Last Sunday, we noted that the heart of our faith is this: we believe not because we see, but because Christ meets us in the Word, in conversation, and in the breaking of bread. This Sunday we move from the appearance of the risen Jesus to an image of Jesus as the gate. This conversation follows immediately after the healing of the man born blind. 

Jesus uses the metaphor of a gate for the sheep, but they did not understand. How can a person be a gate for sheep? It is not only the Pharisees and the community around Jesus; even we may find it hard to grasp. 

Jesus speaks to people who act as gatekeepers— “the establishment.” They elevate themselves as the worthy ones, while others are deemed unworthy. We can find this attitude not only in Israel’s religious community, but also in churches and communities today. Jesus likens such gatekeepers to thieves, bandits, and strangers wandering among God’s sheepfolds. 

Jesus continues to address the Pharisees who questioned the healing of the blind man. They cannot see the truth of the miracle—perhaps because they do not want to see the transformed man whose sight is now restored. These gatekeepers are not glad for the healing. They are more concerned with protecting religious tradition and their role as God’s mediators. They do not care about doing good and ensuring life for a person. Jesus challenges the roles they have given themselves. He crosses their boundaries to assure abundant life. 

The character of the abundant life is in the early Christian community. “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” 

More people stop listening to the gatekeepers and listen to Jesus instead. The Messiah is here, calling people out of this system and into a new identity and way of life—one marked by freedom. “I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture.” 

Because of what Jesus does, there is room with him to break the rules for the sake of abundant life. With Jesus as the gate, all of life becomes pasture. David says it in Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters.” Jesus reiterates God’s abundance: “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” 

What did Jesus mean by saying, “I am the gate for the sheep”? William Barclay, in his commentary on John’s Gospel, offers this picture: many sheepfolds made of stone had no gate, only a narrow entrance. After leading the sheep inside, the shepherd would lie down across the opening—becoming, in effect, the gate. In that way, the shepherd prevented sheep from wandering out and protected them at night from wild animals and thieves. 

This image helps us understand what Jesus is saying. Jesus is the one who lies down as the gate—the one who lays down his very life for those who follow him. 

We are not confined to the walls of a religious community’s gathering place or to any one group’s interpretation of God’s commands. Still, sometimes God uses those spaces to shape us and help us hear God’s voice. The point is this: always keep listening for God—and listening to God. 

In the end, the healed man was kicked out of the synagogue because he didn’t obey the religious authorities. Alternatively, this could be seen as God guiding the unnamed man away—signifying his rejection of the Pharisees’ authority by not adhering to their regulations.  He heard their voice and came to realize it did not belong to the true Shepherd. It didn’t even sound like someone who followed the Shepherd. 

Afterwards, Jesus finds the healed man on the street. The man hears the voice of the one he truly intends to worship and belong to. In a very real—even literal—way, the healed man has been led out by the Good Shepherd, who was his healer, through the Gate and into a new life. 

The healed man has begun to experience the abundant-life pastures into which God, the Shepherd and Gate, leads the sheep. While others try to steal his joy at being healed, Jesus gives him the gift of life and the possibility of abundance. With Jesus, the man’s world gets bigger, not smaller. And that is partly because he came to recognize that what he was hearing from those other gatekeepers was a life too small—too limited, too confined. To stay in that place of fear, he would have had to deny his own true reality and the God who had done good to him. 

The healed man enters the sheepfold of belonging to God as God always intended—through God’s own love and call. His experience points us to the true Gate into God’s sheepfold, and it invites us to enter through hope-filled worship rather than fear.