4th Sunday in Easter

In the English language sheep have a bad rap where following is concerned: “to follow blindly like sheep.” It is true that in some cases this saying is apt and describes well the mob mentality of certain people who decide to abdicate all personal responsibility and simply allow themselves to be swept up by the latest fad. However, as human beings, we are built to follow. There is something in us as humans that longs to be lead, and there is something profoundly reassuring about just being able to follow Jesus blindly. Nevertheless, I think so many of us forgo the joy that comes with following Jesus blindly because we feel a need to be in the driver’s seat of our lives.

Whenever I make my annual 8 day retreat, it always takes a couple of days for me to realize that I’m not supposed to be in the driver’s seat, that actually I can let go of the steering wheel and let the Lord lead me on. Changing the metaphor now from a car to a boat, when I made the Spiritual Exercises for the first time, I was given the image of my life as a boat. I think I must have been praying with the passage where Jesus calls his first disciples and gets into Peter’s boat and tells him to put out into the deep. I imagined Jesus getting into my boat, and because I’m a child of the 20th century, my boat had a powerful outboard motor, and I was sitting at the back steering the boat – happy that Jesus was with me in my boat. But after a while, Jesus said to me, Isaac – get rid of your motor – throw it into the sea, and instead put up a sail. I was reluctant to do this at first because putting up a sail would mean that I would have to now be dependent on the wind – I couldn’t go at the speed that I wanted to go and I would have to go where the wind took me. But this came to be a powerful metaphor for me about letting go and being prepared to trust Jesus, to trust that the wind of the Holy Spirit would take me where I needed to go, perhaps not where I wanted to go.

As I was making this retreat, my eye was caught by the inscription on one of the bookmarks that was in my Bible at the time. It said “Let me O Lord, walk blindly on the path that you have traced, I do not seek to understand your guidance.” This inscription came to encapsulate for me what it meant to follow Jesus, the Good Shepherd. When you think about it, it is actually really very comforting to know that we don’t need to stress about what is round the bend on the path that we are travelling. If there are any surprises awaiting us, (and there indefinitely are), we can rest contented that it suffices for us to just follow our Good Shepherd.

When we put it like this, we might ask ourselves, well if it is so easy to follow Jesus and simply surrender and let Jesus take control of our lives, why don’t more people do it, and why don’t we do it more of the time. Well I think we need to acknowledge that the job of following Jesus is actually not easy. If we’ve ever had the experience of walking by faith and not by sight we will know this. It is hard work trying to make sure that it is indeed Jesus’ voice that we are following as we walk along. We know all too well that there are many other voices in our lives competing for our attention. These voices are often much louder, and often frustratingly more persuasive and seductive than the Good Shepherd’s voice. But these voices do not lead us to quiet waters by where we will find rest for our souls. When we have let ourselves be seduced by these other voices, we know that we simply cannot relax, we need to have our wits about us, because sooner or later we are going to regret having trusted a voice other than the Good Shepherd’s. This is why we need to become familiar with the Good Shepherd’s voice and be faithful to our lives of prayer. It is only in prayer that we can find the silence necessary for the voice of the Good Shepherd to rise above the din of all the false shepherds of this world.

Questions for reflection:

1. Is your boat powered by a motor or a sail?
2. Are you able to relax, even when you can’t see the road ahead of you?
3. Which area of your life do you think you most need the Good Shepherd’s guidance?