Easter 4 Year A 2026: John 10:1-10

The other day, I was commenting to my husband how excited I was about the prospect of getting a real sheep to St. Matthew’s for Vacation Bible School. The theme for VBS this year is Psalm 23, which we read today, and there is so much sheep and shepherd imagery throughout scripture to explain to the ancient near east’s agrarian society the relationship between God and His people using terms that were familiar to them. I said it would be good for all these city slicker kids - my own included - to see what an actual sheep looks like. I told my husband it shouldn’t be that difficult to find someone with a sheep nearby, since my stepmom’s parents had a farm out by Mead where they farmed sheep. And he, as the grandson and nephew of actual farmers, turned to me with a look of incredulity and said, “speaking of city slickers, you don’t farm sheep, you raise sheep”.

So I might not be the target demographic of all of the sheep metaphors in scripture. In my clergy text chain, one colleague sent the group this week, “so what if “I am the Good Shepherd” is played and I know “I am the gate” is awesome and I get all that but … what if I’m super burned out on all the agriculture imagery?” to which another responded, “I get being burned out on coming up with something new to say about agriculture images. I also think that's the only tool available to most of the authors of scripture so we're stuck with it.” But it isn’t necessarily true that it’s the only tool available, just that it would have been the most effective tool. This was the way Jesus’ audience lived. The way Jesus lived. He spoke to them in terms that they understood. So we have to do a little more work to figure out sheepfolds and bandits, which can have an extra level of difficulty when we think you farm sheep.

Today’s text from John gives us half of Jesus’ sheep metaphor. He continues with “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away - and the wolf snatches them and scatters them.” (10:11-12) We will hear this text on Easter 4 next year. “I am the good shepherd” will have to wait til next year, no matter how well Jesus explains that part of the metaphor. And no matter how much easier it is for us to understand the good shepherd when compared to “I am the gate”. Partway through today’s text, Jesus’ audience, who appear to be the Pharisees to whom he started speaking a few verses before, didn’t understand what he was saying to them so he tried again. So today we’re going to look at those first two tries, before Jesus moved on to “I am the good shepherd”.

These few metaphors are the closest Jesus comes in the Gospel of John to the parables he teaches with in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Typically in John, Jesus teaches in long, difficult speeches. But John 10, along with being parable-adjacent, has no parallels in any of the other gospels. That is, the gate/shepherd metaphor only appears in the Gospel of John. These brief metaphors have deep theological meaning.

To help us understand the metaphors, we need to understand what each piece means literally. What was a sheepfold? A sheepfold was an enclosure, often with stone walls, where several shepherds could bring their flocks to safety at night. It was more cost effective and labor effective. So other shepherds who perhaps led different house churches at the time John was writing - scholars think John was the last and latest of the Gospels, written around the last decade of the first century or first decades of the second century - were to be sure to lead their sheep through the gate of Jesus to be in the one flock of the church universal. Were a shepherd to think that they were the good shepherd and not Jesus, or if the sheep were to see their pastor as being equivalent with Jesus, they were not passing through the gate into the sheepfold. John is not making a point about comparative religions here. He is reminding followers of Jesus that we all belong in one sheepfold. Or, as Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians, “Each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’ Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” (1:12-13)

On Jesus’ second go-around, when he says, “I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them,” he is making a statement about others who made Messianic claims. In Jesus’ time, a number of leaders who claimed to be the prophet or the messianic king promised to do signs to prove that God had sent them to bring about the liberation of Israel from Roman control. These leaders were occasionally called bandits. So Jesus is saying that all of these others who claimed to be the messiah and to be a trick pony to prove it are fake, and they went out of style because they were not the true shepherd. He’s saying, I’m not a trick pony, I won’t do what you want me to do to prove myself to you, but they who follow me do so because they recognize that I am the real deal.

In John, Jesus is the gate by which the shepherd goes to the sheep, and by which the sheep come into the fold for safety and rejuvenation and go out to pasture, to bring the love and guidance of Jesus out to the pasture of our everyday lives. On the level of Jesus’ ministry this would be aimed at the Pharisees who are the pictured audience. On the level of church life in John’s time, this may be a critique of other Christians who have introduced human shepherds or pastors who might seem to rival the claims of Christ. The passage found later in verse 16 where Jesus, referring to other sheep not of this fold, expresses his goal of one sheep herd, one shepherd suggests that, when the Gospel was written, division among Jesus’ followers was a problem. (Brown, 348-9)

Throughout John, Jesus makes several “I am” statements. These statements tie Jesus the “I am” to the same “I am” who spoke to Moses through the burning bush. It isn’t as clear in English as in Greek, but the Greek for “I am the gate” in verse 7 roughly translates to “I am, I am the gate”. There are extra words in there which would have been unnecessary if Jesus was simply likening himself to a gate, but instead his word choice serves a dual purpose. There are extra articles in English that are not required in Greek, and adding them in changes the symbolic meaning of the sentence. If he was just making a gate metaphor, he would have written “I” and “the gate” in the same tense and the “am” would be implied. But that’s not what John did. That’s how scholars can tell that the “I am” statement is more than just a gate personification. It’s a claim that puts Jesus on the same level as God, which is very much in line with John’s views on the divinity of Jesus.

Through these metaphors we are reminded to follow Jesus, no one else. Others, like pastoral figures, can lead us to and help us follow Jesus but we must be careful that we do not put those pastors on par with Jesus. That our pastor is not a bandit but is leading us to the gate of Jesus into his sheepfold. Amen.