For Sunday Easter 4A
Collect
O God, whose Son Jesus is the good shepherd of your people: Grant that when we hear his voice we may know him who calls us each by name, and follow where he leads; who, with you and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
Jesus sometimes has trouble with mixing metaphors. I was taught to avoid this in school, for several reasons. One of those is clarity. Sometimes, though, when Jesus seems to be getting going, his mind just flies in these different directions because he’s riffing on his image and explaining it means we get to see how many different dimensions of this apply.
Jesus is the gate and he is also the shepherd, just as he seems to be saying that we can be the gate for the shepherd that is him and also he is the gate for the shepherd that is God and it all gets kind of messy if we’re being honest. And yet it all does, in a way, end up making sense.
I am drawn to the messiness in this teaching, where Jesus compares himself to the shepherd, the gate, and the gatekeeper in the span of a couple of paragraphs. And what draws me is that, when we stop focusing on getting the nature of Jesus and sheepherding precisely right, but follow the movement of the mind through the image, we can see that this is a teaching that equally reflects the nature of Jesus, God, and humanity.
Just like one of the essential lessons in Christian formation is to never read the Bible as allegory — treating a story like Noah’s Arc like it’s Animal Farm, for instance — we should resist viewing the Jesus we read in John as so literal a communicator. His vision shifts, inviting us to follow along, and as we do, we can find a message about God also resonates with Jesus and even ourselves.
Does this make it easier to read? Not really. But there is likely a part of you that followed it intuitively. And I think that is the part Jesus is trying to connect with. And inviting you to connect with, too.