May 2020

Easter begins in joy but Eastertide ends with a hint of sadness. Just as Good Friday is the day of great sorrow, which makes way for the joy of Easter, so the Feast of the Ascension of the Lord can bring a different sort of sadness, which makes way for the joy of Pentecost. The hint of sadness on the feat of Ascension is something like the first or last day in school, a change of job. The difference between the departure of Christ is that we are called not just to grow as people; we are to grow in Christ himself. We take the past with us, remembering with love the people and the places God gave us to live with and in. even if we have a terrible past, we can still have some hope that out of the evils of the past, God will prepare a greater good.

Faith tells us that all is prepared. There are many days when we don’t know what is to happen or what we are to do. We feel that, like the disciples on the day of Ascension, we are still standing on the road looking up at the sky where Christ has ascended. We forget that Christ is the way. So prayer is not just a way of receiving instructions about what to do next. Prayer lets us go further down the road, without needing to know where it leads. The priestly prayer of Christ, as it is called, of which we hear part in today’s Gospel, is a conversation with the Father where Jesus explains that His leaving us behind is an act of love. It is love because perfect love always means trusting the person we love.

The parable told to His disciples by Jesus in today’s Gospel obviously tends towards the positive end of the symbolic spectrum. As usual we look to the end of the story to see what point is being made. Jesus is warning His followers about being led astray by those who are not preachers of the truth. A sheep recognize the voice of their shepherd, His followers too need to recognize His voice and follow Him. Jesus offers the idea that He is the gate of the sheepfold. It is through Him that the sheep go safely in and out. Thomas objects that they do not know where He is going, so how can they know the way? To which comes the famous reply that Jesus himself is “the Way, the Truth and the Life”. It is very much a theme that recurs in John’s Gospel, this centering of our belief on the person of Jesus. It is believing in Him, recognizing His voice, clinging to Him that we receive the gift of eternal life.

Do we see gates as the threshold to freedom or insurmountable barriers? In his epic poem Divine Comedy, the 14th century writer Dante imagined the gates of hell had “Abandon hope all you who enter here” written above them. When cities were walled their gates were often the only way of entering and so were guarded carefully and closed at night. We now lock our doors much more than we did in the past, and even church doors are often kept locked for security reasons. These fears and habits inevitably make it much more difficult for us to understand or live by the practices offered by Jesus. Perhaps we prefer to keep His instructions to a highly spiritual level, which allows us in our minds to open our doors to Him while closing them to everyone else. Do we keep open house, do we welcome the stranger, do we make hospitality our special care? Do we enable people to enter through the gate of Jesus the good shepherd, and to find a home in Him?