The words don’t change. The way we hear them does.
John 10:1-10
The Revised Common Lectionary, which most pastors and preachers follow in our tradition, repeats every three years. The texts don’t change, but the way we hear them is different every time so I always assume that God wants to say something through these texts to this people in this place at this time and in these current circumstances. The text doesn’t change, but the circumstances do.
When John 10:1-10 came up three years ago on the 4th Sunday of Easter I was only a few weeks away from retiring. As I prepared my sermon, knowing that the time was very near when I would be leaving The Little Church with a Big Heart, a congregation I had served for twelve years—a congregation that I deeply loved, a congregation that had loved me back in more ways than I can begin to tell you—I kept coming back to the part where Jesus says, “The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.”
The gatekeeper was opening the gate and I was being led out. That meant that the time had come for the congregation to listen carefully to the Shepherd’s voice so they could discern who was being called to serve as their new sheepdog, which is what pastors really are if they’re listening to the Shepherd.
Six years ago, when this gospel text came up for the 4th Sunday of Easter, we were still in the very early days of the Covid 19 pandemic. Hearing Jesus say, “I came that you may have life and have it abundantly” seemed like the apex of irony when we were locked down in our homes and hearing about thousands of deaths every day. But in many of our faith communities, our abundant life together continued in spite of our enforced isolation. We found ways to worship and hold classes online and even discovered that our after-worship fellowship time had an unexpected bonus because everyone was able see everyone and speak to everyone all at once on Zoom, taking turns in the conversation. It really was remarkable. Plus, there were no complaints about the coffee because everybody made their own.
The words of Jesus are the same every time we hear them, but we hear them differently each time because of what is going on in our lives and in our world.
What’s influencing the way you hear the words of Jesus in this text this year? Now?
One of the downsides of preaching the lectionary is that sometimes the selected text is isolated from its fuller context. The fourth Sunday of Easter, for example, is traditionally known as Good Shepherd Sunday, so each year the lectionary gives us a different fragment of the shepherd and sheep imagery that Jesus is using as he verbally spars with the Pharisees and temple elders who are challenging him. The thing we miss, though, is that all these fragments are parts of a larger unit, a larger story being told in John, a story that takes up all of chapter nine and more than half of chapter ten.
Today’s gospel text is a continuation of the story of Jesus healing the man born blind. The events of that healing and the confrontation that follows all play out in chapter nine but they give meaning and weight to the shepherd imagery Jesus uses in chapter ten.
When we read that story today, we don’t always look too far beyond the miraculous healing of the blind man—whose name by the way, according to both Eastern and Roman tradition, was Celidonius. Maybe we pay some attention to the themes of light and darkness and true sight and spiritual blindness which are also part of the story, but what is not so readily apparent to us is that this is also a story about fear and boundaries and how people use and protect power. Which raises the question: how were the people in this story hearing the words of Jesus?
Poor Celidonius had barely been given his sight when he was almost instantly confronted by the same group of self-appointed, conservative Judeans who had been repeatedly antagonizing and challenging Jesus. Like detectives interrogating a criminal, they made the formerly blind man tell his story over and over again. When some of them suggested that maybe he had never really been blind, his parents were brought in to affirm that yes, he was born blind, and no, they didn’t know who gave him his sight, and by the way he’s an adult and this has nothing to do with us. When, after all this, they asked him to retell his story one more time, Celidonius was just plain exasperated. “I have told you already,” he said, “and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?”
That question really pushed their buttons. They were supposed to be the authorities on all things sacred, and the suggestion, even if it was a bit facetious, that they might become disciples, students, of this Jesus who dared to do questionable things like healing on the Sabbath? That really set them off. They doubled-down on their commitment to Moses and Mosaic law, then circled back to their cultural assumption that Celidonius was born blind because of sin. “You were born entirely in sin,” they said. And then they expelled him from the synagogue.
Fear is a significant undercurrent in this story. The blind man’s neighbors were anxious because acknowledging the miracle would mean that they would have to reevaluate who they thought Jesus was and also, no small thing, how the universe works and how God works. The Pharisees were anxious for the same reason but with more at stake, so they not only tried to debunk the miracle but to discredit the miracle worker, Jesus. The man’s parents were nervous for all the same reasons, but also because the Pharisees could bar them from the synagogue. And that was a very frightening prospect to consider.
According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, there were 394 synagogues in Jerusalem in the early first century. These synagogues were places for religious study and debate but they also functioned as community centers and economic centers. Business deals were hammered out in the synagogue. Workers were hired in the synagogue. Marriages were contracted there. The synagogue was the center of community life and being thrown out or banned could be both economically and socially disastrous.
So fear and anxiety made everyone except Jesus and Celidonius reluctant to acknowledge the extraordinary thing that God had done in their midst. Before we get judgmental, though, it’s important to remember that everything that happens in the gospels happens under the watchful eye and oppressive shadow of the Roman Empire. Everything Jesus said or did had to break through the atmosphere of fear that the Romans relied on to enforce the peace and the paranoia of the Jewish leaders who tried to prevent open rebellion by keeping a lid on the messianic hopes of the people.
Jesus made these Jewish leaders nervous when he was merely preaching and teaching. When he did works of power like giving sight to a man born blind, he just plain scared them. When he started talking about the sheepfold and the gate and the shepherd and bandits and thieves, he infuriated them.
This was their own symbolic language, but it had a very sharp edge when Jesus was using it.
The sheepfold was not private property. It was a piece of communal economic infrastructure, a shared space that was crucial to the economic survival of a village. In reality and as a metaphor it was a symbol of interdependence. Several families would herd their flocks into the sheepfold to keep them safe through the night. Shepherds took turns serving as the gatekeeper, often lying down or sitting stretched across the entrance of the sheepfold as a living gate, guarding the entrance with their bodies. The gatekeeper wasn’t just guarding his own sheep but all the sheep of the village. A thief or bandit who might climb over the wall was threatening an entire community’s common life and security.
Shepherd imagery had political weight. The Shepherd was a familiar political metaphor long before the time of Jesus. Emperors, kings and religious leaders referred to themselves as shepherds to emphasize their claim that they guided and protected the people. Prophets referred to these same powerful people as shepherds when they were critiquing or criticizing them. On the other side of the same coin, the Shepherd was a messianic metaphor. David had been a shepherd and it was commonly understood that Messiah would be a “Shepherd” from the line of David.
When Jesus began to address his opponents with shepherding imagery, confronting them with the metaphors of the sheepfold and the gate and gatekeepers and thieves and bandits, his opponents, the gatekeepers of propriety who had just expelled Celidonius from the synagogue, undoubtedly heard his words as a sharp criticism. They would have remembered Jeremiah saying, “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture.”[1] They would have remembered Ezekiel saying, “Woe, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not the shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat; you clothe yourselves with the wool; you slaughter the fatted calves, but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak; you have not healed the sick; you have not bound up the injured; you have not brought back the strays; you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them.”[2]
The words of Jesus in the text don’t change, but the way we hear them changes every time. We hear them through the filter of our circumstances. Sometimes we hear comfort. Sometimes we hear criticism. How do you hear them?
“My sheep know my voice,” says Jesus. Whose voice are you listening to? What news sources do you read or watch or listen to? What kind of message are they giving you about the world? About yourself? What kind of messages are you letting into your heart and mind and soul?
Are they messages rooted in faith, hope and love? Or are they messages rooted in fear? Do they seek to enlarge your heart or shrink it? Do they seek to open your embrace of others or do they tempt you to close yourself off from everyone who isn’t a whole lot like you?
Who or what are the bandits in your life? Who’s climbing over the wall to steal your peace? Who or what is killing your joy?
Who is the gatekeeper for your heart and mind and soul?
“Very truly, I tell you,” said Jesus, “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 felon comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that you may have life and have it in all its fullness.”
The words are the same but we hear them differently every time.
Nine years ago, for instance, today’s gospel text spoke to me powerfully and deeply in ways I could never have foreseen.
Only two days before preaching on this text, I presided over a memorial service for a young woman named Meghan, the daughter of some our closest friends, a young woman I had watched grow up as an extended-family sister to our kids.
I had officiated at Meghan’s wedding two years earlier, which gave her death an extra layer of pain for me and a feeling of something like guilt, because she was killed by her husband, the man I had united her to in marriage.
Nine years ago, when I came to the part of today’s gospel where Jesus says, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy…” it just wrecked me. I had to stop and take a long, deep breath before I could read the rest of what Jesus says here: “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”
As those words hung in the air, I thought about Meghan’s memorial service. I thought about the church, our “home” church where I had met her parents when we were all teenagers, our church where she and her sister and our kids were all baptized, our church where our kids grew up together to become lifelong friends. I thought about our church where so much life has happened—I thought about that church filled to capacity with people who had been touched by her, whose lives had interconnected with hers and with ours. I thought about how they had all come “back to church” for her, back to the Christ-centered starting point where all our relationships and stories had begun.
I thought about how in that service, despite the pain and anger and sadness that had brought us there, we experienced the joy and comfort of the abundant life we had all shared over the years. And I realized that, despite our grief and pain, our abundant life continues. I realized that Meghan’s abundant life continues, that she lives on in the hearts and memories of her friends and family and in the loving presence and heart of Christ.
On the 4th Sunday of Easter, nine years ago, I realized that, while it was Meghan’s tragic and untimely death that had brought us all together that day, it was Jesus, the Good Shepherd, who had originally brought us all together in the first place. We had all met each other in the very beginning because we had come to church. We had met in the company of Christ. We had followed the voice of the Shepherd who called us all together into one great big flocking family—a family that is bigger than any one church building or any single congregation or any denomination, a family that is, truly, bigger than any one religion.
Abundant life. Overflowing life. This is the gift Christ gives us in our life together.
[1] Jeremiah 23
[2] Ezekiel 34
Thoughts Along the Way 