Jesus: Shepherd and Gate

To appreciate ‘shepherd’ image in today’s Gospel, we have to understand something of pastoral practice in Palestine at the time of Jesus.

Sheep from various flocks would be penned up at night in communal sheepfolds. Though they were all mixed up together overnight, at daybreak, when the time came for them to be led out to pasture, each shepherd could rely on the fact that the sheep of his flock would recognize his voice, separate themselves from the rest, and willingly follow him through the gate of the sheepfold.

Jesus contrasts a ‘good shepherd’ like this, whose relationship with the sheep rests on care and mutual knowledge, with others who come only to steal, harass and bring about the loss of sheep that do not belong to them.

The image acquires a fresh dimension when Jesus goes on to identify himself with the ‘gate’of the sheepfold. If the sheep are to flourish, they cannot remain all day within the sheepfold; they have to go out and find pasture. Yet, if they do not return to the fold at night, they will be at risk. So daily they have to come and go through the gate. The gate is their means of access to both protection and growth.

As ‘Gate’ Jesus performs this function for the community. It is only through continual interaction with himself that its members find life and growth.

In this sense he ‘has come that they may have life and have it to the full’ (v. 10).

Fr Brendan Byrne SJ reflects on this weekend’s Gospel:

Sometimes a sudden loss or illness or experience of failure, or even a trip overseas takes us out of our ‘comfort zones’. These are times when the usual things that support us and protect us from feeling insecure and vulnerable are stripped away.

What is really being stripped away is a false identity that rests on three things: 1. I am what I do, make or produce: 2. I am what people think of me—my importance; 3. I am what I have—possessions, gifts, talents, etc. All of these things we can lose—leading to depression if we have really invested our sense of worth in them.

The temptations Satan puts to Jesus during his “desert” experience involve much the same three things: 1. ‘Make bread out of these stones’; 2. ‘Impress people by making a spectacular leap from the pinnacle of the Temple’; 3. ‘You can possess the whole world if only you worship me’.

Jesus dismisses each suggestion, totally secure in his true identity as God’s beloved Son, an identity that, as elder Brother, he has shared with us.

Lent is a time when we are invited to go out with Jesus a little beyond our spiritual comfort zone. We share something of his ‘desert’ experience so as to know more deeply where our true identity and security lies: not in what we can make or do, nor in what other people think of us, nor in what we own, but in the fact that we are beloved sons and daughters of God.