Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 13, 2008

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

You know how so often in the Gospels Jesus’ disciples don’t get what he’s all about? How they misunderstand his teaching about the Kingdom of God? How they always want to be first, to have the seat of honor, when Jesus is telling them that even he is a servant not a master? It’s easy to put the disciples down and think we’re superior because we get Jesus, or think we do, in a way that, during his lifetime at least, they did not. Well, this morning we have another story in which the disciples don’t get what Jesus is talking about, only this time, I’m with them. I don’t get what he’s talking about either. The image of Jesus as “the gate” that John creates here just makes no sense to me. These words about sheep, gates, gatekeepers, shepherds, thieves, and bandits just don’t add up to anything for me. I can’t tell who John’s Jesus is talking about or what these various images are supposed to mean. I just don’t get it.

And apparently John had some inkling of how obscure these images really are. At one point in the passage John says: “Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not under stand what he was saying to them.” John 10:6 NRSV To which I respond with a hearty Amen! I don’t understand what he was saying to them either!

So John takes another stab at it. He has Jesus say “I am the gate for the sheep.” John 10:7 NRSV Not much help, frankly. Then: “All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them.” John 10:8 NRSV Still not much help. Who came before him? The Hebrew prophets? They weren’t thieves and bandits, they were God’s prophets. So I still don’t know what he’s talking about.

For me, the only part of this passage that makes any kind of sense at all is the last line. John 10:10 reads: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” NRSV Finally a line I can hold on to, in which I can find some meaning for myself and perhaps for you. So please forget all that stuff that comes before this line. I still don’t know who the thief who comes to steal and kill and destroy is supposed to be; but that last sentence, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly,” is, I think, full of meaning for us. So let’s focus on that one this morning and see what it has to say to us.

The first thing it says, I think, is that Jesus is about life, not death. Jesus is the Word of God made flesh, and this God whom in incarnates is a God of life, not of destruction. Other religions have gods of destruction—Shiva in Hinduism, for example—but the God that Jesus shows us is the God of life. God wants life for all of God’s people. Please keep that truth in mind the next time you hear that someone’s death was God’s wish, as in “God took that child because God wanted to be in heaven with Him.” (God is always “Him” in these statements.) As a Mormon man once said to me when we heard a priest on television say this thing about the death of a child, God wants a full life for all of God’s children. This Mormon fellow didn’t cite John 10:10 at the time, but he could have.

Yet John doesn’t leave it at “I came that they may have life.” He has Jesus add the phrase “and have it abundantly.” So to get at the full meaning of this verse we have to ask: What does it mean to have life abundantly? “Abundant” means plentiful, ample, more than sufficient; and when I hear the word the first thing that comes to my mind is material abundance, especially an abundance of food and the other necessities of life. We use the word a lot around Thanksgiving, when we traditionally give God thanks for the material abundance with which most of us are blessed.

And maybe this meaning is part of what John had in mind when he used the word. God does indeed want an abundance of the necessities of life for all of God’s children; and the fact that so many of those children don’t have them is our doing, not God’s. Beyond that, there are some preachers today—some of them extremely popular, with much larger audiences than I have—who tell us that this is precisely what Jesus meant, and more. They tell their people, and anyone else who will listen, that God wants us all to be—rich! That’s what having life abundantly means to them, so they say that that’s what this line from John means and that that’s what God wants for us.

Yet I’m not convinced that John’s Jesus is talking about having come so that we may all be rich, so that we may all be materially wealthy. Jesus wasn’t materially wealthy, so the life of material wealth certainly isn’t the life that he modeled for us. And I don’t see how Jesus can function in our lives to bring us material abundance. It just doesn’t make any sense to me that he does. If we are to understand that Jesus wants us to be rich, why does he say in Matthew “blessed are the poor?” And why does Luke’s Jesus add to that statement the additional words “but woe to you who are rich now”? No, Jesus coming to bring us material abundance just doesn’t add up. John’s Jesus must have meant something else by the phrase “and have it abundantly.” Our task is to figure out what that something else is.

To do that we need a starting point, and it seems clear to me that the only starting point we have is Jesus himself. He is the one who came that we might have life abundantly. That means that what we actually receive from him is, by definition, abundant life. So our question about the meaning of abundant life becomes a question about just what it is that we receive from Jesus.

What we receive from Jesus is not material wealth, it is spiritual wealth. We learn from him who God is. We learn from him first of all what God’s ways are and what God’s passions are. We learn that God’s way is grace—universal, unconditional grace for all people. We learn from Jesus that God’s way is inclusion. God reaches out to those whom the world scorns and excludes and says welcome home. You are my especially beloved children. In Jesus we see that God’s ways are not the world’s ways. The world values wealth and prestige. Jesus shows us that those things mean nothing to God. God values the humble, heart, the repentant soul, and service to God’s people. Most of all service to God’s people.

And in Jesus we see how God wants us to live. It isn’t the life of wealth. It is that live to service that God so values. It is that life of humility and repentance that Jesus shows us. Beyond that, in Jesus we see that the ideal human life is a life of balance and wholeness. It is a life that has enough of the necessities to live, but it is a life in which material things are balanced by spiritual things. Jesus enjoyed good food and drink, so much so that his enemies accused him of being a glutton and a drunkard. Yet Jesus balanced that enjoyment of physical life with devotion to the spiritual side of life as well. His was a life of prayer. Time and again he left even his closest disciples behind, or at least tried to, and went apart to spend time alone with God in prayer. Jesus probably spent more time in prayer in a month than some of us, myself included, do in a year. He cared about people’s physical lives, but he balanced that concern with care for their spiritual lives as well, and he lived out that concern in his own life.

This is the vision of the abundant life that we receive from Jesus, a vision of God’s values and desires and a vision of the whole, balanced, human life. These things are the abundance we receive from him, so we know what the abundant life is that he came that we might have. It is life lived in the knowledge of God’s grace. It is the life of inclusion not exclusion. It is the life of humility, repentance, and service, most of all service. Jesus said that in so far as you fed, clothed, housed, and visited the least among you, you have done those things for him. Matthew 25:31-46 The abundant life Christ gives is such a life of service to others.

And it is a life of balance, of wholeness. It is a life that does indeed have the physical necessities. It is even a life that enjoys the earthly pleasures, the pleasures of food and drink, of companionship, of intimacy, and of love. But it is a life not devoted to those things alone. It is a life in which the spiritual is valued as much as the material, or even more so. It is a life in which we devote at least as much attention to our spiritual health as to our physical wellbeing, and in which we care for each other’s spiritual wholeness as well as for our own. The abundant life is a life of balance, it is the life of the whole person, physical and spiritual together and not in opposition to each other.

These things make up the truly abundant life that Jesus came to give us. We know that because these things make up the life that he showed us. We resist this vision of abundance because we are so conditioned to the world’s way of thinking. We are conditioned to think of abundance only in material terms. Yet throughout history the men and women most filled with life have been the saints who grasped this vision, who were grasped by this vision, and who lived into it every day of their lives. We may not be saints, but the vision of the life of abundance as the life of service and of personal wholeness through Christ is our vision too. We will live it imperfectly to be sure; but to live as best we can is indeed our call as Christians, for it is the vision of the one we call Lord and Savior, even Jesus the Christ. Amen.