The Rev. Austin K. Rios
30th April: Easter 4
During this Easter season, we have seen Jesus appear in new ways to the faithful.
Early on the first day of the week, Jesus the Gardener drew near to Mary who, heavy with grief, desperately searched for his stolen body at the tomb and found it empty.
When Jesus appeared to the disciples in the locked room, they had their first glimpse of how Jesus’ wounded and resurrected physical body was now drawing together the mystical Body of Christ with its many members.
This Amplified Body became the basis for what we now experience through Baptism—the universe-stretching community made alive through the bread and wine of the new creation.
Then last week, we experienced Jesus the Stranger—the one who accompanies us on the pilgrim road and shares stories both glad and sad with us, who then makes his full presence known when we do what he taught us to do—when we make our home and hearts places where strangers become guests and friends.
This week is commonly referred to as Good Shepherd Sunday because of Jesus’ words in the Gospel of John about the contrast between his way of caring for his sheepfold and the way that other political and religious leaders of his day failed to care for people.
But I found myself interested in a different image of Jesus this week, one that is explicit in our gospel for today.
Jesus the Gate.
What does it mean for Jesus to be the gate to abundant life?
Gates are human creations designed to separate one thing from another—a gate can stand between city walls and a city center, a gate on a dam can control the flow of water from one part of a river to another, and a gate on a sheepfold can both gather the sheep together and protect them from outside threats.
Throughout most of Christian history, Jesus words about being the gate have been interpreted to mean that entrance to the sheepfold depends upon going through Jesus, and this idea has been further refined to suggest that it is only Baptism that allows us to pass through the gate of Jesus.
I think that in many ways, this is true. Baptism incorporates us into the Body of Christ and marks us as one of Christ’s sheep forever.
But too often this conception has been employed by the bad shepherds, the thieves, and the bandits of the church and the larger world to serve as a litmus test for human worthiness.
Jesus as the Gate has been used by such bad shepherds to play up the kind of separation and injustice that serves their narrow purposes, and their approach tends to rely heavily on equating Jesus’ judgement about sinfulness and worthiness with the bad shepherds’ own judgement.
So much damage has been done to the greater cause of Christianity by bad shepherds who would rather play gatekeeper than pass through Jesus the gate themselves.
I most certainly believe that we who are charged with Christian leadership, whether exercised in an ordained or lay capacity, must pass through the Gate of Jesus if we are to remain true to the call that leads to the abundant life that Christ revealed to us.
That abundant life is not only a promise for the end of the age, but a reality that we can experience here and now, provided we pattern our lives and our actions along Jesus’ own.
Passing through Jesus the Gate to enter the sheepfold means incorporating Jesus’ ethic of the first being last and the greatest being the one who serves, while ensuring that our relationship to God and to one another is characterized by love and authenticity.
Jesus the Gate stands between two realities like any other gate: the status quo world that encourages us to approach our lives in survivalist and ever more egocentric ways, and the abundant and everlasting life that arises within the shared destiny of sheep aligned under the ethics and grace of the reign of God.
All of us who want this abundant life that moth and rust cannot consume, that thieves cannot break in and steal[1]—the life that becomes the only one worth pursuing and living for those who have fed upon the green pastures and slaked their thirst from the still waters of the Lord’s sheepfold[2]—must allow our lives to be shaped by Christ’s own.
By doing so, Jesus the Gate opens to us and invites us in to share in the life that flows from and through him.
And while being a part of the sheepfold does not protect us from the world’s slings and arrows, nor from the predatory nature of the bad shepherds and wolves, passing through Jesus the Gate does allow us to see those injuries and sufferings in a different light.
Sheep who have passed through Jesus the Gate aren’t shielded from all suffering—in fact, sometimes we experience heightened levels of it. Just think of the trials of generations of martyrs or anyone who has faced rejection and persecution for privileging Christ’s life over the shadow life of the world.
But as we face such trials, we sheep who hear the Good Shepherd’s voice, who have passed in and out of the sheepfold through Jesus the Gate, are graced with the Lord’s ability to meet anger, injustice, and oppression with our Savior’s tools of persistent love. We are given the strength to respond to such sin by simultaneously telling the truth about it—and calling it to change by applying the same grace and forgiveness that has been shown to our own shortcomings.
The more we have both been gathered in through Jesus the Gate and then sent out into the world in peace and charged with God’s mission of transformation, the greater our capacity for love, for bearing sufferings, and for shrinking the distance between the abundant life we know in the safety of the sheepfold and its presence within the daily life we all inhabit.
Jesus the Gate is protective without being exclusive—Jesus the Gate is open to all who are willing to make his unique way of living their own—Jesus the Gate is the thin line between the sacred and the profane and the passageway for all those who long for the goodness and limitlessness of the re-creation of world that resurrection make possible.
Have faith dear ones—do not be afraid of entering abundant life through Jesus the Gate, neither be afraid of following the Good Shepherd’s voice as he leads us out into the wider world.
Be not afraid of the bad shepherds who wish to usurp the role of gatekeeper from God alone, but do be aware of their lures and designs.
Jesus the Gate is our protector, our standard bearer, and our passageway to the life and the peace that the world cannot give.
Let us pass through him this day, feasting once more on the bread and wine of resurrection and then let us go boldly into the world with reinvigorated hearts and hands, ready to share God’s abundance with those who do not yet know it.