The Discerning Space
Jn 10:1-10

Jijo Kandamkulathy CMF
Claretian Missionaries

The good shepherd is an image so engraved in the Christian literature that we have forgotten that it is a metaphor. It must have been the same for the Jews as well, since all the celebrated Jewish ancestors were shepherds. Abraham, Moses, Jacob, David and all in that line. Going beyond the metaphor, we need to meditate on the real me, the sheep and the good shepherd, Jesus Christ, the relationship of every Christian with one’s master.

The meek and gullible nature of the sheep make them susceptible to be led astray. Look at that statement from prophet Jeremiah (11:19), like a trusting lamb, I was lead to the slaughter. That is where, Jesus talks about being the good shepherd who will protect the sheep at the cost of his own life. A shepherd, knowing all too well his sheep sings a song of the sheep in Pslam 23. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, I couldn’t care less, since my shepherd is taking care of me. This sheep knows the master very well and leaves all his cares unto him. Jesus, instead aware of the danger of evil shepherds warn us to be more discerning like snakes and innocent like doves. Discernment of the voices, that is what the Lord wants of us.

About discernment Viktor Frankl wrote in his Man’s Search for Meaning, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” I have been captivated by this sentence over decades and particularly in the context of the relationship between the shepherd and the sheep. The sheep, we the humans, get used to the master’s call through familiarity to his voice. The animals get conditioned to the tone and frequency of the shepherd. We have a choice beyond the conditioning. There is a space between our response and the master’s call.

“My sheep hear my voice.” thus begins the gospel today. This little sentence hides a lot more than it expresses. First of all, it indicates the existence of other voices (of other shepherds) and other sheep that do not belong to the good shepherd. The Good Shepherd seems to speak from the experience of evil or bad shepherds who sell or kill their sheep or leave to the cruelty of preying animals.

I often wonder, how do we get used to the voice of the shepherd? How do we hear the voice of the Lord, regularly? I listened to the Lord through a process of discernment based on the values that I have picked from the scriptures and the Church. There was a period of growth in me in which I tried to cancel the space between the voice and response. That was by choosing a passage from the Bible in random and trying to find a personal message out of it. This practice like taking a lottery ticket is practiced around the world. I do not use this method anymore since, it cancels out the personal process of the discernment. The random usage of the word of God is more likely to satisfy human curiosity. Even the evil tempted the Lord using scripture quotes. Since that realization came, I have started a process of discernment to listen to the voice of the Lord in the scriptures, based on the global values that the scripture gives us.

The good shepherd stands out in the way he gives a choice to the sheep to listen to his voice and he does not force his voice over the sheep. But, he does not allow anyone to get lost either. When the sheep wanders and gets lost, he goes in search of the lost sheep and returns carrying him on his shoulders.

Every call demands a response from us, a discerned response. When we get used to that discernment, we are able to recognize the voice of the Good Shepherd with accuracy.

©Claretian Missionaries

Cum Approbatione Ecclesiastica 2023