We gather today to continue our celebration of Eastertide.  I have really enjoyed Easter this year.  After the chilly Winter we had, the warm Spring weather has been a real tonic along with some beautiful blossoms and daffodils.  

I enjoyed several Easter eggs too...and even more so because I waited until after Easter Day to get them when they were greatly reduced in price in the shops!!  I found a lovely recipe for making chocolate cake from left-over Easter eggs too...although sadly my chocolate eggs didn’t actually last long enough for me to have any left to try out the recipe!!

The Easter message, however, will last forever and so it is with the Risen Jesus that we continue our celebration!

Jesus said: “The sheep that belong to me listen to my voice; I know them and they follow me.  I give them eternal life; they will never be lost and no one will ever steal them from my hand.” 

These words are so very comforting.  We remember that Jesus is the Good Shepherd and we are counted among those who follow him.  He promises to keep us safe with him...always.   What does belonging to Jesus mean?  It means listening to his voice and following him.  It is about getting to know him...and being known by him.

Sometimes we can feel that we really don’t know other people very well.  We live in a society where we are bombarded with ways to stay in touch via social networking sites, e-mail and various other ways to talk, write, and communicate with each other.  However, many people are ever more lonely.  It’s a hallmark of our society that we live really close to each other yet don’t know each other well.  I remember when I lived in London warmly greeting my neighbour from across the road at a school fair.  She looked at me completely blankly and clearly had no idea that I lived just across the road.  She was obviously just busy getting on with her own life...and maybe I was spending too much time ‘twitching the net curtains at the window’!!

Sometimes, we don’t know our loved ones that well either.  I have tended to perceive my father as somewhat remote and authoritarian.  Yet, I know that as a young man he rode his motorcycle around Western Europe all by himself and had plenty of experiences about which I know very little.

The Jewish writer Elie Wiesel was very attached to his father, who died in Auschwitz in 1944.  Yet when Wiesel came to write his autobiography he wrote:

I never really knew my father.  It hurts to admit that.  I knew little of the man I loved most in the world, the man whose merest glance could stir me.  I wonder if other sons have the same problem.  Do they know their fathers as someone other than the authoritarian figure who leaves in the morning and returns in the evening, bringing bread to the table.

To know another requires time, patience, sacrifice, and love.   We can dislike people but when we get to know them, and their stories, our attitude to them can change.  But knowing is a two way business.  Jesus the Good Shepherd knows his sheep intimately, but they also know him - “my own know me” as we heard from John’s Gospel earlier on.  Jesus wasn’t afraid to let himself be known, but we sometimes are.    

Church is about community.  It is about building relationships so that we learn to know and love each other – despite what we find out about each other!  Perhaps we fear that if people really knew us for the imperfect people that we are, they would reject us.  The result is that we can be known for the image we project rather than for the people we really are. 

Jesus is a Good Shepherd to us.  He wants us to have life here and eternal life hereafter.  However, this is a two-way affair.  We are called to respond to his love, and to live out his love in the context of a church community.  The faithful sheep listen to the voice of the shepherd and follow him.  We are warmly invited to get know the Lord, to listen to his word and to respond.  Much of our response will be lived out through our relationships with other people, wherever we may gather or meet.

When I lived in Hulme back in the eighties, I remember the Pastor of a House Church who always wore a knitted hat on her head with a badge written on it which said “When you’ve met me you’ve met Jesus”.  I remember being really amazed by this at the time and I have never forgotten it.  It’s actually a really good reminder that the Risen Jesus dwells in all our hearts and calls us and those we meet into a real and everlasting relationship of love.