I am one of those really lucky people whose best friend has been my best friend since we were about three years old. For decades she has been my person, my chosen sister, and there is something so beautiful and wonderful about getting to see each season of a beloved person’s life. Well, one of the seasons of our shared childhood was sheep herding misfits.
She didn’t live on a farm, or really even a hobby farm necessarily, but for a while during her growing up, her parents decided that because they had several acres of land and a barn, that taking care of animals would be a good exercise in learning responsibility for her and her brother.
Now one of the realities of growing up in a small rural community is that if you go to a friend’s house that happens to live on a farm, or on land that has a lot of work involved and your friend has to do chores before they can play, well you also have chores to do before you can play. So one of the times I was over at her house, we needed to do something to take care of those sheep. And, one of us left the gate open and the sheep would wander and we would have to figure out where they went and it was always such a hassle and frankly probably more than a couple of nine year olds should have been left in charge of.
So in today’s gospel reading, where Jesus describes himself as the gate which stands in the way of harm which can come to the sheep, I couldn’t help but think of my friend’s dad who would inevitably always need to come and rally the sheep, and they would listen to him where they wouldn’t listen to him. Jesus described himself as being the gate which protects the sheep from danger, and in this case, the gate was my friend’s dad and he was protecting the herd from the ineptitude of his daughter and her friend.
The gospel of John, different in many ways from Matthew, Mark, and Luke, is filled with imagery of God and God’s word becoming embodied in Jesus. Throughout John, we see God coming to the world through Jesus, completely shifting the reality of the time away from the values of the world and instead creating a reorientation back to God’s love and care.
The gospel of John doesn’t really give us parables told by Jesus but we have one here. In a lot of ways, this story is both unique and familiar at the same time. The metaphor of God as a shepherd is very commonplace, throughout both the Old and New Testaments. Listeners would have known the importance of the role of the shepherd throughout all of those years. Many kings were referred to as shepherds of their people. Listeners in the ancient far east also would have known that sheep are incredibly vulnerable and therefore dependent upon the shepherd to protect and care for them.
Yet here in John, Jesus is not only described as being the shepherd but also the gate to the pen that keeps the sheep safe. And not a gate that merely functions as a device to keep in or out, but a gate that acts as protection. Here Jesus is the Good Shepherd, who knows each and every sheep by name, who loves each one, who is willing to lay down his life for their welfare. And, here we have Jesus the gate, the intermediary between his vulnerable beloved and the violence and harm of the world.
So, what does it mean to be aware of Jesus’ identity as the Good Shepherd of today’s gospel when we are in the midst of our liturgical season of Lent? We are currently in the part of the church calendar where we journey with Christ to the cross, where we reflect on and lament the pain and forces of the world which facilitate that death on the cross as the outcome to Jesus sharing his ministry of love, justice, and care.
And in that lament and reflection, we come to realize just how little everything seems to have changed in these last two thousand years. Jesus comes, then and now, to a world that is broken, filled with pain, where the powers of the Empire wage with violence and impunity. The Roman Empire, in its constant acquisition of land, money, and power, was actively taking from the poorest citizens to make the wealthy even wealthier. The outsiders, the strangers, the vulnerable, the ostracized, were viewed as disposable and expendable, as not being important. Sound familiar?
Jesus comes to turn it all upside down. Jesus comes, as the Good Shepherd, as one who acts as the gate, the check point, who both puts himself between his flock, his beloved, and the danger and violence that threatens to destroy them and still knows each and every one by name. He knows each story, each vulnerability. In this season of lament and reflection, we notice that God continues to show up and stand with the vulnerable, those the powers of the empire, of the world, push aside and view as expendable. Jesus says these are my beloved and they are anything but disposable.
Last January, I was lucky to go on a travel course through Luther Seminary. We traveled throughout Guatemala and Mexico, seeing the work that the Lutheran Church is doing in the region.
One day in Mexico City, we were visiting a migrant shelter. The shelter we happened to be at was a shelter for men only, and what began as us sitting with a few guests that afternoon, steadily grew adding more and more people. These men wanted to share their stories and they were harrowing. The majority were from central American countries, but several African countries were represented as well as some from South America and even some from the Middle East. Some were hoping to remain in Mexico to apply for asylum there while some still hoped to continue on to the United States. Many had been kidnapped while on their journey and when they learned that we had just been in southern Mexico which is where many of them ran into trouble, they were very concerned about our safety.
As we were talking and listening to stories, everyone going back and forth between translating into and out of Spanish, we noticed one Asian man on the fringe of the room and little by little, he started to inch into the room to hear what was happening. We could see that he was holding out his phone, apparently trying to have it listen to translate. The woman who works for the Lutheran Church in Mexico and runs the shelter said that he was from China and that no one had been able to communicate with him in the month that he had been there. She said he tried to use his phone but it didn’t really work and how much she wanted to know his story.
One of our classmates, who is originally from Taiwan, walked over to him and started speaking to him in Chinese. I will never, ever forget the look in his eyes when he realized that he could understand what someone was saying to him. As he told his story, which Christy translated into English which our professor then translated in Spanish, everyone was holding on to each word that was shared. We learned that he fled China as a political prisoner who had dared to speak out publicly about the Chinese government. We learned that Mexico was the eleventh country he had been in and that he had not spoken to another human being face to face in 10 months. With each piece he shared, he became more and more confident, more self assured, more aware that his story mattered.
When he finished telling his story, all of the residents absolutely flocked to Christy. They needed her to tell him how happy they were to hear his story and they all wanted to know how to say some basic phrases to be able to speak to him. As we left, the pastor in Mexico who facilitated all this work said with tears in his eyes, “today God sent Christie.” That man’s story was known to God, and she got to be the one to share that story, that day she got to be the one who acted as the gate between silence and fear to feeling known and seen.
At Global Refuge, we are honored to be able to share so many stories, to be able to accompany and to support God’s deeply beloved children. And we can’t do it alone. We are grateful to you for joining in this holy and vital work alongside us and alongside those we serve. We are heartened that Jesus has been here, among the tumult and violence before and that Jesus is still here and will continue to be here empowering us on this journey.
Let us pray,
God of Solidarity, Thank you for being a God who enters the suffering of the world- who doesn’t run from those in pain but rushes to the site of blood, of tears. Guide us toward a solidarity that demands something of us. Let us learn to risk ourselves on behalf of the vulnerable, believing that when one of us is harmed, we all are. Help us to remember that justice and liberation are not a scarcity, and that our survival and dignity are wrapped up in one another. Secure in us the courage to stand, knowing together we will restore what the world has tried to suffocate in us. Amen.