Homily for the 4th Sunday of Easter, April 26, 2026. Gospel of St. John 10:1-10. Theme: Hearing the Voice of Jesus in a Noisy World
In today’s Gospel, Jesus says that He calls out to His sheep and they follow him because they recognize his voice. That paints such a serene and easy picture of how to live as a Christian, doesn’t it? The Shepherd speaks and we the sheep listen and follow. Sounds so simple! But we all know that our world is anything but quiet. And that life is anything but easy. We live in a very busy noise-filled age with the constant hum of daily chatter, with the ever-present distraction of social media, and with countless demands made upon our time. There are so many voices shouting out at us and competing for our attention all day long telling us who we should be, what we should want, why we should fear and how we should live.
The bottom line is that we sheep follow our Good Shepherd in a very noisy distracting world. But if we have a hard time hearing Him, it’s not because He has stopped talking. Rather, it’s because we aren’t giving ourselves the time and the space to listen and hear Him. You see, sheep learn to recognize their shepherd's voice by spending a lot of time with him out in the fields. They learn through repeated daily experience what his voice sounds like. It becomes a familiar and trusted voice and so, for their own good they simply listen, obey and follow. By using this metaphor in today’s Gospel, Jesus is telling us that we need to be like that. We need to spend time with Him so that we can become familiar with His voice, recognize it. and then listen, obey and follow.
The Bible and the saints tell us that the surest way to do this, to develop the skill of recognizing the voice of Jesus, is by spending quiet time with Him in prayer on a regular basis. By “prayer” I don't mean reciting memorized words and favorite devotions, as helpful as these might be at times. What I’m talking about is prayer in its simplest and purest form which means a person-to-person conversation with God from the heart and in one’s own words. The easiest way to describe this is to compare it with a visit between friends who have decided to step away from the busyness of their daily routine in order to make time for one another.
And this type of prayer, like any meaningful conversation, is not a matter of one person doing all the talking! In addition to sharing our thoughts and concerns with Christ, we also need to be silent and in that quiet time listen for His reply deep within us. And as we grow in the practice of this type of prayer, we will learn to recognize His voice and distinguish it from all others. Not by its audible tone, of course, because He communicates by unspoken words, but by the impression it makes upon our hearts. We will become familiar with it for we will have tuned the ears of our soul to the frequency of His way of speaking. We will learn that the voice of our Good Shepherd has certain qualities. For example, it doesn’t shout and demand but it whispers with gentleness and peace. It doesn’t accuse and condemn, but forgives and heals and encourages.
But in order to hear His voice, we must be willing to turn down the volume on everything else around us during our prayertime. This means intentionally making space in our daily schedule for this time alone with Him in silence and solitude. And experience shows that if we don’t plan it, it simply won't happen because life makes so many demands on our day. But the good news is that this doesn’t have to take up a huge block of our time so anyone can really do it. As a matter of fact, one of the Church’s official teachers on prayer, the great St. Teresa of Avila, used to say that even just 15 minutes a day of this kind of prayer will bring us deep into the Kingdom of God.
She was so confident about this that she even promised Heaven itself to those who make this daily commitment! That’s a bold statement but she could make it because she knew from experience the transforming power of this kind of daily personal prayer from the heart and in our own words. And you know what she said really makes sense to me because it shows the depth of our desire for God and the sincerity of our intention to grow in our relationship with Him. And I am sure that God certainly will bless and reward such a decision and such a person!
Now, when it comes to actually planning our daily prayer-time it's helpful to know that it can be done anytime and anywhere. While Eucharistic Adoration is, of course, an excellent time and place for it, not everyone can get to a church and besides, in some places a church is not even open. But you know, we don’t have to be physically before the Blessed Sacrament to be truly present with Christ because the doors of a tabernacle and the walls of a parish church cannot restrain the Living Powerful Presence of our Risen Lord. He transcends those material barriers and radiates far beyond those physical confines. And besides, the Bible affirms that Christ dwells by grace through faith within those who are baptized, so we can always be in His Divine Presence for our prayertime, no matter where we are.
So, you see, Jesus really makes it quite easy for us to be with Him, to get to recognize His voice and follow Him. He doesn’t demand our time and attention but simply invites it. He wants a real and meaningful personal relationship with each one of us that flows from the freedom of our love and not simply out of the duty of obligation. And we will see that as we gradually grow in becoming people of prayer, something beautiful begins to happen within us. We discover that we are no longer wandering about like lost sheep in a noisy world, but that we are being led. Led through confusion to peace. Led through chaos to serenity. Led through fear to trust. Led even through suffering to confidence in our compassionate Good Shepherd who holds each one of us in His arms close to His Sacred Heart.
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