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Today is typically celebrated as Good Shepherd Sunday. If you've ever been to a priestly ordination, this particular passage from John 10 is often chosen as the gospel lesson. Psalm 23 and the Collect for today both align beautifully with this theme. But the gospel lesson itself? Not quite. Look again. Nowhere in today's reading does Jesus call himself the shepherd. He calls himself the gate. So we have a problem. The whole day is framed around the shepherd, and Jesus says otherwise. The shepherd vs. the gate.
Of course, I'm being a little silly. This isn't really a problem — there's a way out. Read just a little further in John 10, and verse 11 resolves it immediately: "I am the good shepherd…" But a real question remains, at least for me as the one preaching. How do I make sense of Jesus identifying himself as both the gate and the shepherd? The gate metaphor, it seems to me, is one of the more underexplored images in our tradition. Is there some grand theological theory behind this? I don't think so. I think Jesus calls himself the gate first because his friends simply didn't understand what he was talking about. So he changed his approach. The lesson opens with the shepherd — the one who enters through the gate, the one the gatekeeper recognizes, the one whose voice the sheep know by name. The thief sneaks around the gate. The shepherd walks through it. But his friends weren't tracking. They were lost. Here's something that might help. In first-century Palestinian sheepfolds, there was no actual door or wooden gate. The opening was just that — an opening in the stone enclosure. And at night, when the sheep were safely inside, the shepherd would lie down across that opening. Literally. His own body became the gate. Nothing got in or out without going through him. So when Jesus says I am the gate, he isn't reaching for an abstract metaphor. He's describing something his friends would have seen their entire lives. The shepherd and the gate were never two different things. They were always one. Think of it like something a grandparent once said in passing. At the time, you didn't quite get it. Only after they were gone — or only after you'd lived enough life yourself — did their words finally land. Jesus reads the room, notices his friends are completely lost, and pivots: forget the analogy for a moment. Just think of me as the gate. You have to come through me to enter this sheepfold — the sheepfold of, say, Psalm 23. To genuinely say, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…" one must first pass through the gate named Jesus — to come in, go out, and find pasture. And now that image of the shepherd lying across the opening takes on a whole new weight. Because we know where this story is going. We know what Jesus will do with his body. The gate and the cross are not unrelated. The shepherd who becomes the gate is the same shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. So what does it take to enter? You must be named. Not just any name, but named in a way rooted in love, compassion, and grace. The gate functions as a kind of screening. This gate called Jesus calls each one by a name — the name of someone who acts with grace, compassion, and love. But notice how radically this differs from other kinds of gatekeeping. Think about what we're living through right now. When the gate is built not on love but on hostility — when it screens for names that sound too immigrant, too foreign, too from elsewhere — we see what that looks like on the street. We are seeing it more than ever. So we turn inward. Do I carry the name this gate recognizes? Is there love, grace, and compassion in me for the Other? And I don't mean some vague, abstract warmth. I mean: can I look at another person — broken, imperfect, complicated — and accept them as they are? Not because I'm holier, but precisely because I'm just as broken and imperfect, and Jesus loves me, this I know. Once we are called by name through this gate, we are led by a shepherd — not just any shepherd, but a good one. Jesus becomes the value, the meaning, the hope that someone in this world will lay down their life for us and give us a life filled with love, meaning, and purpose. But here's the thing: that hope only becomes real when we become that someone. When we embody the good shepherd for another person. And that is exactly what we do here, every Sunday. In receiving the Eucharist, we take into ourselves the body and blood of the Good Shepherd — and we go out to become what we have received. Have you seen Jesus?
If he were standing right here, right now — could you recognize him? The answer to both questions is no. We don't know his face. We've seen countless interpretations — artists across centuries, across cultures, each painting their own Jesus. None of them are him. And even those who walked with him didn't recognize him. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus knew Jesus. They followed him. And they walked right beside the risen Christ without a clue. Only afterward — only looking back — did they understand who they had met. Two things broke it open for them. Their hearts burning while he opened the Scriptures. And their eyes opening when he broke the bread. You know what those two things are. They're the bones of every Christian liturgy. The Word and the Table. The sermon and the Eucharist. What we're doing right now, and what we're about to do. Right now we're in the middle of the Word. And honestly — are your hearts burning? Probably not yet. That's fine. I'm working on it. But here's the thing. The Word and the Table exist because of a third thing — the thing we can't manufacture. The thing that makes the other two necessary in the first place. Seeing the risen Christ. We can't see him. We couldn't pick him out of a crowd. And because we can't — because the resurrection keeps slipping past our eyes — we need our hearts cracked open first. Not by argument. Not by explanation. By grace. By love. By compassion. By laughter and sorrow and vulnerability. That's what moves the heart. That's what opens the eye inside the chest. Because resurrection isn't an idea. It's mending what's broken. Feeding what's empty. Healing what's sick. Holding what's been hurt. And today, we are hurting. This is the last service of St. Agnes'. One hundred and thirty years of this community — the living and the dead — and it ends here, today. That is a real loss. The pain is real. So I'll ask again: have you seen Jesus? Say yes. Because yes — we have. Look around you. Look at who is gathered in this room. Did you forget? We are the Body of Christ. We are the risen Christ. Every time we gathered here and broke bread together, something happened to us. We stopped being just ourselves. We became something we could never be alone. That's why we couldn't recognize him at first. We forgot who we become when we gather. We forgot what happens at that table. For 130 years, this community burned off its individual agendas and private desires and became — by the fire of the Spirit and the breaking of that bread — the Body and Blood of Christ. That is not nothing. That is everything. And that body doesn't die when this building closes. It scatters. It looks different. It might be harder to see for a while. But it continues. Because you continue. Because we are imperishable seed, as Peter says — not perishable. His words are the right ones to end with: "Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart. You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God." (1 Peter 1:22-23) Let your hearts keep burning. Not once, but steadily. St. Agnes' is not ending. It is being scattered — like seed. I have always appreciated Thomas for his doubt. Because of his refusal to believe without seeing, there is room in our tradition for honest questioning—for that sacred hesitation between loss and faith. But Thomas offers us something beyond permission to doubt. He also shows us how to recognize Jesus.
Thomas remembers Jesus’s wounded body. The marks of the nails, the pierced side—these must be present, or this cannot be the same Lord. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands,” he says, “and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” And Jesus answers not with condemnation, but invitation: “Put your finger here. Reach out your hand.” The wounds are not erased in the resurrection. They remain—healed, yet still visible. They are what make the risen Christ recognizable as the one who suffered and died for us. We are about to conclude our ministry at St. Agnes’. We carry with us 130 years of memory—of joy and sorrow, of laughter and prayer, of baptisms and farewells, of ordinary Sundays and extraordinary ones, when bread was broken and hope renewed. For more than a century, this parish has been a mark of grace in this community, a place where Christ’s presence has taken flesh in us. With this ending, we are wounded. There is no other honest word for it. Yet this wound is not a mark of failure or of simple loss. It, too, can become a sign—a mark of belonging to the body of Christ. In our grief, we are drawn into the mystery of the risen Lord whose wounds did not disappear but were transfigured. Our wound has been taken up into his. It is not undone by resurrection; it is held within it. And this is what Thomas teaches us: the wounds are how we know him. They distinguish the risen Christ from every idealized image of triumph. They are memory made flesh, faith made tangible. And so it may be with us. In bearing our own wound faithfully—neither denying it nor being consumed by it—we become part of what makes Christ’s body recognizable in the world. We are marked, yes, but in being marked, we bear witness. In time, this wound will heal into tenderness—a holy scar reminding us that love was real here, that God once walked among us in this place. The doors may close, but the story continues in the hands and hearts of all who have been touched by this community. Christ still breathes peace into our fear and says again, “Do not doubt, but believe.” The temple bell stops- but the sound keeps coming out of the flowers. Basho (1644-94) (translated by Robert Bly) Let’s take a moment and imagine ourselves with Mary Magdalene and the other Mary on that first Easter morning. Right now, it’s about 9:50 a.m. for us—but for them, it would have been just before sunrise, maybe four or five in the morning—still dim, still quiet, still heavy with grief.
They had witnessed the death of their beloved Jesus only two days earlier. So this first act of Easter doesn’t begin with trumpet sounds or alleluias—it begins with sorrow. They go to the tomb. Why? Matthew says simply: to see the tomb. Mark and Luke tell us they brought spices and perfumes to anoint him—to finish the burial rites they didn’t have time for on Friday. They come not expecting life, but to tend to death. They stand near the tomb because love makes us linger. You might know that feeling—standing at a gravesite, hoping to sense some trace of the person you love, a presence that memory keeps alive. And then—it happens. The stone is rolled back. An angel appears. The scene must be overwhelming—earthquake, light, fear. Yet the heart of that moment isn’t the spectacle but the message: “Do not be afraid. I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here.” The tomb is empty. The body is missing. The women are terrified. This is how resurrection begins—not in triumph, but in confusion and wonder. The empty tomb might have looked, at first, more like a crime scene than a miracle. (In fact, people in the 18th and 19th centuries who stole bodies for medical schools were called “resurrectionists.” It’s an eerie coincidence.) But the angel goes on: “He has been raised, as he said.” And something shifts. Fear gives way to joy—quiet at first, but real. And in that joy, Jesus meets them. He greets them. He sends them out: “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.” Notice that the joy comes before they see Jesus—it opens their eyes to see him. They began the morning “to see the tomb,” but by the end, they are running “to see the resurrection.” Now, there will be no Easter Sunday service here at St. Agnes’ next year—or in the years after. For many of us, that reality stings. We may find ourselves, like Mary and the other Mary, lingering around what feels lost—an empty building, an empty space where memories live. But perhaps this empty building can remind us of that empty tomb. Not a sign of the end, but of the beginning. Not a place of absence, but of promise. He is not here. He is risen. So where is he now? The same voice that spoke to Mary and the other Mary speaks to us: “Go to Galilee; there they will see me.” Where is your Galilee? The place where Christ’s life meets your life. The place where love still calls your name. Go there—and you will see the risen Christ. |
Paul"...life up your love to that cloud [of unknowing]...let God draw your love up to that cloud...through the help of his grace, to forget every other thing." Archives
August 2026
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