But whoever enters through the gate is the shepherd of the sheep.
The gatekeeper opens it for him, and the sheep hear his voice,
as the shepherd calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.
When he has driven out all his own,
he walks ahead of them, and the sheep follow him,
because they recognize his voice.
We are accustomed to associating gates with enclosures, boundaries, fences, some area that is set apart and in distinction from adjacent areas. Gates are openings or gaps in the enclosures that allow passage from the outside inside and from the inside outside. Passage through these gates depends upon whether or not the gate is locked, whether we have a key, or whether or not we are recognized as someone who should have access through the gate.
John’s Gospel (JN 10: 1-10) describes how it is only the one who enters through the gate that is called the Shepherd. It is the shepherd who calls his own sheep by name and leads them out, because they recognize his voice and follow. Trust and recognition are so-called perquisites for this it appears. The shepherd knows his sheep and the sheep recognize the shepherd by voice. It is a relationship based upon the recognition and development of trust.
Amidst this recognition and trust, what comes later in this passage really strikes me:
I am the gate.
Whoever enters through me will be saved,
and will come in and go out and find pasture.
More than just the gatekeeper, or the shepherd, Jesus is now clearly saying “I am the gate” itself. Rather than just hearing and following the shepherd, now the shepherd IS the gate. Being led now becomes being led within, going through…Christ! Now, we are hearing it’s not just that Christ is a passage into something or somewhere else. We are now hearing that Christ is the something or somewhere else. Christ is not the passageway into the opening, but is the Opening itself. The gate is openness. Openness to what?
The intimacy of this image has grown proportionally. Very much like, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” Jesus is saying “I am the gate!” It’s not a choice of one among many, where mutual exclusion prevails. It is the only real WAY – Openness, reception, engagement with what is before us right now. Christ is the openness into Life, where whatever circumstances we are presented can shine with a newness in Christ! We enter into New Life in the life we are already in. There are of course occasions where we are called away from ‘old ways’ and habits (sin), but ultimately the authenticity of even these movements flow from a source within, i.e., passing through and being in the GATE – the Opening!
Recognizing the Risen Christ, the kingdom of heaven, or whatever other description we may want to add, is not a matter to be done on the other side of a fence, in another pasture. We are saved through entering the Gate – the Way of Christ that not only allows but provides an infinite abundance of pasture – all the places of our lives where we can find and live and share openness to the Divine. We ‘come in and go out’ through Christ. We don’t take Christ with us, or even find Christ so to speak, because the intimacy of the Christ Way of life is deep within and always moving outward! We just have to release it, open it up.
Bruno Barnhart, a mystic of the Camaldolese Benedictine monks, describes this opening up as God in Christ descending into what we are and opening us up into God’s own fullness from within ourselves.[i] Another Benedictine Monk of the Trappist order, Thomas Merton, speaks of this latent Divinity within all of us as a divine spark that brilliantly explodes the entire universe for us:
“It is like a pure diamond blazing with the invisible light of heaven.
It is in everyone and if we could see it,
we would see these billions of points of light coming together
in a face and blaze of a sun that would make
all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.
I have no program for this seeing. It is only given.
But the gate of heaven is everywhere.”[ii]
For Merton, the gate of heaven or Christ gate is everywhere, we simply fail to see it. We are always looking over the fence, or as the Gospel says illegitimately trying to climb over a fence in order to enter a place that we are already within only cannot yet see its shining exuberance. The vision required is simple yet difficult it seems. The only ‘program’ as Merton puts it is the given-ness of Life itself. It is an attitude of openness and surrender (kenosis) to this given-ness. Ultimately it is to see the abundance of life, which Jesus concludes today’s passage indicating:
I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly
To go through the gate, to stand within the gate is to be open to the abundance of life coming to you and I just as it is and to pass through it, without trying to grab hold of it or push it away. This is not indifference or even capitulation and passivity in the face of uncontrollable and/or oppressive forces. Rather, it is the authentic freedom of openness that does not validate fences and boundaries of exclusion, but transfigures them by passing through within the Gate of Abundance flowing from heaven itself.
[i] Bruno Barnhart, The Future of Wisdom (Monkfish: 2018), 189
[ii] Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander” in A Thomas Merton Reader, edited by Thomas P. McDonnell (Image: 1974), 347