Easter 4 A

On the fourth Sunday of Easter, the 23^rd Psalm is assigned for all three years of the lectionary cycle, A, B and C. In the Gospel, the fourth Sunday of Easter pursues the metaphor of the Good Shepherd in John 10. Year A give us John 10.1-10. Year B gives John 10.11-18, and Year C John 10.22-37. While the general theme for the fourth Sunday of Easter is a northern hemisphere springtime vision of green grass, skipping lambs and the traditional biblical and middle eastern image of the good shepherd, the particular vision of this Sunday's gospel reading, John 10.1-10, is less one of comforting custodial security and more one of challenge. We have to wait for Year B (John 10.11-18) to get the actual Good Shepherd image. Here, Jesus is the gate to the sheep fold. “I am the gate,” he says. “Whoever enters by me will be saved.”

So in the same way that Jesus says, in John 14, that he is “the way” and that no one comes to the Father “except by me”, here he says he is the gate. Who’s in and who’s out constitutes a theme with profound relevance to our time, as this Mondays G2 special supplement to The Guardian on “Immigration to Britain since the 1940s” testifies. The whole question of immigration quotas for migrant workers and restrictions for asylum seekers and stringent citizenship tests has a spiritual dimension that is a critical element of this metaphor of Jesus as the gate. And the metaphor in John 10 emerges from a similar cultural tension.

The story of this tension is told in one of my favourite commentaries on John, Raymond Brown’s The Community of the Beloved Disciple: The Life, Loves and hates of an Individual Church in New Testament Times (Paulist, 1979). Brown says, for instance, that “the Johannine prayer for unity with the Apostolic Christians [that they may be one, John 17.20-21] carries a price tag—those other Christians would have to accept the exalted Johannine christology . . . if there was to be one sheep herd, one flock” (p. 90). There is a deep sense of “us” against “them” in John. Brown points out that while John’s christology became the Church’s dominant christology, it is a christology quite foreign to the other gospels, and the gospel lives in tensi0on with its own people (1.11), whom John characteristically refers to as “the Jews”, as if Jesus and his disciples had not themselves been Jews. All this tension is present when John defines Jesus as “the way” and “the gate”.

In her chapter on “Gospels in Conflict: John and Thomas” in her book Beyond Belief (Macmillan 2003), Elaine Pagels remembers being an enthusiastic 14-year-old member of an evangelical church that offered what she then craved—the assurance of belonging to the right group, the true “flock” that alone belonged to God. As Brown described the “price tag” of such unity, so Pagels experienced leaders who charged her not to associate with outsiders, except to convert them (p. 31). They said her Jewish friend, killed in a car accident when she was 16, was eternally damned because she had never been “born again”. John’s gospel, written, Pagels says, “in the heat of controversy, to defend certain views of Jesus and to oppose others” (p. 36), was the focus gospel for this evangelical community.

When I took a sabbatical in 1998 I attended seminars at Chicago’s Center for Congregational Development, which in those days had become aligned with Lesslie Newbigin’s The Gospel and Our Culture movement. I will never forget how agitated a fellow member of one seminar got when the leader began pursuing themes from the Gospel of John. He’d grown up with the Gospel of John, he said. The seminar was bringing back all the pressure to be born again and dissociate himself from “the world”. He described the emotional pain he had experienced by the way a narrow, Gospel of John-driven evangelical agenda had dominated his family and his youth, and what it had taken to extricate himself from all this. The memory of this shared pain came back to me when I first read Pagel’s Beyond Belief.

I think such pain needs to be remembered when we consider the “gate” metaphor in John 10. To be sure, the Christian life is a specific way of life that includes choices and discipline. It is not a matter of wandering about like sheep without a shepherd. Last year I put together a course called “The Way: An Introduction to Christianity as a Way of Life”. One course member did object to the basic idea that there had to be some specific disciplined “way” that implicitly distinguished itself from other ways. But at some point choices have to be made. Engaging in human trafficking is different from offering someone the gift of abundant life (John 10.10). Taking up the way of life we call Christianity involves choices and disciplines. There was a cartoon in The Guardian recently that was a take-off on the all-for-one-and-one-for-all motto of the Three Musceteers. It portrayed the Free Marketeers, a trinity of competitors going at one another with knives. The Christian way of life challenges us to choose. The gate is real.

A solution can be found outside the family, in a traditional Buddhist meditation I once heard from Gyomay Kubose, now dead, the founder of the Buddhist Temple in Chicago. Kubose and I co-presided at interfaith weddings from time to time, and we became friends. I remember him speaking about the “Gateless Gate”. He put it more eloquently than my memory can, but, basically, he said the spiritual path we take does have a gate that must be passed through, like a barricade that must be overcome, and the spiritual path we walk in order to cross through this gate will necessarily be arduous, disciplined and intentional in every way that we can imagine. But once we pass through the gate, we realise that there had never been a gate at all. What we find on the other side is simply life, complete and abundant. For the Christian, this spacious terrain on the other side of the gate is the place where there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. All are one in Christ, in a unity that is the opposite of exclusion. Of course there is a cost, as Bonhoeffer has reminded us that all discipleship is costly. But at the end of the day it is free. It's all about liberation.

Here at City United Reformed Church we have declared ourselves to be an “open and affirming” church, open to the gifts and participation of a wide variety of folk regardless of economic status, race, mental stability or sexual orientation and so on. Those who have been with the church long enough to know the hard work it took to get to this point know the truth of Kubose’s meditation. The path took us to the deep foundations of what it meant to be Christian together. It may have felt like we were simply being "liberal" at first, but we soon became aware that such a choice was no wishy-washy liberalism but a radical commitment to what Christ was all about.

Is this kind of vision absent from the Gospel of John? Brown and Pagels speak of the exclusive nature of John’s high christology. Jesus may be called the Son of God in John, but so is the ordinary believer who accepts Holy Wisdom (“the Word”) as the shape of his or her own life, as Jesus himself had, and this tension between Jesus as “the” Son of God and the rest of us is never resolved here. Jesus and the Father are "one" in John in the sense of solidarity, not identity, and this solidarity is an option offered to all believers. John’s high christology is also an anthropology, the light of our most fundamental humanity. Commentators who read John as a theological treatise about Jesus rather than as an invitation to the reader to take up a life-changing discipleship miss the point. For me, most readings of John stop at the narrow gate and never go in, as it were. If the Gospel of John says one thing, it is that we are invited into a way of life in which we will do what Christ does and in which the Father will be as fully present in the life of the disciple as the Father was present in Jesus. This is the invitation made by this gospel, and this is what it looks like on the other side of the gate. Christ ‘R’ Us.