you out.

Now, when John first wrote this Gospel, there were no chapter and verse numbers. Those came later, and sometimes the way we divided things doesn’t quite do justice to the flow of the text. Really, chapter nine and chapter ten belong together. Chapter nine tells the story of the man born blind.

You might remember it—it was not too long ago that we heard it proclaimed. At the end of that story, they ask the man, “How is it that you see?” And he says, in simple honesty, “Jesus is the one who made me see.” That’s it. And how do the religious leaders respond? “You, born totally in sin, are trying to teach us?” And they throw him out. They reject him.

That blind man is John’s community. They are the ones being shoved to the side, shown the door, treated as if their encounter with Jesus is an offense. And into that experience of rejection, Jesus speaks as shepherd and gate, offering a different verdict on who truly belongs.

The Lord Is My Shepherd

John loves to “rewrite” salvation history in the light of Jesus so that the people learn to hear God’s old promises in the new voice of Christ. The early Christians knew their Scriptures; they prayed them, sang them, lived out of them. So when John starts talking about shepherds, their hearts and minds would immediately go to Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want. He leads me to verdant pastures to give me rest and repose.”

That Psalm was part of their spiritual bloodstream. John takes that beloved image—“The Lord is my shepherd”—and places it squarely in the mouth of Jesus: “I am the shepherd.” In other words, the Lord who is your shepherd in Psalm 23 is now standing before you, speaking to you, calling you by name.

John is saying to his rejected community: yes, you have been thrown out by your synagogue, but you have not been abandoned. The shepherd is here. The Lord is here. Jesus is your shepherd. He knows you. You know his voice. And when the religious authorities say, “You do not belong,” the shepherd’s voice says, “You are mine.”

The Sheep Gate

Now there are actually two images in today’s Gospel. We usually focus on “shepherd,” but John first gives us “the gate”—the sheep gate—another way the Lord’s voice becomes protection and welcome for the flock.

When I was a kid, I’ll be honest with you, I pictured this the way a child might: almost like something out of a cartoon. If the teapot can be a person in “Beauty and the Beast,” then why not a literal talking gate for Jesus? I pictured an iron gate swinging open and shut, Jesus somehow being that gate. I wasn’t very bright. And where I grew up—in Brooklyn—we knew nothing about sheep, nothing about pastoral life, and certainly nothing about sheep gates.

What I did not know then is that the sheep gate was not a piece of hardware. The sheep gate was a person. At night, several shepherds would gather their flocks together into one enclosure. Then one shepherd would lie down across the opening. He himself became the “gate.” He decided who came in and who went out, which flock belonged to which shepherd.

So when Jesus says, “I am the sheep gate,” he is not comparing himself to a wrought‑iron fence. He is describing a living, breathing, self‑giving role. He is telling this rejected community, “You have been told you are out, that you do not belong. But I am the one who decides who is in and who is out. Your leaders may have rejected you, but I have not. I am the gate.”

The shepherds come, they call their sheep, and the sheep—who, let’s be honest, are not known for brilliance—still know the voice of their shepherd. They leave the mass of other sheep and follow that familiar voice. They trust it, and it leads them. As they walk, the shepherd knows them and they know him.

That is the relationship John wants to put front and center for his community: “They know my voice, and I know them.” When every other voice is shouting “Out! Unworthy! Unwelcome!”, the gate himself is whispering, “Come in; you are mine.”

“All Who Came Before Me…” – Hearing in Context

There is a line in the Gospel that can startle us: “All who came before me are thieves and robbers.” If we pull that out of context, it sounds like Jesus is calling Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, and all the great figures of Israel’s history thieves and robbers.

You can imagine how some of the Pharisees might have heard that and bristled. “What do you mean, all? Are you dismissing our ancestors? Our prophets?”

This is what we do sometimes with Scripture, and frankly with each other: we take a sentence out of its setting, ignore what is actually being addressed, and we stretch it until it no longer has to confront us personally. We make it about someone else, somewhere else, so that it does not have to land in our own hearts. That is another way of refusing the shepherd’s voice when it starts to get uncomfortably close.

We saw something similar recently when Pope Leo said that God does not hear the prayer of anyone who wages war. People went into a frenzy. “What do you mean? What about David? What about Churchill? What about this or that war?” Every effort was made to pull the statement apart so that it would not have to land where it was meant to land.

And yet, he was echoing the prophet Isaiah, who says that those whose hands are stained with blood cannot expect God simply to pretend it is not so. What would you expect the Pope to say—that war is just fine? That God blesses every act of violence as long as we feel justified?

Back in Jesus’ time, when he said, “All who came before me are thieves and robbers,” you can almost hear the same outrage: “What do you mean, all?” But again, the call is to hear these words in their proper context. Jesus is confronting leaders who have closed the gate instead of lying down as the gate; who have driven out the sheep instead of seeking them; who have loved control more than compassion.

When the Gospel hits home, we resist it. We look for loopholes. “What about this? What about that?” Anything so that we will not have to face ourselves. The shepherd speaks; the question is whether we will recognize and receive his voice or drown it out with our objections.

A Cacophony of Voices

John tells his community that when you know the shepherd, you recognize his voice. That is crucial, because we are living in a world awash in voices.

We are inundated with what really is a cacophony: voices calling us to fear, voices calling us to drama, voices calling us to division, voices calling us to crazy. We hear it in our media, in our politics, on our screens, even sometimes in our church disputes.

In the midst of all that noise, the shepherd’s voice is different. The shepherd’s voice calls us to compassion, to mercy, to justice.

Recently, Pope Leo was asked for what felt like the millionth time about same‑sex marriage. He said, in effect, that this has become such a divisive topic, and that there are so many other urgent realities calling for our attention: injustice, poverty, the suffering of the marginalized, the violence that racks our world. And yet, people want to focus obsessively on one issue.^[7]

And he quoted quoted Pope Francis who said, tutti, tutti, tutti, all, all, all are welcome. The rich, the poor, the sick, the healthy, the included and the marginalized. All are welcome. Pope Leo is a voice of our shepherd. Pope Leo is the vicar of Christ on earth. And we like him when we agree with him. And we don’t like him when we don’t agree with him. And is that really how it’s supposed to work?

Sometimes, if we cannot help, maybe the most faithful thing we can do is keep quiet and at least get out of the way of the Gospel. We can choose not to amplify the loudest, angriest voices, and instead make space for the quieter, steadier voice of the shepherd who keeps saying, “All are welcome.”

The Good Shepherd Who Gives Life

In the end, today’s Gospel brings us back to who Jesus is for us and what it means to keep our ears tuned to his voice. Jesus is the Good Shepherd. He leads us to verdant pastures. He does not promise us death; he promises us life.

John is reminding his community, and he is reminding us:

• Even when you are not welcomed, you are not alone.
• Even when you are rejected, you are not forgotten.
• Even when leaders close doors on you, the Shepherd is still calling your name.

We know who our Lord is. We know who our Shepherd is. Our task is to listen for his voice in the midst of the noise, to trust that voice, and to follow where it leads, because his voice gives life.