He calls his sheep and
his sheep follow him because they know his voice.
How do we recognise the call of Jesus as the call of God and
decide to follow him? What convinces us of the truth of his claims?
Where do we find and locate authority in a world where
authority is so mis-trusted
At the centre of our faith in the revealed character and
will of God lies Jesus the person who revealed that will to the world.
In the parable today Jesus describes himself as the gateway
to God. His way is the path we must walk to participate in the life of God.
Jesus as a gate or a door is not half as romantic as “Jesus
the good shepherd” or “Jesus the light of the world” or “Jesus the bread of
life” and so imagining Jesus as a door has never caught the imagination of
Christians in quite the same way as all those other descriptions but if you
imagine Jesus as an open door and that door leads out of a dark room or a
prison and is the doorway to God and freedom and light then the metaphor can
come alive.
We either accept his authority or we don’t. To accept his
way and words as authoritative is in classicly Christian language “to accept
Jesus as our personal Lord and saviour”. Scary sounding words but when you boil
them down they mean, “whose authority do you accept?”
Lots of people, movements and institutions claim and
exercise authority in our lives. Parliaments, both European and British, the
law, monarchy, teachers, parents, police, but whatever legitimate authority
they may have in their rightful sphere, the mark of the Christian is that one
authority usurps all of them.
The final claim on our lives comes from God and Jesus as the
revealer of the kind of God we give
that authority – loving, merciful, faithful and just. All other authorities are
contingent.
So if we accept God as revealed in the life death and
resurrection of Christ as the final arbiter in our lives hadn’t we better find
out exactly what is required of us?
This is no easy task. The plethora of denominations and
different understandings of what it means to follow Christ within those
denominations makes a confusing picture – not one that can easily be undertaken
alone. All those different expressions of Christianity are just providing the
framework. The rest is down to us as the body of Christ. We need to meet, to
study, to discuss, to argue, to discern and to pray to be guided along the
right path.
If we seek the guidance of the Spirit and trust the words of
Jesus in the Bible then we will be guided into all truth, and we must do it
together.
