4th Sunday of Easter
Texts: John 10:1-10;
1 Peter 2:19-25; Acts 2:42-47
THE GATEWAY THROUGH DEATH INTO NEW LIFE
Bethlehem is about to enter another transition of pastoral leadership — this being my second-to-last Sunday as your Pastor. My leaving means a sooner pastoral transition from the last one than I had hoped. It feels a bit scary since it’s a precarious time to be church. It’s important to have the right pastoral leadership to help survive these challenging times. I’ve come to the conclusion that my style and emphasis in pastoral leadership is not the best fit for Bethlehem. The bishop’s office is working hard to help provide a better fit. I’m encouraged that this will happen soon.
I’ve been using the phrase “pastoral leadership.” The words pastor and pastoral come from Bible passages like this morning’s readings on Good Shepherd Sunday. We sang a version of Psalm 23: “I rest in the meadows of faithfulness and love.” We know by heart the words behind what we sang: “You make me to lie down in green pastures.” In the Gospel Reading, Jesus contrasts the protection of shepherds with those who try to steal the sheep, and then says something rather strange: “I am the gate. If anyone comes in by me, they will be safe and will go in and out and find pasture.” We’ll deal with that gate-thing in a moment. But, first, I simply want to connect the words pastor and pasture. Pastoral leadership is about aspiring to what the Bible is talking about when it talks about God and Jesus as the Good Shepherd who leads us to green pastures.
The Fourth Sunday of Easter is known as Good Shepherd Sunday. John chapter ten provides a lengthy discourse from Jesus on being a Good Shepherd. In the three years of the Lectionary, we divide John 10 into three pieces: the first part in Year A (this year), the middle part in Year B, and the concluding part in Year C. It’s a bit of irony in the first part that we read this morning that Jesus never yet calls himself the Good Shepherd. That actually comes in verse 11, where he says, “I am the Good Shepherd.” Today, we stopped at verse 10. This year we get the strange part, “I am the gate,” says Jesus. What does that mean?!
John 10 is the exact middle on John’s Gospel. I think it helps if we consider the arc of what surrounds it. In chapter one, John the Baptist proclaims, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” So Jesus isn’t first of all the Good Shepherd; he’s the Lamb of God. And the end of John’s Gospel, the story of going to the cross, is just a bit different that the other three Gospels in the detail of its timing. The other Gospels make clear that Jesus died during Passover week as the Sabbath was about to begin at sundown on Friday — the emphasis on the timing with the Sabbath. John’s Gospel wants to make it clear when Jesus died more precisely in connection with the Passover — emphasis on the Passover. The timing in John is that Jesus is killed on the cross at about the same time the sheep are being slaughtered for Passover. Jesus is the Passover Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
Let’s imagine those details for a moment. How did they kill so many sheep, so efficiently, at Passover? Where did all those sheep come from? Well, we know their was a special sheep-pen connected to the Temple. One gate was on the outside, where the sheep were led in. A gate on the other side actually led into the Temple closer to the many altars of ritual blood sacrifice. We presume that in the week or so leading up to the Passover, people brought sheep to that pen, so that they would be handy for the slaughter at the appointed time. Here’s the question, then. In this larger arc of John’s Gospel — where Jesus is proclaimed from the beginning as the Lamb of God, and then dies at the end specifically as the Passover Lamb of God — what are the odds that, when Jesus says “I am the gate,” he’s talking about the gates of that special sheep-pen next to the Temple? What are the odds that he sees himself as the gateway to a different way to understand something so terrible as being executed on the cross?
This actually makes sense in the whole of John’s Gospel. Jesus’ being the gateway to experiencing death on the cross as a way to life is actually a main theme in the Gospel. Shepherds, sheep pens, and sheep gates are not the only metaphors John uses in this way. On the Second Sunday in Lent, we read the story of Nicodemus, where Jesus imports the story of the people wandering in the wilderness after the first Passover, and they are attacked by poisonous snakes. Moses is told by God to hang a bronze snake on a pole in the middle of camp, so that all who look on that snake may be healed. (Snakes on poles are also the emblem of the American Medical Association, by the way.) Jesus tells Nicodemus that the Son of Man will be lifted up on a pole like that to give eternal life to all. In other words, his being lifted up on the cross will be the gateway, so to speak, into God’s coming reign based on life. “I came so that you may have life,” says Jesus in John 10:10 — “yes, and have it full to overflowing.”
It was tough being church in the late First Century. Life as outsiders under the shadow of death in the Roman Empire was challenging enough. But even more so as this new gathering of Jews and Gentiles together called the church. You were no longer welcome by Jews, who disagreed with your claims that the Messiah had come; you certainly didn’t fit in with Gentiles who promoted the Empire. And as followers of this Messiah Jesus, the way forward wasn’t exactly clear. There were disputes in this new venture about how to proceed. So it was vital in John’s church that they found an anchor in positive images like Jesus being the snake lifted up on a pole that leads to healing. They found it comforting to know Jesus as the Good Shepherd who could lead them through, even the valley of the shadow of death, into abundant life. Jesus was the Passover Lamb of God slaughtered so that our sacrificial ways of dealing death might be taken away from us and even forgiven. Jesus was the gateway through dark and challenging times into life in God’s new age. This incredible love of God made fully present through Jesus laying down his life for us the bread of life, the light of the world.
Have we mixed our metaphors enough? But this is what John’s Gospel does. It provides us with numerous comforting and hopeful metaphors with which to understand something so horrible as the cross not as simply death, but actually as the gateway to life. It is the gateway, for example, to what the Civil Rights Movement saw in John’s Gospel as the “Beloved Community.” They could take comfort and hope in placing their bodies on the line in places like the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL, knowing that this was actually the path towards new freedom and new life. It was the gateway to calling all of God’s children — black and brown and white — to live together in the peace and justice, enabled by Jesus having gone to the cross in the shadow of death of the Roman Empire. In the Beloved Community, there is no longer Us and Them. There is only Us. Jesus as the Good Shepherd is also the to the pastures of the Beloved Community.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, our way hasn’t gotten any easier. We live at a time under the shadow of rising authoritarianism and fascism, a time in which leaders are seeking to divide and conquer, leaders who seek to amp-up Us-vs-Them thinking. We live in a time post-COVID in which many people have found their ties to church to be less important than the many issues which challenge and threaten. We live at a time when there are disagreements within the church about the best way forward through these shadowy times. For a year-and-a-half I’ve offered as your pastor my vision for understanding the way forward. I’ve come to believe that another pastor with some different elements to his or her vision might be a better fit for you. That is truly my prayer for you.
What we will continue to have in common, however, is Jesus’ death and resurrection as the promise of going forward, even through the valley of the shadow of death, as the gateway to new life. For he was the Passover Lamb of God who went out of the sheep pen and onto the altar of the human way of sacrifice and yet passed through it into the pasture of New Creation. He is truly the Good Shepherd who can lead us into new life, even in the shadow of death — and into the light, even in dark times. This is the message of hope we have to share with one another in his church as Beloved Community. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethlehem Lutheran Church,
Muskego, WI, April 30, 2023
