The Stranger's Voice—Learning Abundance and how to be Loved by Name

“Truly, truly, I’m telling you, the one who doesn’t go into the sheepyard by the gate but instead climbs in somewhere else, that person is a thief and a robber. The one who goes in through the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens it for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls the sheep that are his by name and brings them out. When he gets out all the ones that are his, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they recognize his voice. But they would certainly not follow a stranger and instead run away from them because they don’t recognize strangers’ voices.”

Jesus told them this proverb, but they didn’t understand what he was telling them.

So Jesus said again, “Truly, truly, I’m telling you, I am the gate for the sheep. Everyone who came before me were thieves and robbers, but the sheep didn’t listen to them. I am the gate; if anyone comes in through me, they will be protected and will come in and find pasture. The thief only comes so they can steal, slaughter, and destroy. I came so they could have life and have more than enough.

John 10.1-10 (from the Liberation and Inclusion Translation Bible, translated by Brandon C. Vélez Johnson)

What if I don’t know that voice?

What if it startles me?

What if I’m scared?

These kinds of questions haunt me about this passage. Jesus talks about being the shepherd whose sheep know his voice. But what if I don’t recognize his voice? Does that mean I’m not one of Jesus’ sheep? Does that mean I won’t find salvation?

It might sound dramatic, but this is what happens when scriptures is weaponized. When we use the Bible to draw lines about who is in and who is out, looking in its pages for clear lines of delineation, anxiety about our own position will follow.

How can I be sure I’m in?

What if I’m not?

These are the two questions that cause fear to drive our theological imaginations into the shadowy places where our bodies tense up, go on hypervigilance, and remain feeling unsafe no matter what we do to try to escape the feeling. Anxiety over our belonging is real, and passages like this one have been used to draw hard lines, to exclude people based on a highly indefinable phenomenon, and create small cliques of self-justified, holier-than-thou, self-righteous, insular, fear-based groups of fundamentalist extremism.

So, what do we do when we want to hear the good news in scripture that has been weaponized and used in toxic ways to the point that we can’t hear past the harm?

That’s where I am with this passage about shepherds and gates. I keep trying to work through it, and the whole time there is a small voice in the back of my head still using these verses as a litmus test for who God loves. I don’t know how to get past it. I don’t know how to turn it off. I don’t even really know how to combat it. I need the Spirit to do her guerrilla warfare against the lies of the adversary, planting truth where fields of harm have been planted.

So, I return to the voice. Jesus’ voice. This soft whisper that loudly calls to the sheep, urging them into wide open places of safety and abundance.

I don’t think any of us know this voice at first. Jesus’ tells us that the sheep run from the voice of a stranger, and I know from my own experience of coming to know Jesus—as opposed to knowing the concept of Jesus that institutional, evangelical Christianity handed me—that I run from that voice because it is trying to lead me out of my perceived safety.

The boundaries that I draw—back to those boundaries of who is in and who is out—create a sense of safety for me. With confirmation bias and the comfort of being surrounded by people who look and think like me, I can convince myself of safety. I don’t feel challenged. I don’t feel uncomfortable. I don’t feel confronted. And I don’t feel curious.

Curiosity leads us into uncomfortable places, but it is in these places that growth happens. It’s where we are stretched and challenged that change can be catalyzed and growth can take place. As long as we stay with the familiar, the safe, and never venture beyond the circles of boundaries we draw around us, we will become stagnate and stale, losing our salt and extinguishing our light.

So Jesus’ strange voice comes calling to us, urging us to follow where he has already gone, where he has established good paths that lead us to pastures of green, blooming with what we need to thrive.

Jesus wants us to have abundance.

The scarcity we live in when we are convinced that there is enough for us and not for everyone is just another way we lie to ourselves about safety. We try to stockpile money, resources, food… anything we think we need access to at any moment. We’re seeking to keep ourselves from need by feeding all our wants. But, scarcity turns us greedy and harms our neighbors.

The truth is, there is enough for everyone. There is abundance for everyone… if we will let go of what we grasp so tightly with our tiny fists.

When we start to stop believing the voices of scarcity, something happens. We grow more and more to know the voice of Jesus. Jesus speaks of abundance, of wide-open places, of green pastures and banquets set in the middle of a battlefield. Jesus’ voice is anti-scarcity, and as we cease letting the lies of scarcity fill our ears, we begin to hear Jesus correctly, proclaiming words of hope and truth, telling us there is enough for all of everyone at the table.

See, the voice of the stranger to our abundance isn’t the voice of Christ; it’s the voice of the thief, of the insurrectionist. It’s the lies of the powers and principalities that animate the systems of greed, dominion, and violence that ensnare and oppress us all. Even the billionaires are caught in this web. Each and every one of us that decides I need more, even if it’s at someone else’s expense, is trapped in the lies of scarcity.

But Jesus is the gate out of the walls of greed and scarcity. He’s not tending the doorway, controlling who get’s in and who’s left out. That’s a scarcity mindset. No, Jesus came, and with the resurrection blew the hinges off the doorway. It is through him, by following where he has already walked, that we see our way out of this captivity. We are free to walk away from scarcity and into abundance.

We are free to undo the harm done to our neighbors.

We are free to give mutual aid.

We are free to cook meals and feed the block.

We are free to help people we know that need a hand up.

We are free to stop giving people scraps and calling it help.

Jesus opened the gate, and we all can come and go freely, without fear, without danger, without scarcity.

People still try to close that gate, to keep the “right people” in and “those people” out. But Jesus is having none of that. Jesus is the way because he has shown us in the cross what love looks like. And love doesn’t look like a closed gate. So, Jesus keeps the gate open… even if some religious, political, and social people want to act like it’s closed.

We are in the green pastures if only we will show abundance to each other.

And this is the call, the voice of Jesus, the voice that calls each of us by name, that loves us each by name.

Jesus isn’t just shepherding a flock. Jesus is shepherding you, me, him, her, they, them. Jesus is the shepherd of each of us individually. He knows your name, and he loves you.

Jesus comes to us when we act as if scarcity is the truth, and walks in front of us, leading us to a banquet that we never imagined possible. Jesus gives us the imagination to undo scarcity. Jesus walked these ways, knows them well, and gives us all the grace, time and time again, that we need to unlearn scarcity.

Jesus calls you by name to come to the table, to the feast. He has a place for you, a chair with your name on it, a plate for you. Jesus knows your fear. Jesus knows my fear. He knows how much we long for and need abundance, and how far away we are from it. He knows how wrapped in scarcity we are, and as the good shepherd, he takes the time to untangle us from the net of greed, fear, scarcity, violence, and dominion.

Jesus is the way out of this. And Jesus has revealed that we belong to each other. He has given us freely to our neighbor and has given our neighbor to us. This is true abundance: belonging to one another, being known by name, and open-handedly living with each other in community.

Community is communion, and communion is our banquet, our table, our feast where everyone has a place, no one is left out, and abundance is the way we live.

Eat up.