John 10:22–30
When Jesus is confronting crowds, he often has what seems to be a simple, straightforward ask of them: Believe what you see in front of you. Yet this proves to be beyond their ability. They want sometimes words, sometimes miracles on command, but always they want Jesus to be for them what they imagine, respond to them as they expect. They cannot do the most straightforward thing: Look at what is before them and judge accordingly.
Their inability or refusal to simply take him at his deed and word, to recognize a truth that doesn’t accord with the world they have grown up in and then continued to build, should be familiar to us. This is a human trait that we, too, display often. We prefer our own ideas about justice and punishment, order and propriety, safety and security, over what is quite evidently true: That prisons do not increase safety or rehabilitate people who have committed crimes, they are not humane “time-outs” until people are ready to reenter society, they do none of the good often assumed about them and much harm. Believing they must be the correct way to respond to harm or disruption, we refuse to see how much is lost and how many hurt—or what else could be, instead of incarceration.
Yet Jesus says that no one can snatch his own from his hand. His sheep are his, given to him not by a society that weighs the worth of human beings as it suits the powerful but by Almighty God, the stamp of whose image is on every person, even those who have been banished from public sight.
What if we took Jesus at his deed and his word? What if we accepted the truth when it comes before us, even if it disrupts our ideas of how a society must be run? What freedom might await us, with our eyes open to God’s Anointed and the surpassing worth of all of his sheep? What might then be possible?
Bailey Pickens is a Presbyterian pastor who lives with her wife and dog in Nashville, TN