Recent studies show that there may be a genetic component to the tone and quality of one’s voice, and it has to do with more than just vocal inflections. There may be shared physiological features among voices of biological relation. Does your own voice bear any resemblance to your parents’ voice? What about your siblings? Can you find any tonal similarity between their voices and yours? I certainly can. On numerous occasions, my voice can sound just like that of my parents or my brother.
Our own speech patterns will naturally be similar to those of our family members. Perhaps your father speaks rapidly and excitedly and you do, too. Or maybe your mother has a funny way of lowering the tone of her voice at the ends of questions, rather than the other way around, and you do the same. It’s only natural that our distinctive voices, however unique they may be, would contain recognizable vestiges of our biological relations. But how far back do these shared vocal qualities go? What tone colors in the voice of your seventeenth-century ancestor might you find? If somehow you could hear a distant relative speaking from the past, would you recognize her voice, and would it sound like yours?
And if you heard Jesus speaking your name, would you recognize his voice? And how? St. John tells us that Jesus the Good Shepherd knows his sheep, and they know him. He calls them each by name, and they heed his voice. Above all, they recognize the sound of his voice. On the contrary, they don’t recognize the voice of the hireling because he’s not good. He doesn’t care for the sheep. He’s a mercenary, a con artist, a coward. But when Jesus calls the name of the sheep, they know it’s him, because they know that he knows them. And because he knows them, they will follow him. But how do they know it’s Jesus? Is it the tone of his voice? Do they, by chance, hear some remnant of their own spiritual ancestry in that voice? And what about that heritage is so favorable that they’re compelled to follow the voice?
I would be interested in taking a survey of Christians today, and I would want to ask them this: when you imagine the sound of Jesus’s voice, what is it like? Is the tone harsh or gentle? Is it scolding or affirming? Is it forceful or invitational? And I would bet that many people—perhaps some of us here today—hear Jesus’s voice as condemnatory, full of harsh judgment, scolding, and rigid.
Maybe it’s because we aren’t so good with our imaginations these days. Too much listening to robotic voices means that the voice of the Good Shepherd sounds like a GPS navigator. The seething anger echoing in the corridors of worldly power imprints itself on our minds. Facile lies make it difficult to trust anyone’s voice. The voice of the cruel teacher who was always chastising you unfairly still hammers away in the recesses of your memory. The cold voice of the distant parent haunts you. The mocking voice of the bully who tortured you as a teenager is subconsciously buried alive within your heart. Maybe this is why it’s so hard to accurately hear the voice of the Good Shepherd. We know his voice is good, but it’s difficult for us to hear good anymore. The reason the sheep won’t follow the voice of the hireling, the bad shepherd, is because something inside of them—something about who they are—cautions them against following such a voice.
And although St. John doesn’t describe the sound of the Good Shepherd’s voice, he does tell us something important about the Good Shepherd himself, which might help us understand the sound of his voice. The Good Shepherd knows his own and they know him, just as the Father knows the Good Shepherd and the Good Shepherd knows the Father. And this must mean that in the voice of Jesus, we perfectly hear the voice of God the Father. In the voice of Jesus, we’re taken back through our spiritual heritage to the Source and Foundation of all that is and who we are.
To discover who we are in the clamor of today’s world, we must sift out the gentle voice of the Good Shepherd calling our names, and then we follow it like obedient sheep back to the beginning. We go backwards in time and try to trace this thread of a voice through history. In doing so, we learn something about who we are, because truth be told, we’ve forgotten who we are. But who we are is in the Good Shepherd’s voice.
As we go back in time, we’ll hear the Good Shepherd’s voice in the saints who called the Church back to her roots. We’ll hear his voice resonating in the tortured larynxes of martyrs crying out the good news even in the face of death. We’ll hear his voice imperfectly in the calls of the prophets who tried so hard to bring God’s people back into covenant with him. We’ll hear the Good Shepherd’s voice even in the flawed leadership of kings and judges, sent by God to lead his chosen people. We’ll hear it in the guidance of Moses trying to lead a recalcitrant people into freedom.
And even today, we hear the Shepherd’s voice in the oppressed and marginalized crying out for dignity, or in the starving child calling out for food, or in the mother of the murdered teenager demanding that something must change, that there must be some hope for goodness in all that is bad. If we listen closely, we can hear the Good Shepherd’s voice in every little corner of hell on this earth, crying out for goodness. And because we live in him, and he lives in us, our voices bear some resemblance to his.
But since St. John has told us that the Good Shepherd knows us and we know him, and that the Father knows him and he knows the Father, if we heed and follow his voice, we’ll discover not only the voice of our heavenly Father. We’ll also find ourselves back at the beginning, where we’ll learn more about who we are.
When we follow the Good Shepherd’s voice back to the beginning, we’ll hear the dynamic, gentle voice of God the Father emerging from the deep nothingness as the eternal Word in the power of the Holy Spirit saying one thing: It is very good. These are the words that are so difficult to hear these days, whether about ourselves or creation or our neighbors. It is very good. And something within each of us is instinctively searching for goodness.
The Good Shepherd’s voice invites us to follow him, back through the ravages of history, over the beating of pruning hooks into spears and the lamentations of the forsaken, to find the sheepfold to which he has led us. And when we arrive at the sheepfold, we find that it is a garden. It’s a lush, gorgeous garden full of green, colorful, blooming things. It’s an idyllic existence, where humans walk and talk freely with God, unencumbered by cares, concerns, or insecurities. It’s a time before there was murder or war or greed or jealousy. It’s the beginning of all that we know, and at that moment in time, God calls us each by name and makes us his own. And God says, it is very good. YOU are very good.
But the beginning is not just a beginning. It’s also an end. If we have found the beginning by following the Good Shepherd’s voice, we’ll also catch a glimpse of the end God has prepared for us. The gate into the garden of Eden is also the gate into eternal life. And the gate is tended by our loving Good Shepherd, whose voice does not berate or manipulate or coerce but invites us into the sheepfold. And far from being somewhere in the distant future, the gate to the garden of eternal life is right here, closer than it might appear.
To hear the voice of the Good Shepherd is to hear that we’re not forsaken but loved, not condemned but forgiven, not left alone but brought into community, not scattered but united in the love of the One who lays down his life for the sheep. And the One who is perfect goodness, the Good Shepherd, yearns for our voices to echo his voice and to tell all the world what we can only know by going back to the beginning. And, indeed, it is very good.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday of Easter
April 21, 2024