Christ the door

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (John 10: 1-10) gives us a parable that is so strange, so abstruse, that when the people did not understand what He was saying to them, Jesus actually explained its meaning. In fact, it is less a parable and more a figure or metaphor. In it, Jesus evokes a sheepfold in which the shepherd would keep his sheep. The sheepfold has a door by which the shepherd passes in and out, whereas thieves and robbers climb in another way. The sheep know the shepherd and will follow his voice but not the voice of strangers.

When these metaphors land not so much on deaf ears as on bewildered ones, Jesus explains His meaning or at least elucidates it a little more. I am the door of the sheep, He says. All who came before me are thieves and robbers. The sheep find pasture through me whereas the thief only comes to destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

This extract from the gospel weaves together two truths which are central to our spiritual lives: the truth of Jesus as our saviour and the truth of our dependence on Him. There are many robbers and thieves who would take our souls. There are thieves in the material domain: wealth, popularity, beauty, success, recognition, bigger houses, job security, the affection of friends, holidays in the sun, the list could go on and on. It is not that we consciously make these things our saviours, but something in us makes one or other of them indispensable to us.  Wherever your treasure is, there will your heart be also. But there are also thieves in the spiritual domain, the chief of these being the devil himself. But he is not the only one. Any ideology, philosophy, religion, or denomination that opposes in any way the fullness of the truth of Jesus is in some respect a thief and a robber. The seeds of the Word that exist in the world are usually wrapped in parasitical growths and weeds, just as the words of the parable teach us: Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. It is worthwhile remembering that such growths and weeds are also part of the life of the Church, though in a different way. The Church is a place of shepherds and sheep, but there are also wolves, and even worse, there are hirelings. The sometimes-cosy or mystical language that we hear about the Church’s internal affairs needs to be weighed against the realism that the gospels offer us. And before the enthusiasts go wild over the latest lapel badges, proclaiming us to be a missionary Church, a synodal Church or some other kind of Church, we would do well to remember the value of the label of the militant Church which reminded us that, attired in the armour of God which St Paul explains to us, we are at war until we die in the hope of sharing in the victory that Christ has already won. We are at war precisely with the thieves and robbers that Jesus speaks of today in the gospel. Indeed, we are at war with ourselves: If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

Yet when the centrality of Christ is established in us, the spiritual combat which is the rhythm of our lives is accompanied by a melody and descant on which our souls can feed. For again in today's gospel we hear: If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture. What does it mean to go in by the door which is Christ? Surely this action evokes for us the contemplative dimension of our charism in COLW. We retreat from the world into the cell of our souls where we can converse with God, come to knowledge of ourselves, and so cast ourselves upon His mercy. Every day that we do not go through this door and into this sheepfold of Christ-knowledge and self-knowledge is a day when we have left our own doors open to thieves and robbers.

And how many thieves and robbers there are! Allow me a short tangent here. We do not yet know much about our new Pope Leo XIV but we do know that when he spoke at the Synod on the New Evangelization in 2012, he was most concerned about the power and influence of the media culture in which the vast majority of us live: thieves and robbers in so many ways. And we do know that when he addressed the Cardinals on Friday last week, one of the reasons he gave for choosing the name of Leo was that just as Leo XIII had faced one industrial revolution (the second industrial revolution and not the first, as so much of the media has wrongly stated), so, today we face another industrial revolution, powered by the extraordinary technologies of artificial intelligence. And it is in keeping with his Augustinian background not to simply smile benignly, as if these forces came without risks, but to be aware of the eternal drama that underpins all our material affairs, pitched as they are between the two loves that have built two cities, in Saint Augustine's extraordinarily evocative image.

To return to our theme, however, only when we have been into that sheepfold, listened to the voice of Christ and become aware of our own weaknesses can we pass out through the door which is Christ and into the world to be about the business of the Father. Then and only then can we share in that abundant life that Christ intended to give us and which the thieves and robbers would snatch from our hands. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy, says Jesus who welcomes us into His heart, the pasture of our souls.