Dear Sisters, dear brethren, every year on this, the fourth Sunday of Eastertide, we hear in the Gospel a passage from the tenth chapter of St John’s Gospel in which our Lord speaks of Himself as a shepherd and as a gate to the sheepfold. Hence this Sunday in Eastertide has usually been known as ‘Good Shepherd Sunday’. Today we have just heard the opening part of this discourse, the part in which our Lord refers to Himself not as the shepherd, but as the gate to the sheepfold, through which the sheep pass safely out to pasture and into protection at night, and which guards against enemies gaining entry.
But why does our Lord use this imagery? We are explicitly told half way through this passage we have been listening to, that ‘this figure of speech Jesus used with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them’. Who are they? It is only if we read on in our bibles that we will find out at the end of the discourse, but this detail is never included in any of the extracts that are read over three years on this Sunday of Eastertide. But it is helpful for us to know. Our Lord did not simply decide one morning that He felt like talking about Himself as a shepherd or as the gate of the sheepfold. This discourse, not understood by many who heard it, was spoken by our Lord immediately after one of the great miracles or signs He worked. Back on the fourth Sunday of Lent, six weeks ago, we heard the Gospel passage that immediately preceded today’s Gospel reading. It was the giving of sight to the man who was born blind, who was expelled from the synagogue because he dared to claim that Jesus must be the Messiah, since nobody who did such a great and good work as giving sight to a man born blind could possibly be anything other than a great and good man. But there was more, for at the end of the narrative, Jesus found the man who now could see, but was excommunicated from the synagogue, and He asked Him, ‘do you believe in the Son of Man?’ The man replied, ‘tell me who he is, Lord, and I will believe’. Jesus said to him, ‘I who am speaking to you, I am he.’ And the man bowed down and worshipped Jesus.
On that occasion, those who had expelled the man from the synagogue were the Pharisees who objected to what our Lord did on the Sabbath Day. They regarded it as ‘work’ which contravened the third commandment. Our Lord’s response to them was to tell them that, because they refused to see the hand of God at work in what He was doing, they were blind – that is, spiritually blind. Their blindness is not of the eyes, of the ordinary vision, but of the soul, of the spiritual vision – making it impossible for them to recognise God working in their midst and recreating the sabbath day in a new way by His own authority which He has as the Son of God in person.
Immediately after this our Lord begins to speak as we have just heard Him doing, desciribng the sheepfold and the gate, and Himself as the gate, and finally of Himself as the shepherd, the Good Shepherd. It is only at the end fo this that we hear our Lord’s opponents disputing among themselves; some are saying, ‘he is raving, he has a devil in Him’, while others said, ‘How can the devil be in Him? Can a man possessed by the devil give sight to a man born blind?’ So we know that they are the same people listening to Him today as witnessed the healing of the man born blind.
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