Fourth Sunday of Easter
Chris Young, a country singer, has a song called “Voices,” in which he talks about the voices he hears in his mind. But it’s not a sign of being crazy. He sings about the voice of, “My dad saying working that job, / but don’t work your life away. / And mama telling me to drop some cash / in the offering plate on Sunday.” Those are the voices that guide him in his life to help him make good decisions.
We often refer to the voice of God in our heart as the conscience. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraph 1776 (quoting the Vatican II document Gaudium et spes) states:
Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment. […In his conscience] he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths.
Our conscience is the voice of the Good Shepherd. But too often, we now refer to our conscience as what we simply want to do, which may bear no relationship to what God tells us. It is not a law unto itself, but the law given to humanity by God, to help a person know how to follow God in each particular circumstance.
In order to hear the voice of the Good Shepherd in our hearts, we have to know what that voice sounds like. How do we familiarize ourselves with His voice, to make sure that it’s not merely our own? We read the Scriptures; we learn what the Church, the Body of Christ, teaches, since Christ cannot teach one thing through the Church, and yet tell us to do something different in our hearts.
Part of recognizing the voice of the Good Shepherd is recognizing that He calls us by our name. In the Gospel of John, on Easter Sunday, Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb but does not see Christ, but just the empty tomb. Later that day, after telling the other disciples her experience, she returns to the tomb and sees a man, whom she presumes is the gardener, but it is really the risen Christ. It is not until Christ calls her name that she recognizes Him as the same Jesus she saw die on the cross. I think about the times when I was younger and in a crowd of family and/or friends. If I was trying to get my mom’s attention, I might try saying “mom” a few times, but if that didn’t work (because there were lots of moms there), it always worked when I called out “Sue.” She heard my voice and she heard her name and responded. Jesus has that personal connection to us, and calls us by name. Another example is that in the last moments of a pope’s life, if they are examining the pope to see if he is still alive, they will use his baptismal name, knowing that the name he was called by his parents would beckon him if he is still alive.
Another important aspect of the voice of the Good Shepherd and calling us by name is that He doesn’t call us by our failures. The thieves and mercenaries who want to steal the sheep and lead them away to bad pastures remind us of the wrong that we’ve done in order to keep us in that pain and hurt. Jesus will identify our sins, when we have not chosen to follow God, but He doesn’t identify us with our failures, but still calls us by name, even as He calls us to repent.
When it comes to our conscience, the voice of the Good Shepherd, we are not deciding what is right and what is wrong. We have no power to call good: bad; or bad: good. What our conscience helps us to do is to take what God has shown us is good or bad, and apply it to this particular situation in which we find ourselves. If we find our conscience telling us to do something that God has forbidden, then we have not formed our conscience well; we have not accustomed ourselves to the voice of the Good Shepherd, but decided to wander off to other fields and listen to other voices rather than God’s voice. As I said earlier, God will never contradict Himself. So if we think something is right which the Bible or the Church says is wrong; or if we think something is wrong that the Bible or the Church says is right, we need to go back and evaluate to whose voice we have been listening.
If we are living a Christ-centered life, then we will hear voices every day of our lives. No, not crazy voices, but the voice of God, helping us to choose the good and avoid the bad in all the circumstances of our life, which we call the conscience. If we are following the voice of thieves and robbers, then we will miss the gate to eternal life which is Christ. But if we follow the voice of the Good Shepherd, even if we have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death with Him, we know that we will make it through the sheep gate and “dwell in the house of the Lord for years to come.”