​Easter 4A (John 10:1-10)

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.