Jesus - the Gateway to Abundant Life

Fr. Leo Maxfield is my uncle, godfather, and a role model for me as a priest. Fr. Leo lived for many years in Spain, and wherever he went he always made a point to get to know the local people well. He was always interested in learning from them and their way of life as much as he was interested in ministering to them.

Near the place where he lived there was a shepherd named Serapio and Fr. Leo would see Serapio every morning leading the way as he took his sheep up to a meadow to graze for the day.

After a while he noticed that in the evening Serapio always followed the sheep home instead of leading them as he did in the morning. So one day he asked Serapio why he led the sheep in the morning and followed them in the evening.

“Oh Padre,” he replied. “That’s simple. In the evening I want to make sure all the sheep get home. I don’t want to take the chance that I’ll miss any of them as it gets dark on the way home. That’s why I follow them.”

Jesus is like that. He makes sure all the sheep get home. No one is lost. No one is left behind when it gets dark. Everyone makes it home.

I suspect it was more than mere curiosity that prompted Fr. Leo to ask Serapio why he followed the sheep home in the evening. Fr. Leo is a serious Bible reader and knows his way around John’s gospel better than most. As he watched Serapio he surely would have remembered that in the gospel we heard tonight Jesus says the sheep follow good shepherd. So in a way Serapio’s practice of following his sheep home seems to contradict Jesus’ description of the ideal shepherd who leads his sheep home through the gate.

But this is a gospel passage that is dense and full of difficult twists and turns. Scholars will argue endlessly about the minute particulars of how this passage is constructed and what those particulars mean. The figures of speech Jesus uses in this passage can confuse us and if they do we are in good company because verse 6 says “…they did not understand what he was saying to them.”

One of the things that may confuse us about this passage is that it is the first part of a two-part discourse – the last one of Jesus’ public ministry. This one deals with the image of Jesus as the gate, but it is the second one – which we did not hear read tonight – that is fixed in our minds as a beautiful and comforting image of Jesus as the good shepherd. We have to be careful to pay attention to the two different Christological images in this discourse – that is, two different images that tell us who Jesus really is – and not let the more familiar one obscure the less familiar one that is more difficult to grasp.

The more familiar Christological image is too easy for us. The gate image is more edgy and challenging. Yes, Jesus is the good shepherd whom the sheep follow, but he is equally the gate, the doorway to abundant life. What does this mean?

A way of thinking about this image of Jesus as gate is to think about another image given to us by the 16th century Spanish Carmelite nun Teresa of Avila. In her book The Interior Castle (or The Mansions as it is known in Spain) Teresa compares the soul to a castle that has many rooms. She describes each room an aspect of the soul. She depicts the soul wandering from one room to another. As the soul progresses into the center of this castle, the soul is more and more conformed to the will and the ways of God. It is the most interior chamber of this castle in which God dwells and where unity with God is fully and finally attained.

A core aspect of our Anglican moral theology – the part of our theology that relates to how we make moral choices – is that our goal in the Christian life is to strive continually to conform our will to the will of God. Every choice, every act, every thought is an opportunity and a challenge to align our will with the will of God.

In a way, this aspect of our moral vision works well with this gate image of Jesus. Our lives are full of choices. In creating humanity God has given us great freedom of choice. We can decide to live our lives alienated from God. God allows us to do this. But that is not where truly abundant life lies. Abundant life lies in conforming our hearts and minds to the will of God.

Some Christian traditions stress rules and formulas, and complex catechisms and confessions for doing this. We, on the other hand, take to heart our baptismal vows in which we promise over and over again:

§ to continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers.

§ to persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever we fall into sin, to repent and return to the Lord.

§ to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ.

§ to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves.

§ to strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.

Our moral proposition is that if we were truly to live by these baptismal vows we would not need rules to govern us. Any choice about life and death, war and peace, sexuality and intimacy, freedom and justice, and the living of daily life can be tested against these five vows. Do you really need me or the church to spell out the connection between these five vows, Jesus’ invitation to abundant life, and the moral choices you confront? The gate image in tonight’s gospel reminds us that choices must be made and they must be made in a way that conforms us to God’s will. Another way of saying this is that our baptismal vows call us to a life of holiness and all our choices must direct us toward holiness.

In business and government people are often told that they shouldn’t do anything they wouldn’t want their children to read about on the front page of the newspaper. As Christians our standards are higher. Although we may stumble often, we strive to do only what we would be pleased to have Jesus know about us if we came face to face with him.

In my Easter sermon I said that while God surely loves us just as we are unconditionally, God also invites us to be different. God simultaneously loves and forgives us while expecting more from us. What God expects from us is to be more and more like God, and Jesus – the God become human – is the ultimate example of how to achieve this, or least how to try to achieve this. This is the sense in which Jesus is the gate – the gate to abundant life.

There is another dimension of this gospel passage that I want to point out to you by making a stupidly simple statement: You can’t have a shepherd without sheep. That is to say, there is a relational aspect to this gospel passage. It is a passage that says something to us about how we live in a community. The identity of this community is determined partly by the shepherd’s relationship to us and partly by the community’s relationship to the shepherd – to Jesus. In other word’s, human identity is determined by Jesus’ identity. Remember: much of the gospel of John is about who Jesus is and for John Jesus is the One who has existed before all time. That is to say, Jesus is God.

It is this identity of Jesus as God that determines who and what the community of sheep is, that is, who we are as the church. We are all followers of Jesus who gather around him and learn from him how to be in tune with, and in relationship, to God – learn how to be holy. Jesus shows us how to do this and this is how Jesus can be said to be the gate to abundant life. Abundant life lies in connecting our lives to the life of God. As the community of Jesus’ followers take him as the gate – as the point of access to God – the community receives life and life abundantly.

A moment ago I called our attention to the baptismal vows that were made for many of us when we were infants, that some of us made ourselves as adults, and that we all reaffirm from time to time in the life of the church. Do you remember the response we all make when we are asked if we will live by these vows? We say “I will, with God’s help.” As we promise to conform our lives to God we acknowledge that we cannot do this alone. We cannot live into our baptismal vows, we cannot live moral lives without God’s help. And one of the ways God helps us is by giving us one another – the church – to accompany us on the journey to God.

And so I end by returning to Serapio the shepherd who follows his sheep home, who directs them to the gate they must enter so that they will be safe for the night. This is what Jesus does for us. He directs us to the gate so that we will be safe not for just a night or even for just the span of our lives – but forever.

Thanks be to God for the abundant life given to us in Jesus Christ!

Amen.