The Fourth Sunday of Easter, May 3, 2020

John 10, 1-10

Jesus said: “Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever does not enter a sheepfold through the gate but climbs over elsewhere is a thief and a robber. But whoever enters through the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens it for him, and the sheep hear his voice, as the shepherd calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has driven out all his own, he walks ahead of them, and the sheep follow him, because they recognize his voice. But they will not follow a stranger; they will run away from him, because they do not recognize the voice of strangers.” Although Jesus used this figure of speech, the Pharisees did not realize what he was trying to tell them. 

So Jesus said again, “Amen, amen, I say to you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. A thief comes only to steal and slaughter and destroy; I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.”

Since this section is tied to the healing of the man blind from birth, which Jesus performs in the previous chapter, it seems that Jesus spoke the words used in today’s Gospel reading in Jerusalem around the Jewish Feast of Booths, a joyous harvest festival which takes place in September or October, and follows five days after Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.  

Jesus, here, speaks of gates, fences, sheep, thieves, and shepherds.  He begins by describing how a shepherd works.  He speaks to a mostly urban crowd who probably have as little knowledge of the subject as a city dweller today would have.  He speaks simply and clearly about the subject.  But John does not recount the Lord as providing the crowd a reason for his talking about shepherding.  He appears to his hearers and to us to have come up with the subject quite randomly.  When he had spoken of himself as the Bread of Life, he was building on the sign he had performed with the feeding of the five thousand in the wilderness.  His discourse here follows the healing of the man blind from birth, but there is no obvious connection with that sign.  

In fact, what Jesus does in his teaching about the shepherd and the sheep is to explain this sign of the healing of the blind man.  He is speaking to the Pharisees at the end of chapter nine.  They have harassed the man whom Jesus healed, intimidated his parents, and even tried to convince him that he had not been blind at all, in an increasingly desperate attempt to deny that Jesus had performed a miracle.  Jesus rebukes them and speaks of their sin.  It is at this point that he says, “Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever does not enter a sheepfold through the gate but climbs over elsewhere is a thief and a robber.”  He is accusing them of being “thieves and robbers” who steal from the shepherd.  Very clearly, the sheep do not belong to them and will not follow them because the sheep “do not recognize the voice of strangers”.  The Pharisees acted as “strangers” who frighten the sheep when they were harassing the man who was healed.  Instead of rejoicing in this sign of God’s mercy in his own temple, they threaten the man, this sheep.  

Jesus speaks of himself as the Shepherd whose voice the sheep recognize: the man born blind could not even see Jesus when he was healed, but when Jesus told him to go to the Pool of Siloam and wash there, he did, making his way through the temple complex and through the old town of Jerusalem to get there.  The Pharisees tried to drive him away from the Lord, but instead, he ran from them and found his Shepherd.  

Jesus will later explain to the Apostles that he is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14, 6), that is, the only Way, the only Truth, the only Life,  and this sums up what he says here: he is the only Shepherd, he is the only Sheep Gate.  All the ones that “came before” were wicked false shepherds who came to enrich themselves.  These today can be seen as ideologies that promote self-indulgence and are disguised in the garb of “progress” and “freedom”.  The idea of abortion as liberating women is one of these.

But only the Lord Jesus can heal the blind and lead the sheep to freedom from danger and to nourishing pasture.