John 10:1-10 "Through the Gate" Scott Hoezee

Eight or so years ago there was a story carried in various newspapers about a woman from Missouri who was startled out of a dead sleep one night by some desperate cries of "Help! Help!" You know how it is when you awake to some sound: you are not at all certain whether you really heard something or if it was just a dream. At first she thought perhaps her husband had cried out, but he was sleeping soundly next to her. Then suddenly she heard the cries again: "Help! Help!" Finally she threw back the covers and headed downstairs toward their living room. "Help!" went the plaintive voice yet again. "Where are you?" the woman replied. "In the fireplace," came the rather shocking answer.

And sure enough, dangling in the fireplace with his head sticking through the flue was a burglar, upside down and quite snugly stuck! The police and fire department got him out eventually, though not before having to disassemble the mantle and some of the masonry. Perhaps the best part of the story was what this woman did in the meantime. She flipped on all the lights and videotaped the whole thing. I don't know what the two talked about while waiting for the police and company to arrive, but had I been she, I think I would have hauled out a Bible and given the crook a pointed reading of John 10: "Verily I tell you, anyone who does not enter by the door but climbs in another way is a thief and a robber!"

John 10 is one of the most moving and lovely passages in the New Testament. It is also one of the most well-known. Yet tonight we ended one verse shy of the most famous of all the "I Am" sayings in John, and maybe it was vaguely agonizing for you to have me stop the reading where I just did. At the very end of Handel's "Hallelujah" chorus there is a rest, a pause for 2-4 seconds or so before the choir completes the number with that final, thunderous "Hallelujah!" But what if one year the Calvin Oratorio chorus stopped at that rest as usual but then just went on to the next piece without finishing the last "Hallelujah"? You'd want to jump up and ask what's going on! Finish it! Or maybe it's kind of like those times when you get all ready to sneeze . . . but then don't. You would rather have just let it out! And so here: stopping on the very cusp of Jesus' saying "I am the good shepherd" may seem hard to take--you don't want to hold back another week but would prefer to forge ahead right now. Let's finish this wonderful passage!

But I am having us wait a week so that we can take the time to consider just these first ten verses. Because the passage which follows about the good shepherd is so powerful that it has the tendency to swamp the lesser-known image of "I am the gate." In fact, think about it: how many times have you seen some kind of a depiction of Jesus as the good shepherd? Probably hundreds or thousands of times. We see it every time we enter this sanctuary in the stained glass window over the door in the narthex and we've seen it on countless other stained glass windows in churches all over the world. We've seen it on any number of Christian greeting cards we've sent or received, and we've also seen it now and again on Precious Moments-like figurines. But when was the last time you saw Jesus depicted as a sheep gate?

Showing Jesus with a lamb draped over his shoulders creates a pretty picture. But how can you show Jesus as some slatted gate swinging on hinges? A gate of grey, weathered wood dotted with knot holes and being swung open and shut by some gatekeeper is not as interesting as the human image of a gentle shepherd. But perhaps it is not just the difficulty we have in picturing this that makes us think so seldom of Jesus as the gate.

If you were paying attention when we read these verses, then you perhaps noticed a few oddments. First of all we can observe that in verses 1-6 the focus of Jesus' little allegory (it's not really a parable) is on the kinds of people who try to enter a sheep pen. Those who climb in stealthily over the back fence are crooks, but the one who walks right through the front gate is the shepherd, whose voice the sheep both know and trust. The whole point seems to be about the people who may enter a sheep pen one way or the other. The contrast is not between the gate over against the back fence but between who it is that uses those various points of entrance.

There is no question in those first six verses that Jesus is the shepherd who is loved, recognized, and trusted by both the gatekeeper and the sheep themselves. So you expect Jesus to continue on with this line of thought. Indeed, if you were to erase verses 7-10 and just flow right on from verse 6 to verse 11, you would never miss a thing. Given the way the first six verses laid everything out in this allegory, it would make perfect sense for Jesus to slide right into declaring himself the good shepherd.

But he doesn't! Startlingly in verse 7 he instead identifies himself not as the person who walks through the gate but as the gate itself. You didn't see that one coming. How can Jesus be the gate? He just said (and in verse 11 he will say again) that he is the one who walks through the gate. So how can he be the gate and the shepherd who walks through it at the same time? If it is a straightforward, logical analogy or allegory you are looking for, you won't find it in John 10. The rhetoric and imagery here are more fluid than that. But maybe for that same reason these verses are also richer and more layered with meaning.

So let's ponder this image of the gate for a while tonight. What are some of the things that just this piece of John 10 may mean? To begin let me relate to you a story a biblical commentator told many years ago. Apparently while doing some research in the Middle East this scholar ran across an Arab shepherd. This shepherd was not a Christian and did not know the Bible. But he was a keeper of sheep and so was showing off his flock as well as the penned-in area where his sheep slept every night. "And when they go in there," the shepherd said proudly, "they are perfectly safe." But then the scholar noticed something. "Your sheep sleep in that pen and yet I just noticed that the pen does not have a gate on it." "Yes, that's right," the shepherd replied, "I am the gate." "What do you mean?" the man asked in startled wonder. "After my sheep are in the pen, I lay my body across the opening. No sheep will step over me and no wolf can get in without getting past me first. I am the gate."

Now there is an image to savor for a moment! Perhaps this may explain how Jesus can so freely mix up the imagery of being at once the shepherd and the gate. Perhaps it was possible to be both after all. The gate is the one who lays himself down to keep what is good on the inside and to keep what is bad at bay. And whether or not the good is kept safe from the bad, the point is that it will be the gate, perhaps the very body of our Lord, which makes the difference.

Actually, it is not certain that this was the precise imagery which Jesus had in mind. In fact, verse 3 indicates some kind of actual gate which can be swung open and shut by the gatekeeper, and some commentators have used that feature to this allegory to argue against the notion that Jesus as gate is no more than the shepherd curled up on the ground at the opening to the pen. Again, however, the imagery is fluid enough in these verses that it may be possible to hold both images in creative tension: Jesus may be the gate that gets opened and shut, but perhaps we can imagine that what gets swung open and shut is nothing short of the body of Jesus itself.

Either way, however, there is yet another interesting facet to gates and doors which we may fruitfully be able to think about for a moment. Jesus here identifies himself as the gate and then in verse 9 talks about the need to "enter through me." But really no one ever actually passes through a gate any more than you could walk right through a door in your house. You pass through the doorway, which is the empty space that opens up for you once the door itself is opened or moved aside. But unless you are a ghost, you cannot literally pass through a door or a gate. Indeed, our inability to pass through the wood of a door is precisely what makes the thing useful: exactly because the wood is solid your being able to lock the door is what prevents the good from escaping and the bad from trespassing.

Yet Jesus, again mixing his imagery at a fast and furious pace here, says that he is one gate that the sheep must go through after all. But you'd have to be dead to do that--you'd have to be ghost-like. But maybe just that is the point. Ordinarily the gate or door needs to be moved aside, it has to yield and give way, in order for a person or a sheep to pass into whatever the gate encloses. But in a sense isn't this what Jesus did by coming to this earth? He emptied himself, gave way, he opened himself up by shucking the perks of divinity and glory so that he could come here as a humble servant. He let himself get moved aside--shoved aside, in fact--until finally he was dead.

Yet by God's power and grace he was raised again. But the resurrected Lord Jesus could do things he didn't do before and which ordinary human beings don't do--things like being able to pass right through locked doors to appear in the midst of his disciples just as they were sitting down to eat some bread and fish. Is it too odd to suggest that the same Jesus who said he was a gate through which we need to pass is pointing in some sense to what we need to become in him through baptism? In baptism we die, we drown, we get crucified with Christ, the New Testament claims. Yes, we are raised with Christ, too, but like that risen Lord Jesus we are not the same after our baptismal dying and rising. Having died with Jesus, we now have the ability to pass right through him into the newness and fullness of the life he has promised.

But once we do that by baptism, we are most certainly not locked up in the pen forever. We who lose our lives for Christ's sake find those lives given back again. Maybe that is why Jesus makes a point of saying that we not only come in through the gate of Jesus but we also get to go out into verdant pastures of freedom and joy. That's vital to remember. Some people outside the church--and maybe at times even a few folks inside the church--have the idea that becoming a follower of Christ leads to some kind of religious incarceration. You get locked up, cloistered away from real life as well as from anything which might prove to be pleasurable, enjoyable, or fun.

Quite the contrary Jesus depicts his sheep as not just entering some pen but as also being regularly led back out of that pen into creation's various pastures. True, even so we are not given free reign out in the world. This is the point where the imagery shifts on us again as the gate through whom we pass then becomes the shepherd who also accompanies us and leads us out in the world. But that line of thought quickly leaks into next Sunday evening's sermon, so we will leave it to one side for the moment. The point for this evening is that Jesus is a two-way gate: he not only locks up behind us to keep us safe but also unlocks and swings open so that we can enter into a life dripping with more fullness than we can know.

But whether we are going into the pen or out into the pastures, it is Jesus himself, and his crucified but now resurrected body, that we pass through. We are purified by this baptismal journey through death and back to life again. We are changed, altered, re-oriented, re-energized. And this rhythm of baptism's passing in and out of Jesus the gate is re-enforced by also the Lord's Supper. There again we see the body and blood of Jesus laid down for us--the body and blood through whom we pass into newness of life but which, in the ritual act of eating and drinking, passes also through us!

All in all what we find in John 10, and then in the rest of the wider gospel as well, is a marvelous co-mingling of images. We have a living gate, a gate not of wood and steel but of flesh and blood; a living gate which is "swung aside" not because some wood swings on hinges but because Jesus' body was killed on the wood of the cross. Having been crucified and then raised, Jesus' new body has the wondrous ability to pass through doors and, by baptism and the Lord's Supper, to be passed through as the gateway to new life.

A couple of weeks ago when thinking about Jesus as the light of the world, we went to the end of John's gospel and to that little charcoal fire on the beach. We recalled again the wonder that sometimes the light that blazed forth in the original creation can also come to us in the warm glow of a much smaller fire in whose flickering light grace and forgiveness can come again and again. Tonight I want us to again go to near the end of John's gospel, this time to that famous scene in John 20. The doors are locked and yet Jesus appears to the disciples and, this time, also to doubting Thomas, who had missed it the first time that Jesus passed right through a locked door.

So now Jesus comes to Thomas and invites him to place his fingers through the nail holes and to pass his hand through the sword wound slit in Jesus' side. He is, as it were, asking Thomas to let his body enter the wounds of Jesus' body and thereby come to faith and so new life. Thomas didn't need to go that far, as it turned out. Jesus' living presence had already penetrated the locked doors of Thomas' logical and rational heart, resulting in Thomas' tear-choked cry, "My Lord! My God!"

That's the kind of joy-filled cry that results when you pass through the gate that just is Jesus' body. Of course, we haven't talked much tonight about who those robbers are who try to sneak into the fold through other points of entry. Probably Jesus had in mind some of the religious leaders of his day, the Pharisees who sneered at Jesus at the end of chapter 9. They refused to enter through the gate of Jesus. Their version of life with God had nothing to do with passing through a sacrificed body but was instead mostly about rigorous work aimed at earning some kind of reward. The result, in part, was nearly the opposite of what Jesus has in mind: they wanted to lock up God's holy sheep and never let them go out, never experience life's fullness and joys. Theirs was a gate that swung just one way: shut. But that is not the path to life.

When Jesus said, "I am the bread of life," the religious folks choked on his rhetoric. They deemed this kind of food to be disgusting and so was spiritual cuisine to be avoided. When Jesus said, "I am the light of the world," they were too accustomed to being blind to know what to do with light. Now Jesus says, "I am the gate," but they preferred trying to sneak into the pen their own way, trying to lure God's sheep away from the life of freedom and joy and back to the locked-up life of dead legalism.

In verse 6 John tells us that the people around Jesus on that long ago day didn't understand. It seemed just one more in a long string of figures of speech from Jesus which they just couldn't for the life of them grasp. All these centuries later these words come to us afresh tonight. They are still not easy to understand. Why we must pass through a gate of dead but now raised flesh remains mysterious. And so there are still many who for the life of them cannot figure this Jesus out. But my prayer is that by having eaten Jesus the bread of life and by having walked in the radiance of Jesus the light of life you have for the life of you figured it out. For the life of you--the eternal, rich, abundant life of you--may you understand this full well, both now and forever as you pass in and out of Jesus, the divine gate. Amen.