‘I am the gate’ – The Outrageous Grace of Jesus Christ
Preacher: The Rev’d Canon Dr Rachel Mann, Area Dean of Bury and Rossendale
Readings: Acts 2:42-47; John 10:1-10
There’s a pop song by Jordy Searcy I’ve listened to quite a lot recently. I won’t list the lyrics here as I don’t want the Chapel to get into trouble for copyright breach. The song is called ‘Explaining Jesus’, and Searcy addresses and apologises to a list of people who have been hurt and damaged by patriarchal religion. For example, he says that ‘if you’re gay and over 85 you will likely have thought for your whole life that when God made you he messed up’ … or if you’re a person who’s been raised to be a Southern Belle in the US and who has, therefore, effectively been born and bred for ‘show and tell’ you will likely spend your whole time thinking you’re never good enough. Searcy’s list goes on – the LGBT person who is confronted by a pastor who is sure he’s right but just wants ‘a chat and a coffee’ … the person who wants to pray to God but is sure that God condemns them …
And Searcy’s refrain is a simple one: it is simply to offer an apology. He says, ‘I’m so sorry for what you’ve heard … I’m sorry no one explained Jesus to you …’ The song ends with an instrumental version of Amazing Grace. For Searcy, ultimately we come back to grace. We come back to Jesus and the simplicity of the one who is Love … who does not paint agendas and then pretend that agenda is the truth … who is the one who meets us as who we are and for what we are … For the one who greets us is the God who meets us with the delight of an old friend, a beloved sibling, a parent who does not condemn but loves us into that forgiveness and acceptance which goes beyond mechanistic understandings of sin or brokenness. Who bids us sit at the table of grace and invites us to be fed and served by God himself, the one who is our friend, sibling, parent … the one who, to our shock, we find is not driven by human harsh judgment but offers outrageous, abundant grace.
And Jesus says, ‘I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.’ Let’s just stay with that image of the gate for a moment. What a curious, odd – dare I say it – queer disruption of our assumptions about flesh and blood and the embodied divine. Jesus says, I am the gate. Not the gate-keeper … There is something curious (though beautifully biblical) about parsing something usually seen as inanimate into a picture of the living God, the I Am. Perhaps when one hears that phrase, ‘I am the gate’ one pictures as I do, (I am a child of the English countryside!), a five bar wooden gate. For those of us of a certain vintage an image will likely come unbidden to mind from the shepherding show which was unaccountably a top draw TV attraction in the 80s ‘One Man and His Dog’: that image of a sheepfold into which the dog manoeuvres the flock before the shepherd closes the gate.
Well its difficult to control our imaginaries and introjections, but there are other ways of reading the phrase. Jesus might be saying, I am the portal … that sounds wonderfully sci-fi to me. Or more prosaically, the entrance … Jesus’s first auditors might have pictured a portal to the Temple, to the site of worship, to the Holy Ground of God … we might have a vision of Jesus, the portal, taking us to another realm … to the Kingdom of Heaven itself … or to something only slightly less high concept: Jesus as the doorway through which we may pass to the safety of rest at night and out to food in the pasture of the Lord in the day. Jesus as safe-passage … /and Lord how much are safe passages needed in such days as these … Jesus the safe passage for all who would depend on him in a savage world … the safe and good passage for all who are displaced by war and hatred and who flee in search of safe haven. Who are trapped on small boats or begging for seats on the last plane out of Khartoum … for the terrified trans or non-binary or queer person afeared their hard won rights are about to be taken away …
At the moment the Church of England is getting tangled up in knots about how to implement the work we’ve been calling Living in Love and Faith. It’s our attempt at finding fresh and hopeful ways of thinking about what it means to be human and to be in abundant flourishing relationship. As you may be aware, recently we’ve very much focussed on what is to be said about LGBT+ people and our relationships, and how to come to a fresh settlement of love about people who have rarely been cherished or heard or permitted the good pasture some of us might have been.
I’ve been involved in some way in that work for years now and I’m finding it very hard work. Hard work isn’t necessarily bad, but one of the things I love about what I see and hear in Jesus’s words is a kind of simplicity and rest. Be in relationship with Jesus the portal, the gate, the safe passage, and know safety and salvation. In a sense, there’s no need for – as Jordy Searcy has it – ‘explaining Jesus’. When we meet him and when we the Body of Christ dare to show him forth in our fellowships and congregations it all becomes rather self-evident. Jesus isn’t the gatekeeper but the gate … the safe portal, safe because he is Love and Grace and the one who says to us, ‘a new commandment I give you: to love one another as I have loved you.’ And all the rest – the ecclesiology and the politics and the doctrinal stuff – it matters, I’m sure it does, because as humans we want good order and want to keep on the path to salvation (and we also probably want to keep the theology bros on side), but is it really so complex? Jesus says, love one another as I have loved you. And that’s not so hard is it? Or is it? Is it – as the evidence trail of history and the present demands of screwed-up politicking and our current obsessions with polarisation and culture wars show – the narrowest, toughest path of all?
I always want to stay where Jesus is. For all that people think I’m some sort of clever-clogs feminist or a dangerous progressive or lover of queer deconstruction, I know – in my bones – who is the one who shows us the way. And I don’t mind admitting that as I’ve occupied a range of roles locally and nationally in the C of E I’ve only become ever more aware that I am a creature of unclean hands and lips. My priesthood is stained with life, and structural violence and sin, and compromise. And Jesus says, ‘The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.’ And I am left wondering is that me? Is that any of us when we get ourselves tied up in knots about what the ‘right institutional thing’ is to do in the face of the tender offer, the open safe portal of Christ? Am I, in my institutional identity, simply a thief stealing the goodness from faithful lives and relationships? Am I a destroyer of goodness? A kind of hope killer? Is that what the institutional church does?
I am ashamed of the way scripture and tradition can be weaponised against people, whether that be lesbians gays bi people, women, trans and non-binary folk, those who are disabled, and indeed about how parts of the New Testament have been weaponised against Jewish people. I want us to resist this weaponisation, of course, I do. Resistance isn’t enough, though, if resistance means only pointing out the way in which scripture can be deployed as texts of terror. I want us to be more committed. I want us to stay close to Jesus, the Jesus who says, ‘I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.’ I want us to pay attention. Who is this ‘they’ of whom he speak? Who are the sheep of the sheepfold and pasture?
I suspect few of us would like to see ourselves as like sheep. Images of passivity and group-think come to mind. To be a sheep or a member of *quote* the sheeple is hardly a flattering image. Yet, given some of the things I’ve said – about how power and privilege can work, about how I find myself wondering if someone like me might find themselves (despite themselves) behaving like the thief, the destroyer – I wonder if the concept of the sheep to whom Jesus comes to offer abundant life needs to be re-energised with hope. For perhaps the sheep of God’s good pasture is anyone or any group that finds themselves in the place of vulnerability … of relative powerlessness … of othering in the face of institutional, religious and cultural power. The people for whom the conditions of the world were never set in their favour. The people with whom Jesus finds solidarity on the Cross …
‘I came that they might have life and have it abundantly.’ I hear Jesus say this and my heart aches for grace. Abundant life, imagine it. Not comfortable or pleasurable or insulated or wealthy life, as if one were the kind of person who lives in the world of TV’s Succession. But abundant life. This is a world in which our saviour can be a gate and safe passage; a world where those who are mocked and demeaned and deprived of levers of power and privilege and indeed dignity find divine food and safety; where those of us who are so privileged and powerful that we don’t even recognise our privilege find ourselves called to stop killing hope and breaking into the sheepfold of grace. Our saviour’s world: A world of solidarity where love is the most terrifying, holy thing. Who of us is bold enough not only to want it, but dare to inhabit it?