Fourth Sunday of Easter – Year C

Welcome to the Fourth Week of Easter. This week, we hear Jesus say, “My sheep hear my voice.” It’s a voice made fully audible only in the resurrection. Of course, we catch faint whispers of it in Jesus’ life and death, but it's only in the light of Easter that we hear it clearly. And so, with Easter ears, we return to the words of Jesus and hear them afresh.

What do the sheep finally hear in this week’s text? They hear the voice of the One in whom there is no violence, and who is in rivalry with nothing — not even death.

It’s easy to forget that sheep aren’t cuddly pets. In Jesus’ day, they were food, clothing, and, most pointedly, sacrificial victims. Led by shepherds, they entered the temple through the “sheep gate” to be slaughtered by the thousands. On feast days like the one in this passage, the bleats and cries, the smoke and flies, were surpassed only by the river of blood that ran thick through the Kidron Valley.

Into this, Jesus speaks. He uses a series of mutton-based metaphors to expose the system for what it is — a giant abattoir. His words threaten the "shepherds" who profit from maintaining the sacrificial system. Jesus suggests that he’s a different kind of shepherd — one who frees the lambs for life, not fattens them for slaughter. He and the Father are one in this.

That’s when the religious leaders blow a fuse and try to stone him. Jesus flees outside the promised land, “beyond the Jordan,” where he was first baptized. Perhaps we are to imagine that Jesus lingered there, tempted to stay outside the promised land rather than return and become the “Lamb who was slain.”

P.S. Please note that this week’s text is part of a long discourse (John 9–10) that begins with the healing of the blind man — which aggravates the religious leaders — and ends with them trying to stone Jesus.