Easter 04, Year A: John 10:1-10
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
May 3, 2020
Jonathan Hanneman
To watch a video of the sermon, please visit this page.
Each year on the fourth Sunday of Easter, the Lectionary loads us up with Bible verses referencing shepherds and sheep, so much so that many people refer to today as “Good Shepherd Sunday.” This year we celebrate that theme with Psalm 23, a portion of I Peter referencing “the shepherd…of your souls,” and the beginning of Jesus’ Good Shepherd discourse.
Oddly, although our Gospel reading makes extensive use of shepherd and sheep imagery, if you look carefully, you won’t see a single mention of “the Good Shepherd” in any of our texts today. Jesus is building up to describing himself that way, but he doesn’t do so until the verse immediately following our reading.[1] Instead, he focuses here on a different—and for me, at least, more opaque—metaphor: “I am the gate for the sheep.”
I’m sure you’re intimately familiar with gates. If you were to look out the windows behind me, you would see several just from here. For most of the week, I couldn’t see this as much more than a throwaway metaphor, as did most of the resources and commentaries I looked at. Everyone seems to assume that Jesus is building up to something more important, and this statement just happened to pop up along the route to his main point. But as I thought about it, I realized this gate image can subtly influence our attitudes and behaviors, which makes it worth looking at.
As you well know, a gate is a practical, moveable barrier to keep something protected from outside influences. Despite its functions of preservation while allowing access, the concept of a gate easily becomes exclusionary, creating an us-versus-them mentality. It reminds me of a song we used to sing in Sunday School when I was little:
“One door, and only one,
but yet its sides are two.
I’m on the inside,
on which side are you?”
As a child, I really liked that song. It had easy rhymes and a simple musical pattern. It was fun to sing, and the words made me feel secure. However, as a grown-up, I find both its tone and its message to be disturbing. On one hand, the melody sounds really close to the common “na-na-na boo-boo” taunt. And on the other, the wording implies an inherent superiority for the Christian, who—instead of celebrating our role as servant to all, as Jesus clearly taught us—is suddenly flaunting their position as an insider simply because they possess some kind of hidden knowledge.
I know I’ve mentioned it before, but this concept of “secret knowledge” is closely related to the ancient heresy of Gnosticism[2] and is frighteningly common in many—maybe even most—expressions of Americanized Christianity. The name for this philosophical tradition comes from the word gnosis, which simply means “knowledge.”[3] The problem with Gnosticism was (and still is) not the knowledge aspect itself. The problem is the practiced secrecy leading to exclusion. In our Morning Prayer reading just yesterday[4], Jesus plainly told his followers, “What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.”[5] If we look at the overall scope of the Gospels, Jesus doesn’t appear to have had much patience with this kind of insider/outsider thinking or practice, which means if we’re reflecting him accurately, we shouldn’t either.
That brings me back to the “I am the gate” thing. In the Gospel of John, Biblical scholars normally treat Jesus’ “I am” statements as significant pointers to his Messianic claims. Unfortunately the Church has often used those same statements as a means of division, expressing distinction, exclusion, and superiority for ourselves. We read “I am the gate” or “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” but instead of looking at the metaphor Jesus is trying to show us, we put all our focus on the word “the.” But what happens if we move the emphasis from this (genuinely insignificant) article back to the broader image? How does this gate statement look then?
Before we can go there, it’s important to note that the word John uses for “gate” isn’t necessarily the hinged blockade we think of today. The word can just as easily reflect the gateway itself—the opening in any wall that allows you to walk to the other side.[6] And the “gatekeeper” may not be “opening” the gate so much as unblocking an entrance or simply allowing someone passage.[7] So this “gate” Jesus calls himself likely has more to do with access than exclusion.
Another thing to note is that “the gate of the sheep” was (and still is) an actual place in Jerusalem.[8] The Sheep Gate was located in the northeastern part of the city wall, just outside the Temple complex. As you can probably guess from the name, this was the area of the city where people brought their animals before offering them for sacrifice. From looking at maps, the Sheep Gate wouldn’t have been too far from Gethsemane and could have been a reasonable place for Jesus and the disciples to enter the city after spending time there or further up the Mount of Olives.
Now I’m heading into genuine speculation, but this also wouldn’t have been an unreasonable place to find someone who was bringing an offering to the Temple, perhaps someone giving thanks for a miraculous healing—someone like the man born blind, who we met in the previous chapter of John. I bring him up because he’s part of the forgotten context of this dialog. Not only does the story of Jesus healing him and his resulting expulsion from his local community immediately precede this conversation, according to John, the discussion is happening in the man’s presence. Chapter 10 is a continuation of his story![9]
So with that in mind—knowing that Jesus’s words are connected with events surrounding the man born blind, knowing that the Sheep Gate was a physical location where they could have been sitting and that, if so, they were likely watching actual shepherds interacting with real sheep in a genuine “courtyard of the livestock” (which is a more literal translation of the words behind “sheepfold” in verse one of our passage), how might that affect our understanding of what Jesus was trying to say?
There are layers and layers of expression and imaginative theology we could run with here, but I’ll try to stick with the main things Jesus himself brings up:
“…I tell you, I am the gate[way] for the sheep….Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture….I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
Unfortunately, I need to interrupt myself again to deal with a little bit of religious jargon. Over the last couple of centuries, “saved” has become an explosive word in Christian culture, its broad understanding being connected to the idea of eternal life gained through God’s forgiving of sin. Remembering that “eternal” is more about quality and state or intensity than simply duration, that isn’t a bad theological explanation. But in practical use, the word itself refers to any action of rescue, restoration, or preservation. All are equally valid translations that can work perfectly well here. To avoid connotations theological assumptions not necessarily present in the text itself and to help us stay focused on Jesus’ metaphor, I think replacing the term “saved” with one of those choices would be far less distracting.
Getting back to the point, Jesus describes himself as the gateway, saying anyone who enters through him will be rescued/restored/preserved, and will be able to go in and out and find pasturage. That would contrast with the scene at the Sheep Gate. When sheep are in the field, their shepherds lead them out to pastures for grazing. They have protection, reasonable freedom of movement, and, we imagine, a fairly contented life. But the sheep in the courtyard by the Temple would be having a different experience. When an individual sheep left that particular area, they weren’t going out for lunch or to frolic in the grass. They weren’t coming back in. They were heading to their death, entering God’s presence through ritual and fire.
That brings us back to the man born blind. In receiving access to a new way of living, he had been expelled from his family and local community, although—if he was bringing a thank offering to the Temple—apparently not from God. Jesus had given him life, but the people around him transformed it into a kind of death. Anyone who’s needed to leave their heritage, voluntarily or by force, is familiar with this sense of both abandonment and freedom. One life has died, but the possibility of a different one stands in front of you. The world has ended. And now you need to figure out how to build a new one.
Jesus is saying that his followers don’t need to be stuck in death, not forever. He’s not a wall, completely cutting people off from one another until the end of time. He isn’t a door, blocking access until someone else gives the okay. He’s a pathway, something that offers connection despite separation.
Separation is something we’re all intimately familiar with right now. The stay-at-home order, although adjustments are coming, has been extended once again. It’ll likely be another month or two before many of us will be able to get together in person. Physically, we’re still separated, still isolated, and much like death itself, still effectively parted from one another.
But at the same time, we’re alive. The world has ended. Things are unlikely to go back to the way they used to be. But despite the changes and upheaval, despite the genuine loss and destruction COVID-19 has brought us, somehow, we’re still connected. Somehow we’re still alive to one another. In some ways, in having to rethink how we meet as a church, in having to change the way we communicate, I think we’ve actually become stronger together.
How frequently were you able to get together with friends from church before? Once or twice a week at most? Now we have the option of interacting daily. Instead of holding in our concerns or joys to share on Sunday morning, we’re able to express those things to one another through livestreamed Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer on Zoom. We’ve been able to share our church services with loved ones scattered not only across the country, but around the world. In our current separation, in a time when life’s circumstances have created a seemingly insurmountable wall between us, Jesus, through some smart thinking and ingenuity on the part of his people, has been able to keep us together. In a global crisis defined by exclusion and sacrifice, Jesus has opened up an unexpected doorway for continuing connection and even broader inclusion. He’s showing us yet another pathway to new and abundant life.
[1] John 10:11
[2] Gnosticism is actually a broad category of erroneous teachings all grouped around the concept of secret or insider knowledge as the path to Divinity. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/gnosticism?s=t
[3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B3%CE%BD%E1%BF%B6%CF%83%CE%B9%CF%82#Ancient_Greek
[4] The Feast of St. Athanasius: http://lectionarypage.net/LesserFF/May/Athanas.html
[5] Matthew 10:27
[6] See Thayer’s Greek Lexicon entry b at https://biblehub.com/greek/2374.htm.
[7] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%80%CE%BD%CE%BF%CE%AF%CE%B3%CF%89
[8] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions%27_Gate and https://blog.israelbiblicalstudies.com/holy-land-studies/where-is-the-gate-of-the-sheep/
[9] There are some intriguing linguistic details John also uses to connect the man’s expulsion with Jesus’ words here, but that probably needs to wait for another sermon.