The gate for the sheep: Easter 4

 Easter 4 2026

John 10.1-10

“I am the gate for the sheep”, says Jesus. Gates and gatekeepers are very much the theme of the Gospel reading today, and that theme is just as relevant now as it was when the Gospel was written. Our news is full of debates about who belongs and who doesn’t - in our local communities, in our nation - and about who gets to decide that and on what grounds.

We are hardwired – like many other animals - to favour those who are like us, those who look or sound as if they are part of our tribe, and to be suspicious of those who don’t. It goes way back into our evolutionary history, but it can be very problematic. We don’t live in scattered kinship groups as our ancient ancestors did. We live in a complex interlinked world, where we need and are enriched by all sorts of people, and ideas, including those that are different from us. By the time we’ve had breakfast, our lives have touched and been touched by people on many continents. Our cup of tea – and what can be more English than that? – will probably have come from Kenya or India, our orange juice from Brazil. We are shaped by ideas that our ancestors might have thought foreign too. None of us would be sitting here in church, none of us would be calling ourselves Christians, if foreigners hadn’t, long ago, landed on these shores bringing news of a new faith, rooted in the life, death and resurrection of a man from the far-off, alien, Middle East. 

Yet we so often struggle to make real space for newcomers, not just tolerating them, but recognising them as people who come with gifts to share. That’s true on the small scale as well as the large. In friendship groups, in workplaces, in clubs and societies, in families, the incomer can struggle to be accepted, especially if they have the temerity to suggest some new way of doing things.   “Who do you think you are? This is our group. This is the way we’ve always done it…”

Gates and gatekeepers – they seem to be an inescapable feature of human life.  

And that brings me back to the Gospel where we find Jesus talking about gates and gatekeepers too, but who is he talking to? “Very truly I say to you”, he begins, but who are the “you” and what’s been happening to prompt his words?

If we look back at the chapter before this, Jesus is in Jerusalem, somewhere near the Temple – he’d actually just been chased out of the Temple by stone-throwing mob who were offended by the message he was preaching. As he’s walking along, he comes across a man who had been born blind, and he heals him. He spits on some mud, smears it on the man’s eyes and sends him off to wash, at which point the man discovers he can see, for the first time ever – hallelujah! Cue the general rejoicing, or so you might think. But, to cut a long story short, it doesn’t turn out that way. The onlookers, this man’s neighbours, don’t know what to make of it – they are very disturbed by what’s happened. They summon the Pharisees – religious experts - to come and give their opinion. Some people say he can’t be the same man as the blind beggar they’ve been walking past for years. The man’s parents are even summoned to bear witness to the fact that this is, in fact, their son. The man is asked to explain himself, but he can’t. All he knows is that someone called Jesus put mud on his eyes, told him to wash, and here he is, healed. What’s the problem with that? 

The problem is that the Pharisees have taken on the role of gatekeeper. They are the ones, they believe, who decide whether people are ‘in’ or ‘out’ of God’s favour, in or out of his family, and they are scandalised because  Jesus is not “one of them”. As far as they are concerned he is a sinner. He doesn’t interpret the Jewish law in the way they do. It doesn’t matter what he does, how self-evidently good it is, as far as they’re concerned it must be wrong, because he’s the one who is doing it.  

Eventually Jesus hears about the commotion, and comes to find out what’s going on. He rebukes the Pharisees. This man had been physically blind, he says, but their refusal to see God at work in their midst, to acknowledge this wonderful, blessed thing that had happened is a far worse sort of blindness. You can imagine how well that goes down.

They think of themselves as gatekeepers, protecting something vital, protecting the purity of their culture and religious tradition – maybe they even thought they were protecting God - but in reality their actions and attitudes are denying people – God’s beloved flock – the fulness of life God wants for them.  

Jesus talks of himself as the gate, and the shepherd who looks after that gate, but it’s not a gate that imprisons or restricts. It’s a gate which allows people through which people “come in and go out and find pasture,” somewhere which is safe so they can grow into people who have “life and have it abundantly”. 

That was the experience of the man he had healed. His blindness would have made it almost impossible for him to live anything like a normal life. Like many disabled people at the time, his only option to support himself was begging. It’s not just his eyes that are opened by his healing; it’s his whole life, his whole world, his potential, his place in his community. It’s all changed, and yet the Pharisees, and some of his own neighbours, seem to think it would have been better if things had stayed as they were for him. 

Today we are invited to look at ourselves, to look at the situations in which we may be tempted to “gatekeep”, to try to control and restrict other people’s access to God. Instead Jesus calls us to let him be the gate, and the gatekeeper, who can create a space that is far bigger than we imagine for a flock that is far bigger than we imagine, to “come in and go out and find pasture” so that they - and we - can live abundantly in the blessing God wants for us all.

Amen