Enter Through the Gate

Scripture Reflection for the fourth sunday of easter (May 15, 2011)

I live in Chicago – a vibrant and diverse city with incredible opportunities to explore faith, the arts, leisure, social activism, or whatever might interest you. It’s an amazing place, quite different from the pastoral setting of Jesus’ life and ministry. Our lives are fast-paced and complex. How can I relate Jesus’ metaphor of a shepherd and his sheep to today’s modern context?

For Jesus, the metaphor of a shepherd was easily accessible for his audience of small town residents. For us, it sounds like a fable from a long-forgotten era. Jesus connects his unique identity as Son of God and savior to a shepherd’s unique relationship to his or her flock. The shepherd enters through the gate and leads the sheep through it to the pasture beyond. Jesus so leads humanity through the gate from life to salvation for eternity. In the scene Jesus portrays, the gate is the threshold between earth and heaven: inside of it humans are confined, not free, while on its other side they gain the fullness of eternal life. The gate itself is pivotal. Jesus even declares, “I am the gate.” While we may not deal with shepherds very often, we are familiar with gates.

Actual gates seem rather commonplace and mundane, but what purpose do they actually serve? I think of the gates on the block where I live, lined with small apartment buildings. Each building is cordoned off by a fence, and each fence has a gate that locks automatically. In other parts of the city, gates serve to protect those inside them from the chaos of violence and hostility. In commercial and industrial districts, gates clearly mark the “Private Property” where people are not allowed to enter. None of these gates are put up maliciously, but they are tangible representation of the way people live: independent and separate from one another.

These divisions and demarcations are universal; the phenomenon is evident not just in cities. We can see it in a college where we may not know the people in the dorm rooms on our hall, a suburb where people build large houses so that they can have luxurious private spaces, or a rural landscape where fence lines mark the boundary between one owner’s property and another’s. While there are good reasons to separate one space from another, we have lost the understanding of connectedness to which Jesus calls us.

As the shepherd, Jesus calls the sheep out from the sheepfold and into the pasture. In the same way, we are called out of our own individualism to engage with the world. Whether by greeting a neighbor, being active in an organization, or going out of our way to address the unmet needs of others, we step through the gate from the complacent independence that keep us isolated from others. On the other side of the gate lies the fullness of life in communion with others.

In the familiar final line of this gospel, Jesus says, “I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.” Our decision to follow Jesus does not mean living according to defined expectations, but moving beyond the gates in our world to experience the fullness of life. Christ makes this possible for us, and we should make it possible for others. By opening the gate and calling others by name, we too can be the shepherds to the many sheep around us. When we hear Jesus calling us by name, we then turn and extend that call to others, inviting them to follow as well. When we enter through the gate that is Christ, we do not build up barriers to connection, but break them down. Only by living in this way can we truly have life and have it in abundance.

(Image by: Free Christ Images)