Before I came to All Saints last December I was engaged in a long-term personal project: reading, in order, the novels of Thomas Hardy. As if actual reality was not dystopian enough, I had to augment it with stories of rural English men and women enduring unspeakable tragedies. Go figure
My most recent Hardy novel is Far from the Madding Crowd, the story of sheep farmer Gabriel Oak and the trials he goes through not only tending his flock but also in courting the beautiful but willful Bathsheba Everdene.
If you have read the book or seen the movie, you will remember the awful scene described in a chapter called “A Pastoral Tragedy” in which a young sheepdog leads a flock of sheep to jump from a precipice and fall to their deaths. In Hardy’s words, as Gabriel Oak surveys the damage,
A horrible conviction darted through Oak. With a sensation of bodily faintness he advanced: at one point the rails were broken through, and there he saw the footprints of his ewes. . . .The ewes lay dead and dying at its [the precipice] foot—a heap of two hundred mangled carcasses, representing in their condition just now at least two hundred more.
In other words: Gabriel Oak had lost 200 pregnant ewes, representing a total loss of 400 sheep. He was ruined.
I recount this story not simply to bum you out but rather to put this morning’s Gospel into context. When we call Jesus the “Good Shepherd”, as we do on this Good Shepherd Sunday, or when Jesus calls himself the “gate for the sheep” as he does today, we need to hear those titles as they refer to the lives of actual shepherds and sheep. In the church we tend to put this pastoral imagery into stained glass and see all this pastoral stuff as merely picturesque. But when Jesus talks about it he is using metaphors drawn from the daily life of his audience. Sheep were both precious and vulnerable. In Hardy’s episode they follow a canine leader with dubious credentials. The result is a calamity for all concerned.
In today’s Gospel [John 10:1-10] Jesus says this:
Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.
Now this is not the Gospel passage where Jesus says, “I am the Good Shepherd”. This is the one where he calls himself “the gate for the sheep”. Why on earth does Jesus compare himself to a gate? Even our Gospel writer acknowledges the weirdness of this metaphor: “Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.”
Now I don’t really claim to understand this curious saying all that well either. But I think it might be helpful to locate this passage more precisely in the arc of John’s Gospel. Today’s reading is a bit out of sequence. It comes immediately after the episode we read several weeks ago about the healing of a man born blind. In that story the Pharisees turn not only on Jesus but on the man he has healed. John’s audience knew that there were real adversaries out there. So, following on that story, today’s passage wants to say something about how the new, Christian community can survive in a dangerous world.
That prior story helps us understand where todays talk of “thieves and bandits” comes from. As Jesus says,
Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. . . . I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
This, of course, is figurative language. Jesus is not literally calling himself a gate. He is comparing himself to one. Gates have certain characteristics. They move in two directions. They are a way into and a way out of an enclosed area. They are also part of a fence or a wall. So, however you think about the fence, the wall, and the enclosed area where the sheep are kept, the gate is fundamental to the whole security system.
Jesus’s use of the figure of a gate to describe himself invites two thoughts, one about him and one about us.
First, if Jesus is the gate (or, as he calls himself later in John, “the way”) that means that Jesus is central to the whole program. We Christians do not believe in a fuzzy, gaseous, abstract notion of God. We believe in a specific God, one whom we meet in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. If we want to know what God is like, we have only to look at Jesus. Jesus was loving, compassionate, and kind. Jesus healed and fed people. He challenged both religious hypocrisy and social injustice. To say that Jesus is the “gate” or the “way” is not to say, as some do, that you can’t be saved unless you say that Jesus is Lord. It is to say that if you presume to talk about God in ways that don’t reflect the example and values of Jesus, then you’re not talking about God at all, just some projection of your own fantasies and resentmets. As Christians, we have to ground our God talk in the reality of who Jesus was and what he stood for. Any ideology that substitutes its own values for those of God in Jesus is at best false, and at worse pernicious.
Second, if Jesus is the gate, then we are the “sheep” in the enclosure. His language about thieves and bandits is there to remind us both of our vulnerability and of the lengths he will go to protect us. Our world, like his, is full of dangerous people and bad ideas. Jesus’s point here is not to say that those don’t exist. It is to say that they are ultimately powerless over us. We are under the protection of the one who calls himself our gate, our shepherd, our way. Certainly, life can be painful, but it is not ultimately tragic. We, those we love, and our world can and will endure the attacks of thieves and bandits because we are in the embrace of the One who calls himself the gate for the sheep. Nothing--not even death--can overwhelm God’s loving purpose for us. Jesus, our gate, keeps them out and keeps us in. Like sheep to a shepherd, we are in the care of One who knows us, loves us, and fences us in.
If you remember Far from the Madding Crowd, you’ll recall that in the end Gabriel Oak not only gets Bathsheba Everdene; he also gets a lot more sheep than he lost in the first place. Happy endings in Hardy’s novels happen rarely; in everyday reality they occur only on occasion; but in Jesus’s kingdom they par for the course. God is God and we are safe. And that’s the way things are. Amen.
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