Fourth Sunday Of Easter

Christians are familiar with the parable of Jesus as the Good Shepherd. It is found in the 10th chapter of the Gospel of John. The first 10 verses of chapter 10 contain two parables that introduce the Good Shepherd parable.  A parable is a comparison which teaches a lesson. The first little parable speaks of someone who enters the sheepfold not the normal way through the door or gate but climbs in stealthily over the wall. Such a one cannot be the shepherd since the shepherd enters the sheep pen openly through the door or gate. There is a guard, a gatekeeper, involved. The gatekeeper knows the shepherd. When he sees the shepherd approaching, he throws open the door or gate. The sheep hear the shepherd’s voice. He knows each one of his sheep by name. He calls them and leads them out of the pen. After all the sheep have left the pen, the shepherd walks in front of them. They follow him because they know his voice. The sheep will not follow a stranger because they don’t recognize his voice. Instead, they flee from a stronger.

The author of the gospel adds that those who heard the parable did not understand what Jesus was saying to them. They are not alone. Nevertheless, we must make the attempt to understand what this parable teaches. To whom is Jesus speaking? The answer may be in the immediately preceding context. Jesus had just been in conflict with the Pharisees, by which the author of the gospel means the scribes. The author, in words attributed to Jesus, brands them not only as blind but guilty of their own blindness.  Most of the scribes (scripture scholars) in the time of Jesus belonged to the Pharisee party. Their differences with Jesus would have been not about the Torah itself, but about interpretations and traditions that grew up around the Torah. There were often in-house debates between the scribes themselves and also between Jesus and some scribes. The bitterness between Jesus and the scribes in the gospels is not so much a bitterness of the time of Jesus, but rather the bitterness of the time when the gospels were composed.  

The Gospel of John, just like the other three canonical gospels, is not written as a biography of Jesus. It is written in the nineties of the first century to instruct a Christian Community about Jesus and sometimes to guide them against the scribes who attempted to draw them away from the Christian “Way”, as it was called. At the time when John composed his gospel, the temple was no more. With the destruction of the temple went the power of the priestly caste. In the time of Jesus, the two great pillars of Judaism were Temple and Torah. In John’s time, there was only one pillar left on which Judaism rested – the Torah (the Pentateuch). By extension, however, the word Torah implied the Prophets and other Writings, such as the Psalms. These are the three parts of the Hebrew Scriptures: Torah, Prophets, Writings.  Of the religious authorities in the time of Jesus, only the scribes, who were mostly of the Pharisee persuasion, were left as religious authorities in the time of the composition of John’s gospel.

Let’s call the two sides Moses-Jews and Jesus-Jews. Each group thought of themselves as the true or genuine Jews. Conflicts arose not only over traditions but especially over converts. We see this in Matthew 23, written ten or more years before the Gospel of John. In that chapter, Matthew hurls seven (the perfect number) curses against the scribes. Each curse begins, “Woe to you (A curse on you!), Scribes and Pharisees, etc.” In Matthew’s second curse against his opponents, he writes, “You hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to make one convert, and when he has become a convert, you have made him a twofold son of hell worse than yourselves.”

The Ecumenical Movement was not born from the Gospel of Matthew. His chapter 23 helps us understand the little parable of today’s gospel reading. John is warning his Christian Community against those he (and Matthew and Mark and Luke) considers a danger to perseverance as Christians. We know mostly our side of this struggle over converts at the end of the first Christian century, the curses, the name-calling, the denouncing, the demonizing. We can be sure that the scribes were just as eager to denounce Christian leaders, Christian scribes. We can conclude that when John speaks of thieves and robbers entering the sheepfold, he is talking about the great Jewish scribal teachers and leaders in the last decade of the first century. He warns Christians to beware of those who sneak into the Christian Community, the ones he will later call the wolves among the sheep. Certainly this demonizing of adherents of a form of religion is unattractive, but this feature of organized religion lives on into our own times.

John adds a second parable introductory to the Good Shepherd parable. In this second brief parable, the Johannine Jesus no longer speaks in the third person of impersonal characters such as shepherd and gatekeeper. Now he speaks in the first person and begins as he does the first parable with a double oath, “Amen, Amen, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All who came before me (the scribes and Pharisees) are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the door. Whoever enters through me will be saved.” To hear these further insults against John’s opponents placed in the mouth of Jesus is distressing, but there is beauty about the symbolism of door or gate. In ancient Palestine, it was the custom for the shepherd to gather sheep into a low stone-walled enclosure at night. The shepherd himself lay down across the opening as the gate or door. He puts his own life in jeopardy to guard the sheep from marauding bears, lions, wolves, thieves. Thus Jesus will say later in the parable of the Good Shepherd, “I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”