Easter 4
Sermon preached by Hannah Swinthinbank
Readings:
John 10:22-30
Acts 9:36-43
(Revelation 7: 9-17; Psalm 23)
“My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish”
“Tabitha, get up.”
The other week, a friend and I were watching the (very wonderful) sitcom, Derry Girls. In this particular episode the girls break into their school to find out their GCSE results and end up getting arrested. They’re being interviewed at the police station, and the Chief Inspector enters the room—largely in shadow. “Please, sit down,” he says to one of the girls. And Clem sitting next to me, turns around and says, “Is that LIAM NEESON?”
I imagine that many of you can identify a number of people by just the sound of their voice—maybe not Liam Neeson, for it was he—but others. If you’re old enough (sorry) to share my mid-90s nostalgia for Derry Girls, then you may also remember trying to work out just who was on the other end of the phone you just answered when if they forgot to tell you.
Maybe there are voices that you know well enough that you can tell how they’re feeling by the tone of their voice. The I-haven’t-had-my-coffee-yet voice, the I-have-this-really-great-thing-to-tell-you-voice, the this-tone-of-voice-coupled-with-my-use-of-your-full-name-means-you’re-in-trouble voice.
Who do these voices belong to? People we know, often love, who we let into our lives.
In my head I can hear the warm voice of the message telling me, ‘I love it…’ from the trusted friend I sent a draft of a paper. The ‘You got this!’ yelled across the quad as I retreat to my desk to write another essay. The firm-but-kind, “Are you sure…” of the parent wisely questioning a choice I’m making. They make a difference to how I feel about myself and what I’m doing, they shape how I act. There are other voices, less life-giving, too, but those are for me and my therapist…
To know a voice like this is to have listened to it. And to really listen to a voice, to heed it, is to give it power in our lives We are saying that we trust where it is leading us or directing us, that we want what it is offering us. We are saying that we believe it is telling us the truth about something and we are going to let that shape our lives.
I wonder whose voices have power in your lives. I wonder whose lives your voices have power in. Do they speak life to you? Do you speak life to others?
“My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.”
Our readings today reveal this powerful relationship between voice and life. In following Jesus’ voice, his sheep say that they believe that his words and his deeds show him to be the Messiah, and that it is worth following him. That doing so will lead to life.
The idea recurs in Acts. “Tabitha, get up,” says Peter. And up Tabitha gets. Peter’s voice calls her back to life.
This story is familiar—not because we’ve heard it before and will hear it again—but because it holds resonances it holds of an earlier story, that of Jesus’ raising of Jairus’ daughter. In that story, Jesus arrives ‘too late’. The girl has died. He sends everyone but her parents and his disciples from the room and tells her to ‘get up’. Here Peter also arrives after Tabitha’s death, he asks everyone to leave the room, and he tells her to get up.
The language Luke uses is deliberately similar to that of Mark’s gospel story. He gives the woman’s name in both Greek and Aramaic—Dorcas, Tabitha—but has Peter use her Aramaic name, suggesting that this was the language of conversation. In Mark, the Aramaic words are transliterated into Greek and then translated: ‘Talitha koum!’ says Jesus to the little girl. Get up. ‘Tabitha koum”, Peter would have said to the woman in Joppa. This wordplay creates a little echo that is designed to resonate and grow. It reminds us that Peter is copying Jesus, following in Jesus’ footsteps, and that he is able to speak life to Tabitha because of Jesus’ promise of life to those who follow his voice.
Reading this story now helps us to remember in a particular way. In Acts this story comes after Pentecost, of course: Peter has received the Holy Spirit, and this is important for this act. But in the light of Easter, we are reminded that Tabitha can be raised from the dead because Jesus was raised from the dead first. We are reminded that in rising from the dead Jesus has defeated death and is the firstborn of the new creation. Jesus’ resurrection is, if you like, the final proof that Jesus is the Messiah, that he can give eternal life and those who follow him will never perish. And in the context of persecution, which we have seen already in Acts, the raising of Tabitha stands as a powerful reminder of Jesus’ conquest of death.
Tabitha’s resurrection is dramatic, of course. But speaking life isn’t only about this kind of resurrection. In John eternal life is not something that is for the future. It is given to those who believe as they believe, and it makes a difference to life in the here and now. Jesus calls it ‘abundant life’— emphasising its quality as much as its temporality.
Think of it like this: we hear Jesus’ voice and follow it into his kingdom, and so, even before death we are called to live as if we live in the kingdom in which we too will be resurrected. In a beautiful phrase, the African American theologian Willie James Jennings describes Jesus as “God drawing the everyday into holiness – a holiness that will last and will be a new pace for living life”[1] I love this use of ‘pace’ – in a time when the world moves so fast, living at God’s pace can be a radical act. To spend time visiting people, encouraging people, grieving with people. The attention that Peter pays to the widows who are showing him how Tabitha had cared for them is really worth noticing—he doesn’t arrive, raise the dead and leave. He spends time with them and values them, just as Jesus used to do. This, too, is life-giving.
This leads me to some questions.
First, are we hearing Jesus’ voice and following it into the kingdom? Yes, in our prayer, and our worship, and our reading of the Bible, and even (hopefully!) our listening to sermons. But also, are we paying attention to the Peters in our lives who speak Jesus’ voice to us? It’s worth adding that these aren’t only the voices of people we know personally: they might be figures or even organisations we don’t know, but whose voices we trust. Who reminds you that you belong in the kingdom? Who reminds you that this belonging means something for how you live?
We may need different voices at different times, to say different things. Sometimes we will need to hear Jesus reminding us that we belong: that we are his sheep, that he loves us, and that we live in him and in the light and power of his resurrection. Sometimes the ‘get up’ we hear from our Peters will be reminding us that we belong in this life, that they are with us and for us. Sometimes all we will need is the gentle ‘mmhmmm’ or even the silence of a voice that is listening and attending.
At other times we’ll need to hear Jesus challenge us, to remind us that following him, living in the kingdom, ought to be shaping our lives. We might need to hear a ‘get up’ that is a ‘Wake up!’, a ‘What are you doing?’ a ‘Is this really the life you think Jesus has for you?’ These voices can be hard to hear, in that we don’t always want to hear them, but it’s really important to try and listen to them and to know who we’re listening to. Often these are the voices of perhaps a handful of people who keep us accountable to this following of Jesus, and who we give this power because we know that they love Jesus and love us. For those of us who live and work in places that put us in positions of power, this also means listening to those who offer use critiques, challenges, even complaints, and discerning what Jesus’ voice is saying to us about our lives.
One of the things that these people in my life do is to remind me that I’m also called to called to bring Jesus’ voice into the lives of others, like Peter does. This is not to say that they’re wildly encouraging me to raise the dead (a complex subject for another time), but they’re reminding me that my voice has power in people’s lives and to think about how I use it.
This means considering how our voices can encourage, can care, can be attentive (and might even just need to shush). It means thinking about how we challenge others well, loving them and loving Jesus. It means learning who we have these relationships with personally, but also thinking about how we might do this in more structural ways — in everything from voting (which many of you may have done on Thursday), to giving constructive feedback in the organisations we belong to, to thinking about how we support and enable other people to use their voices to speak life.
“My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish”
Where do you need to hear Jesus’ voice in your life today? Where is he asking you to speak life to others?
[1] Willie James Jennings. Acts. (Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017), 99