Sermons
December 7, 2025 (2nd Sunday of Advent)
“Do me a favor: open the door and let ’em in.”[1]
John 10:1-18
The Revised Common Lectionary actually divides this passage up into two parts, and separates them by a full year. The first ten verses are assigned to the Fourth Sunday of Easter in Year A, and then verses 11-18 are assigned to the Fourth Sunday of Easter in Year B.[1]
Actually one of my main criticisms of the RCL, compared to the Narrative Lectionary, which I follow (along with Julie at the Methodist Church, and Shawn, whenever he preaches here or somewhere else), is that John really gets treated like an afterthought. Each of the Synoptic Gospels gets its own year in the RCL: Matthew in Year A, Mark in Year B, and Luke in Year C; but John is broken up and scattered here and there through all four years. The only part of John that gets extended treatment is chapter 20, the resurrection narratives, which are meant to be read on Easter and the Sunday after in all three years.[2]
On the other hand, since the Narrative Lectionary follows a four-year cycle instead of a three-year cycle, we have a chance to go through the whole Fourth Gospel in some depth. We are out of order today, of course; I typically go off the lectionary in Advent because I’m not really impressed with how the Narrative Lectionary handles this season. We will come back to John 10 on Ash Wednesday in February, although at this point I’m not sure how it will be handled in our service that day.
Throughout John, unlike the other three Gospels, Jesus spends a substantial amount of time explaining who he is, beginning with “I am” statements—and remember that, at its most basic level, the Name of God means something like “I Am Who I Am,” or maybe “I will be who I will be.” When Jesus says, “I am…” in John, we are meant to connect Jesus to God.
John is the Gospel of Incarnation: it begins with God’s Word made flesh, and continues through a series of statements in which Jesus describes himself in terms of some attribute of God—Jesus is God in human form.
John 10 is a case study in mixed metaphor, but one image runs throughout the chapter: the relationship between shepherd and sheep. We are most familiar with verses 11-18, in which Jesus speaks of himself as the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep.
We love that passage, and one of the favorite ways for artists to portray Jesus has been as a shepherd, with a flock of sheep gathered around him and one over his shoulders, presumably the one that has been lost and is now found. It’s a lovely and comforting image, and there’s nothing wrong with that; but today’s reading includes the first ten verses, too, and to really understand what’s going on in John 10 we need to jump back a bit, to chapter 9—which, again, we’ll return to in February.
John 9, as you may remember, is the story of the man who was born blind, whom Jesus healed, and then who was disfellowshipped by the religious leaders. It seems apparent, by the time you finish reading John 9, that the main issue that brought on the conflict between Jesus and the religious leaders in that chapter was their need to have control over others’ religious experiences, control over how others approached and related to God.
Jesus came along, and he wasn’t under their control, and it shook them up. So they reasserted their authority by casting out the man who had been blind, because he was a visible reminder of their loss of control. After that Jesus seeks out the man born blind, now sighted but outcast, and he comes to believe in Jesus.
Then comes the speech that continues into John 10. That happens quite a lot in the Fourth Gospel: something happens, there’s some conflict, and then Jesus makes a speech. And I think this speech, particularly this first part where there’s lots of talk about gates, is a response to the conflict he’s having with the religious leaders.
It’s tempting to look at this text and see allegory, and bring it into our current political climate. So we look at it and say, “Who are the thieves and bandits who are trying to get in and steal or do damage to the sheep?” And some folks will say it’s the folks on the right whom they see as co-opting faith language for political gain. Others will say, “No, it’s the liberals who call themselves Christian, but who are actually trying to dilute the faith by changing it to fit modern culture”—or, they might argue, are rejecting Christianity altogether.
But if we start talking that way, particularly given that just about every congregation is a mix of folks from both ends of the political spectrum and every point in between, number one, we’ve alienated at least half of the people listening; and number two, we’ve missed the point and, I daresay, made the text say something it doesn’t actually say.
Surprising as it may seem to us, Jesus never registered with either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. It is quite possible for a person to be a faithful Christian whether they’re liberal or conservative, and this text is not about American partisan politics.
This text, I think, is a response to the religious leaders Jesus has just come into conflict with over the healing of the man born blind.
When Jesus says he is the gate, he is perhaps also making a negative statement about those religious leaders: You’re not the gate, much as you’re acting like you are. You’re actually thieves and bandits, more interested in control and destruction than in life.
Jesus is saying that being people of God ought to be something that gives life, not something that stifles it. And the religious leaders who cast out the man born blind after Jesus gives him his sight have demonstrated that if God gives new life in ways that are contrary to their understanding of how that ought to happen, they will even reject God’s work.
You who are more interested in your own power and control are dealing in death and destruction, he says. But I came to give abundant life.
What does that mean?
Does it mean, as I’ve sometimes heard folks claim, “Follow Jesus and he’ll make you rich”? Does it only mean, “Follow Jesus and you’ll go to heaven when you die”? Or does it mean something else?
Now we need to look at the Fourth Gospel as a whole. We will get quite a bit more into this over the seasons between Christmas and Easter, so today we’ll just dip our toes in.
John’s Gospel operates on lots of levels, and you could study it every day for the rest of your lives and never get all of the different meanings that are in each passage. At one level, the Gospel records the Christian community’s conflict with Judaism at the time it was written—by that time the split between the Jewish faith and Christianity was complete, Christians had long since been ejected from the synagogues, and there were some pretty substantial hard feelings in the church, particularly since Christians felt like they were following the Messiah the Jews had been waiting for but whom they fought with and rejected when, as Christians believe, he finally did turn up in the person of Jesus Christ.
Digging a little deeper you find some very substantial exclusivism in the way John’s Gospel has been interpreted.
Jesus is the gate into God’s sheepfold, and there is no other gate that provides access to God.
Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except by me.”[3]
Statements like these have been used by Christians to say that the Christian faith is the only true path to God; everyone who belongs to another faith is wrong and must be converted or else they’ll go to hell. It’s possible John and the community of people around him would agree with this. And a substantial number of Christians today agree with this, at least to some extent.
But the problem is that far too often folks who believe Jesus is the way, and Jesus is the only gate into God’s sheepfold, seem to go a step further, saying, “Jesus is the only way in, and we are the gatekeepers, and you have to go through us, do things our way, in order to get through the gate.” Missionaries in former times sometimes did this, requiring the people to whom they ministered to give up their languages and way of life—even their traditional styles of clothing—when they became Christian.
A former regional minister of mine in Oregon and then in Iowa, who was born in Canada and holds dual citizenship, said he once had a woman ask him, in all seriousness, how he could call himself a Christian if he’s not an American.
That’s more in keeping with the attitudes of the religious leaders Jesus was arguing with than it is with Jesus’ attitude. Jesus is the gate, and this gate doesn’t really need gatekeepers. Jesus is the gate, not the United States of America or the Western way of life. Jesus is the gate, not the Democratic or the Republican party.
Jesus is the gate, not the Christian church or the Presbyterian church or the Catholic church or any other church. Churches are supposed to be places where we can meet Jesus, where we can find help in getting to the gate, not additional gates between us and the true gate and the God whom we access through that gate. The religious leaders Jesus addresses in John 9 and 10 had set themselves up to be additional gates by which they controlled access to God.
As we dig still deeper into John’s Gospel, we find something else. Yes, quite a bit of the Fourth Gospel sounds pretty exclusivistic—and I’m not sure that’s always a bad thing, not totally. If Jesus is not the way, the truth, and the life, if Jesus is not the gate by which we enter into God’s Kingdom, then what are any of us doing here?
But this Gospel does not have in its sights whether or not Buddhism or Hinduism, which John may never have even heard of; or Islam, which didn’t exist yet when the Fourth Gospel was written, are true faiths, valid paths to God. The Fourth Gospel is simply saying, “We have found the way, and it’s Jesus Christ.” It’s engaged in a dispute with folks who say, “No, Jesus is not the way.” It’s engaged in a dispute with a religious establishment that said, “We are the way to God, and you can only experience God as we say you can.”
But there’s something more here. John doesn’t intend for his Gospel to be used to scare people into faith: “Jesus is the only way, the only gate, and therefore you’d better get with the program or you’ll burn in hell.”
We know this because of the way his Gospel describes Christ and life in the Kingdom of God we have access to through Christ: the abundance of good wine at the wedding in Cana;[4] living water,[5] the bread of life,[6] everyone who eats and drinks from which will never hunger or thirst again; for God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life; God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him;[7] the vine and the branches which bear lots of fruit as they remain connected with the vine;[8] whoever believes in Jesus, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die;[9] and finally, in today’s reading, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
Having entered God’s sheepfold—God’s Kingdom—by the gate that is Jesus Christ, we have now been granted access to eternity (eternity that begins not at the moment of our death but the moment we choose to follow Jesus), to endless and perfect love, to complete joy, and to a life in which fear is irrelevant.
So we need not listen to the thieves and bandits who serve the forces of death and destruction. We need not give in to their demands that their priorities, which are revenge, lust, greed, and anxiety, be our own. We have abundant life that does not rely on such things, but relies instead on the absolutely dependable love and grace of the eternal God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
[1] John 10:22-30 is assigned to the Fourth Sunday of Easter in Year C.
[2] …which in turn gives short shrift to the Resurrection narratives in the other three Gospels, all of which are interesting in their own right and tell the story in their own unique ways.
[3] John 14:6
[4] John 2:1-11
[5] John 4:1-11; 7:37-39
[6] John 6:25-68
[7] John 3:16-17
[8] John 15:1-11
[9] John 11:25-26