“Come In, Go Out, Find Pasture”

By Pastor Young K. Fourth Sunday of Easter · Easter 4A · Good Shepherd Sunday · April 26, 2026 John 10:1–10 (NRSV)

Walking with the Resurrected Jesus

Easter Season

Easter 1

Easter 2

Easter 3

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Easter 4 Come In, Go Out, Find Pasture Apr 26

Easter 5

Easter 6

Easter 7

A Body in the Doorway

A low stone sheepfold on a Palestinian hillside at dusk, the shepherd lying across the only opening — “I am the gate.” — John 10:9

In the world of Jesus’s parables, a sheepfold’s gate was not a piece of hardware. The folds were rough stone enclosures on the hillsides of Judea and Galilee, and at night the shepherd lay down across the only opening. His own body became the door. Nothing entered without passing over him. Nothing slipped out without first waking him. That is the picture behind the seventh great “I am” of John’s Gospel — egō eimi hē thyra tōn probatōn, “I am the gate of the sheep.” It is not a claim about mechanism. It is a claim about a body. Commentators on John have long noted how strange the imagery is for a literary metaphor: a gate is hardware, a shepherd is a person, and the Fourth Gospel insists that here both are the same thing. The threshold of the flock’s life is the body of the shepherd, laid down and raised up. To ask after Christian access to God is, in John’s grammar, to ask after a wounded body that opens. The text is set inside a verbal storm. John 9 has just narrated the healing of a man born blind, and the religious authorities, instead of celebrating, have thrown him out of the synagogue for confessing Christ. The shepherds appointed to keep the gate have become the men standing in front of it. John 10 is the pastoral teaching that follows that confrontation, and it is hot to the touch. When Jesus says “I am the gate,” he is not offering a serene metaphor. He is naming what has just happened: the gate to the people of God is no longer the credentialed authority at the synagogue door. The gate is Christ — and his own body is what opens.

• • •

The Wardrobe

An old wooden wardrobe with the door cracked open, fur coats hanging inside, snow and pine glowing softly behind — “Come in. Go out. Find pasture.” — John 10:9

The image C. S. Lewis chose for what such a gate finally does is older than his book. Four children have been sent away from the bombs of London during the war and dropped at the door of a sprawling country house. Long corridors. Empty rooms. And in one of them a wardrobe so deep that the smell of mothballs and cedar reaches the door before it opens. Lucy slips inside to hide. Her arms push through the fur coats. Her hand keeps reaching for the wooden back panel — the place every wardrobe is supposed to end. The back never comes. The fur gives way to pine. There is snow under her feet and an iron lamp post burning in a wood that has no business holding one. A country that was not there a moment before — and yet, somehow, has been there all along. The wardrobe does not move Lucy a single inch in our world. It opens her to a country she could not enter any other way. The Christ of John 10 stands in this same shape. He is the only gate. There is no Narnia without the wardrobe, and no Kingdom without the Christ. The threshold he is does not relocate the sheep. It transforms them. It restores their seeing. It returns them to the very pasture that has waited for them all along — pasture they could not see, because they had not yet walked through the body of the Shepherd to find it. The Greek under John 10:10 deepens the move. Christ comes that the sheep “may have life, and have it abundantly” — perissón, an overflow, more than enough. It is the same word Psalm 23 reaches for when David says, my cup overflows. The pasture has not changed. The hillside is the same hillside it has always been. What has changed is that the cup of grace has been poured out over the sheep until it cannot help but spill — over the table, into the soil, onto the road, across the bench at dusk. The wardrobe is the body of the risen Christ, and on the other side of it is a country that has been a country all along.

“There is no Narnia without the wardrobe, and no Kingdom without the Christ.”

• • •

Come and See

What Lucy does next is what every sheep on the other side of the wardrobe will eventually do. She runs back through it. She finds Edmund, Susan, and Peter, and she says, Come and see. This is the only honest mission of the church on the far side of Easter. The sheep do not manufacture the pasture. They do not engineer the Kingdom. They find themselves overflowed and turn around to call others into a country they have already walked. The witness here is not a salesman dragging strangers into a structure of their own making. The witness is Lucy, breathless from her own astonishment, pointing back at a wardrobe she did not build and saying that the cold air on the other side is real. Most witness, in the end, looks small. It looks like an unremarkable invitation extended at a bad moment to someone who said no. It looks like a conversation in a church kitchen that no one will remember by Tuesday. It looks like the long patience of a teacher, a grandmother, a friend, a sponsor — the slow accompaniment of someone who has been through the wardrobe and is willing to stand near its door for as long as the next person needs.

• • •

Standing in Front of the Gate

This is also why John 10 carries its heat. The healed man of John 9 has just been thrown out of the synagogue, and the people who threw him out were people whose vocation was to keep the gate. The Shepherd’s response is unsparing. He does not appoint gatekeepers in his stead. He is the gate. Whoever stands between another sheep and the threshold of Christ — no matter what credentials they carry — is not a true shepherd of the flock. It is a confession the church has had to make again and again. In the name of religion. In the name of doctrine. In the name of politics. In the name of being the right kind of believer. There is a long history of people who were taught the wardrobe and then began, slowly, to sell tickets at its door. The teaching of John 10 is not sentimental on this point. The Shepherd is firm. Move aside. Trust the wardrobe. Trust the Shepherd. Let the risen Christ do the work he alone can do, and let the other sheep walk through.

• • •

The Wardrobe Is Open

A girl gazing through an open wardrobe into a sunlit pasture with sheep grazing in the valley beyond — “A country that has been a country all along.”

The gate the Gospel of John has been describing was laid down in a tomb on a Friday afternoon and raised on Easter morning. The shepherd who lies across the opening is not a metaphor for divine accompaniment. He is the risen Lord — the body that was broken now standing as the threshold of the sheep’s life. The wardrobe is open. There is a Narnia somewhere in most lives at any given moment. It is sometimes a kitchen table where the silence has finally begun to feel like company instead of loneliness. It is sometimes a hospital corridor where the Shepherd had arrived before anyone else did. It is sometimes a forgiveness that has been waiting on the other side of the gate for years. The wardrobe is not only an image. It is an invitation. And the country it opens is the one Christ has been preparing all along. The reader who has come this far is seen. The reader is loved. And grace, on the testimony of every sheep who has walked through the wardrobe ahead of them, has not finished its work yet.

A Closing Prayer

Good Shepherd, you are the gate of our life — the only one. Teach us to come in. Teach us to go out. Teach us to find the pasture you have always been preparing for us. Teach us to invite others through the wardrobe of your wounded and risen body. And forgive us for every time we have stood in front of the gate you opened. Move us aside, and lead us through. In your risen name we pray. Amen.