The Gate Between Us
The Lord isn't just our shepherd
“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. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.” Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.
So again Jesus said to them, “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.”
John 10:1-10
We were on vacation this past week down in Mexico, where my in-laws generously brought us to a resort. We had a wonderful time, I relaxed more than I usually ever do on vacations, read some books I had meant to read and ate things I didn’t mean to eat. If there was only one thing that I felt an uncomfortable disconnect with, it was the surreality that began in the Cancun airport, where the divide was instant: all the travelers were economically privileged Americans, and all the people who worked and lived there were not so. I’ve since learned that 12 million Americans visit there every year, a solid 3.4% of all Americans visit this one region of another country. Unfathomable. And here’s a triple negative for you: if you go, I don’t know how you can’t not think a little bit of the disparity and gap between you and the people there. It’s overwhelming, totally bifurcated everywhere we went, the vacationers to luxury and the workers serving it up.
I say none of that to be ungrateful for the vacation. I also say none of that to be condescending either, because truthfully, it wasn’t just a language or class barrier. When you are the universal customer in someone else’s home and workplace, you are cut off from each other’s entire authentic inner world. As we were in the white shuttle van driving down the desolate highway, undeveloped jungle between paradise, I would feel this awkward tension between me, sitting behind the driver’s seat, and the driver. We’d start up small talk, but it just felt forced. I thought, I have no idea what his life is really like, and I have no idea how to ask him in a way that’s not condescending. How would I begin to know what’s going on with him? And what if the person I’m talking to actually is doing better than I think? What if (with high likelihood) they’re doing better spiritually?
But this really struck me as a tiny tragedy, this distance that is always between us. We can’t totally close that distance with everybody, and probably can’t 1000% close it with anybody, even a spouse. Do you ever feel that too? Is this not part of our human condition? We can have all the social manners, grace, charisma, charm, banter, all that, but we can’t fully close the gap between each other. And often when we try, we do so in deformed ways—we use each other, we abuse each other, we take each other for granted, we impose our experience onto each other so that it feels like there’s no difference between us, but it’s just us being presumptive. Remember Covid-19? (Sorry to jog your memory.) What did we call the thing we all had to do? “Social distance.” If a preacher could ever find a silver lining from the pandemic, it’s that we all now have a shared metaphor for something that’s real all the time. In the pandemic, we had to keep physical distance, but we relationally keep a social distance from each other at all times.
So how, you may ask, does this have anything at all to do with our readings today, where we remember the Lord is our shepherd? Not only do we remember he is our shepherd, but in John’s gospel, Jesus tells us that he’s also the gate. What is that, and what does it have to do with awkward Mexican van rides?
When you think of Jesus as the shepherd leading you, what comes to your mind? What comes to your heart? Probably at least the emphases of Psalm 23—protection, provision, restoration, preparation. Thy rod and staff leading. Much less famously, but in the same register, 1 Peter calls him the shepherd as “guardian of your souls.” (1 Peter 2:25). These are all things that are real and important parts of his pastoral leadership of us. Far more than any human pastor, Jesus should be all of our pastors.
But because Christ likes his paradoxes, especially his paradoxes of relationships, he tells us he’s not just the shepherd, he’s also the gate. Come again, Jesus? If that’s your reaction, that was also the reaction of the group he was talking to: “Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them” (John 10:6). So he says again, twice, “I am the gate.” There were thieves and bandits, he tells us, but he is “the gate.” The thieves and bandits are those who we might think of as false messiahs, false shepherds, people who present themselves to sheep as a shepherd to earn their trust, only to lead them astray. On the one hand, Jesus is talking to us about his role as our path to God. He is the great Mediator (Heb 9:15), where “the only way to the Father is through me” (John 14:6), he’s our pastor leading us upward from earth. Probably few of us have ever been led by someone claiming to be Jesus, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been led by thieves and bandits. In fact, I suspect everyone in this room has been spiritually led by someone who we trusted, only to find out that they weren’t leading us or caring for us, they were there to devour.
But when Jesus talks about himself as the gate, it’s not just being saved upward, but also in the world, horizontally. The sheep “will come in and go out and find pasture” (John 10:9). Hear that freedom—“come in and go out” through the gate and find pasture, a place that will have lots of other sheep who also come and go through him as the gate. He’s not just the great Mediator with us and God, but with each other.
We don’t often talk about Jesus as the gate. There’s no famous psalms, “The Lord is my gate, I shall not latch.” And so to me this is an underrated part of how we think about what Christ can do for us in our lives as Christians: we pass through him. Every moment, and between each person, from freedom to freedom, we have the invitation to go through Christ.
This is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer talked about in his book Life Together, written about the underground seminary he led in Germany. In Christian community, he says, the goal is to go through Christ to one another rather than directly relate. Now this may seem counterintuitive; if we have distance between each other, don’t we want to directly relate? But, Bonhoeffer says, in so many of our worldly relationships, humans devour each other. We might be sheep, but we can be thieves and bandits on each other, wanting to use each other for our own ends, because of the predicament of sin. But when we go through Christ to get each other, he’s not just our mediator between us and God, he’s our mediator between each of us. We can come and go to each other’s pastures. Christ is the gate when we travel through him. As he wrote:
“Without Christ we should not know God and could not call upon him, nor come to him. But without Christ we would also not know our brother, nor could we come to him. The way is blocked by our own ego. Christ opened up the way to God and to our brother. Now Christians can live with one another in peace; they can love and serve one another; they can become one.”
We read a vignette from Acts earlier this morning that always reads as so utopian. If there’s anything anyone knows about utopias, it’s that they don’t exist; the word literally means “no place.” Here it is:
“All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.”
Acts 2:44-47a
Depending on who you are, this might sound more unbelievable than any miracle of Jesus. But they could do this because Christ was the gate. You can almost feel how thick the Holy Spirit’s presence was in those days. The way our society is structured, the incentives are for us to serve ourselves. Maybe this is how we manage the reality of sin on a mass scale, but it means we usually don’t go through Christ; we go through ourselves. But when we go through Christ to each other—using him as the gate—suddenly, we’re making sacrifices like the Good Shepherd. We can do things that would be impossible if we were only out for ourselves. This is life with the shepherd, the gate, and also him as one of the sheep with us, the perfect lamb sacrificed and spilled as our scapegoat. Let him lead you, guide you, dwell in you, and also draw you out into love.
So I’ve been sad that I couldn’t quite get there this past week in Mexico. I didn’t fully take the opportunity with our van driver, but I know there will always be more chances. Maybe you’ve missed those chances too, and maybe you can start with letting Christ simply be your gate to curiosity—sincere, curious love. Just silently go through Christ in that moment, what’s really going on with this person, Jesus? Who is this child of God in front of me? What is their life really like? Lord, how do you want me to show your love to this person?
This is yet another reason why it’s important that we pray for others, not just for ourselves. Every time we pray for people, we go through Christ to see them. When we do this while also holding onto all of who he was in his sacrificial love that died on the cross and his resurrection power that rose again, we aren’t just going through Jesus to feel more empathy for someone. We might ask for the promise in his resurrection to bring life to relationships that were broken and left for dead, to revive our mercy or theirs, or at least be at peace with what we can’t change. We might even start asking, how can I show the same sacrificial love as you did, Lord, to help them? Be careful though, or we might start selling things we don’t need to help people who do.
Something we heard about Marvin at his funeral really reminded me of my granddad: they took any opportunity they could to talk with strangers. And not just talk, joyfully converse, joke, be curious, question, it was just second-hand. Marvin’s son Jason said every 20-minute trip to the store took four hours. My dad has this too, but this instinct hasn’t fully developed for me yet. What I suspect about Marvin and what I can say about my granddad is something they would probably not say about themselves, and it was probably not something they did consciously all that often: they let Christ not only be the gate between them and God, but be the gate between them and every other person in the world. If we do likewise, we won’t always do it perfectly, because that’s impossible. But when we let Jesus be our shepherd and our gate, when we go through Christ, even in the simple ways, he’s not just showing us the path to God. He’s leading us on the path to one another. Pass on through him, for the Lord is your gate. Amen.
For more discussion on our readings this past week:
