Through the Gate

         In Israel, if you climb up on a high place and look out over the Judean Hills, that biblical home of sheep and shepherds, you see waves of brown, arid hills rising and falling for miles, like sand dunes on a windswept beach. Farms and villages lie far apart, scattered across these rugged, flowing hills as if they had once been dropped there accidentally by armies of angels on the run. While Israeli settlements tend to be wrapped in fearsome barbed wire, and Palestinian villages are encased in ancient stone walls, shepherds and their sheep still pick their way over the hills and valleys. Shepherds must lead their flocks around the obstacles of rocks, walls, and disputed property lines, as the sheep somehow feed on the microscopic bits of green vegetation scattered in dry, rocky soil. One can imagine the ease with which a sheep could get lost or hungry in such a landscape. We identify with these sheep, I believe--with these little lambs wandering along barriers and through a wide sea of scarcity. When our political leaders disappoint us or our social networks fail us or our loved ones let us down, don’t we long for someone strong to step in and bind up our wounds and feed us? When we obstinately wander off down paths that lead to dead ends, when we find ourselves stalked by wolves or caught with a lame leg in a briar patch, don’t we wish for a good shepherd to swoop down and scoop us up in saving arms? Don’t we want to be led by someone who knows what they’re doing, by someone who can take us directly to those green pastures and still waters? We may not know much about sheep, but we know what it means to be cared for, to be fed and carried and rescued when we go astray. When we hear, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” we feel peace descending upon our souls, even in times of pain and grief. When we hear, “The King of Love my shepherd is,” we curl up contentedly within the words of the well-known hymn, secure in the knowledge that, “I nothing lack if I am his and he is mine forever.”  The image of God as our shepherd brings with it a feeling of security, tender-loving care, and the close community of a well-tended flock.

          In John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd.” Jesus understands that a good shepherd knows his sheep, that he has a deep bond with them, loving them as individuals, rather than counting them as commodities. But the good shepherd that Jesus portrays in our Gospel is not just a good leader and a bearer of security and comfortable community. Jesus is a shepherd so closely bound to his flock in love that he lays down his own life for them on the Cross. Moreover, before Jesus calls himself “the good shepherd” in v. 11, he says in our passage, “Very truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep.” A gate?! A gate doesn’t gather us up into loving arms and carry us to safety!  A gate doesn’t feed us or search for us when we are lost! A gate does not die in order to save us. Even worse, a gate can close and be locked against us.

          A gate, however, is a doorway into and out of community. It is the threshold between the safety of home and the beckoning world. In Jesus, we have a home and a mission. Jesus says, “whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in, and go out and find pasture.” We will come in and we will go out. Jesus leads us out into the world to do the difficult things that we are called to do, and Jesus leads us back into the worshipping community, into the security of our cozy flock. Life within the limits of the sheepfold, no matter how comfortable, is not “abundant life.” Life in fear and exile, cut off from any home, is not “abundant life,” either. In order to have the rich, deep kind of life that God wants for us, we need a way out of the bleating huddle, and we need someone to lead us down those paths of righteousness that we cannot find on our own. In the Gospels, Jesus is the gate not just to green pastures and still waters. Jesus is the gate to righteousness and to self-giving love. Jesus is the gate that opens toward the valley of the shadow of death and toward the Cross.

          The trouble with the gate imagery is that, rather than seeing the gate as a necessary passage, we tend to see it as a door that excludes some of us from the presence of God. “See,” we shout at each other from across fences, “I am in here with the shepherd, and you are stuck outside.” I’m not sure that the image is so clear-cut, however. It is not the gate itself that keeps the sheep from following their shepherd; their ability to follow depends on whether or not they recognize their shepherd’s voice as he calls to them. In our Easter Gospel, also from John, Mary Magdalene first recognizes the risen Christ when he calls her by name. “Mary,” says the strange gardener to the frightened, grieving disciple. And suddenly Mary knows her Lord, and despair gives way to joy.

          One of my favorite stories about the power of names and calling is the story of the famous Rabbi Yahuda ben Bezalel.[1] Rabbi Yahuda, a famous scholar and inventor, had a dream. He dreamed that he died, and as he approached the throne of God in heaven, he wondered if his name was written in the book of those who would share in God’s eternal kingdom. He introduced himself to the angel of the Lord as Rabbi Yehuda ben Bezalel, famous inventor, and asked the angel holding the great book of life to search for his name. The angel began reading out from the great book all the names of those who had died that day, and the rabbi watched soul after soul get up and be admitted before God’s throne in response. When the angel had finished reading, the rabbi began to weep, for he had not heard his own name. Filled with the injustice of it all, he cried out, “Why didn’t you call my name? What have I done wrong? Why did all of these people get in, while I am excluded?” The angel calmly replied, however, that the rabbi’s name had most definitely already been called, for everyone’s names are inscribed in God’s book. The problem is that many people never hear their true names during their lifetimes. They think that they know their names, but since they have never heard their real names, they do not recognize them when they are called. These people must stand before the throne until they hear their names and know them. After hearing this truth, the rabbi awoke from his dream and prayed that he might be granted just once to hear his true name from the lips of his brothers and sisters before he died.

          Like the angel in the story, Jesus calls out to each of his sheep. Like the rabbi, however, we have to respond to the name that we hear. We have to be prepared that we are going to hear a name that marks us as a child of God. As Rowan Williams says, it is going to be a name that is “our particular way of playing back to God his self-sharing, self-losing care and compassion.”[2] God not only cares for the sheep, God expects God’s sheep to care for each other in the same way. We know that wherever we go, our shepherd can see beneath meaningless titles and protective masks, and that he leads us in and out, in and out, calling out to us a name shimmering with love and so valuable to him that he shed his own blood that we might hear it. Like newborn babies who automatically turn their heads toward their parents’ voices, we know the voice of our Creator. Our prayer must be that we will know our true selves well enough to answer his call. As we recite at Morning Prayer, “He is our God and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. Oh, that today we might hearken to his voice.”

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[1] As told by Rowan Williams in A Ray of Darkness, 152.

[2] Ibid., 150.