The suffering Christ is the touchstone for how each of us should suffer injustice. In First Peter, we have the theme of caring taken to extremes. In a sense, each member is a shepherd for all the others. The tone of voice of caring is matched by actions of caring. The image of the shepherd does not appear in the vision of the early church in Acts 2, but this vision shows each member caring for all the others, giving of their own substance to those who have need. Maybe the other lections can give us more guidance. We have the content, then, of caring, and the intonation would also need to convey the same degree of caring, even self-risking and self-sacrificial caring. There is David, who fought lions and bears to save his sheep, Psalm 23 where the Lord as shepherd guides us through the dark valley, and most of all, Yahweh as the true shepherd in Ezekiel 34 who cares for his sheep. Let us start with the image of the shepherd that references many passages in the Hebrew Bible. There is the intelligible content, but there is also the intonation, the way the voice modulates and sounds in the heart. This suggests that there are two dimensions to the art of hearing the voice of Jesus the Good Shepherd. In some ways, the distinction between the two helps us use them well together. Although the two functions are distinct, and there are advantages to noting the distinction, we want them to work well together. Normally, hearing the content and the inflection is one seamless phenomenon but the separation caused by events such as a stroke show that each is done by a separate part of the brain. Many times, Sachs demonstrates that we learn how the brain works through various malfunctions. Undistracted by the inflection, she knew that the words were incoherent.
She could not hear the inflections but she could understand the words. It seems that undistracted by any intelligibility of the words, they could sense the tone of the voice with great clarity. They were laughing because they knew the president was lying. Most of them were laughing although they could not understand a word of it as they were suffering from aphasia. A group of patients recovering from strokes were listening to the speech by a president (several years past now). Thinking of hearing the “voice” of the shepherd reminds me of one of the anecdotes told by Oliver Sachs in one of his books about neurological patients. It is not surprising if these people were hard of hearing as well. 10: 6) We get an important clue as to the problem if we note that Jesus is speaking to the same people who had taken umbrage at his healing of the man born blind, people who said they could see when they really couldn’t.
10: 3-4) Interestingly, although this seems fairly straightforward, John says that his listeners “did not understand what he was saying to them.” (Jn. When Jesus speaks of himself as a shepherd, he says that the sheep “hear his voice” and they follow him because they “know his voice.” (Jn.
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