A sermon on 1 Peter 2:19–25 & John 10:1–10 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.
“I have come that you may have life, and have it in abundance.”
“Life in all its abundance, in all its fullness.” If you want a punchy mission statement for what Jesus was on about, that would be it. “I have come that you may have life, and have it in abundance.”
And if you want a snap shot of that abundant life, you probably can’t go past Psalm 23 — the all time classic summary of the deepest desires of the human heart. Beautiful tranquil resting places. Spirits revived. Clear pathways. Security, even when faced with death. Sumptuous food and drink. Goodness and love surrounding us all our days. Ask anybody what sort of life they long for and their answer will probably echo something in that list.
“I have come that you may have life, and have it in abundance.”
But there is a big difference between Jesus’s quest to give us life in abundance and the quest of too many human beings to gain and hold on to life in abundance. When Jesus seeks to open the way to fullness of life, he seeks to open it for everyone, for all of creation. We are more inclined to grasp it for ourselves, without regard for anybody else. Even at the expense of others.
Ultimately it’s not even possible to achieve fullness of life while it is denied to everyone else. If you live with everything while everyone around you lives with nothing, not only will you be relationally impoverished, but you will have to live behind walls and razor ribbon and armed guards. And the people who live locked in secure compounds like that are not actually happy. Walls erected to keep others out cause a crippling anxiety. What if there’s a security failure?
As Dorothy Day once said, the only way to have real security is to live as close as you can to the bottom, because then you have no fear of a fall.
Just listen to all the talk about immigration. The recent policy announcement from the Federal Opposition leader was pretty short on actual policy, but pretty good at echoing the voices you’ll hear on talk-back radio — people jumping up and down about how immigrants are a threat to our values, to our prosperity, to our way of life. You’ll even hear some of them giving a nod to the environment and saying immigration is a threat to that, without ever acknowledging that we live in a single global environment and it’s not even possible to protect our environment by confining over-population to the other side of a border line.
And that’s even before we ask whether our environment, our life-styles and our welfare are actually any more important than those of the rest of the world’s population.
In launching that policy statement, the Leader of the Opposition expressed particular concern about the dangers of letting in people from places like Gaza, people who have not only been traumatised by war, but who do not have any home they can return to. I don’t know whether he is genuinely feeling the anxiety, or just feeding it for political benefit, but in the end it doesn’t matter. Because it is not about him. It is about the people he is speaking to, and for them, the anxiety is real. Most people are not so much selfish, as afraid. They are like the sheep in our gospel reading who are afraid of thieves climbing over the walls, and afraid of the voice of strangers.
But in their genuine fear, they are falling prey to the self-defeating logic that says that in order to be safe and happy, we have to hoard our possessions, our values, our privileges, and put up walls to protect them from others trying to get a share of them.
Go back to the lands so many of these traumatised people are coming from, and you can see, writ large, just how self-defeating this logic is. You will see the crippling nightmare it leads to, and it leads there time after time after time.
The modern nation of Israel was created by the survivors of one of history’s great atrocities for the precise purpose of creating a place where Jews could be safe and secure. But since then, Israel has, perhaps more than any other nation in living memory, pursued a policy of security through an iron fist. It builds walls. It arms itself to the teeth. It invades and occupies the lands of its neighbours to create ever bigger buffer zones. It controls the flow of basic resources like water and food to those it fears. And its agents assassinate its opponents.
And the result? Certainly not happiness and security. Instead, a society beset by a deep pervasive fear, and requiring ever-increasing brutality to maintain the arrangement. If it is not already, Israel is rapidly becoming the most unsafe place on earth for Jews. And in part that is because radical Palestinian groups like Hamas have got hooked into the same logic, thinking that in order to hoard happiness and security for themselves, they have to eliminate Israel. Both sides keep escalating, driven by the same desire and the same self-defeating logic.
Nowhere is it more obvious that trying to hoard our happiness and security — trying to build our happiness and security on depriving others of it or eliminating them completely — produces exactly what it was supposedly promising to prevent.
But we don’t have to travel to the other side of the world, or look at conflict between nations to see how wrong this can go. We can probably find examples among our friends and families.
The period of the covid pandemic sparked a huge escalation in the numbers of ordinary people becoming convinced that the whole world is conspiring against them and that their only hope of happiness and security lies in protecting themselves from a toxic and untrustworthy world.
Now, there is nothing stupid about thinking that the system is stacked against you, and that those in power can’t be trusted to always have the best interests of ordinary people at heart. There is any number of examples that will prove that there is more than a grain of truth in that. It is not that hard to understand the suspicion and fear.
But the cruel irony is that that same self-defeating logic gets its claws into these people too.
We see them tragically beginning to cut themselves off from others, and seek out only the company of those who share their wariness. Unable to trust anyone else to look out for them, they strive for maximum self-sufficiency, and minimum dependence on anyone else. They regard strangers and authorities with ever increasing suspicion.
Their quest for absolute freedom leads to the exact opposite — solitary confinement in a prison of anxiety, resentment, and hostility. The sovereign citizen who trusts no one ends up more trapped than anyone. Walled off from the mainstream society, they can no longer see the sky.
This is the same logic of hoarding turned in on itself. The quest to grasp and protect abundant life chokes that very life to death. Just as Jesus warned us, again and again, if you try to hold onto abundant life tightly enough to keep it out of the hands of others, it crumbles in your hands and ends up not being life at all. Just a self-imposed siege.
But if you’ve never really understood how people can get caught up in that kind of thinking, maybe you haven’t really tried to live the opposite without compromise either. Because when we try to live with radically open hands and share the abundant life with neighbours and enemies alike, we quickly find ourselves denounced as dangerous and subversive and unpatriotic. Vested interests masquerading as moral principles will rise up spitting venom and stop at nothing to crush those who act and call for the access to abundant life to be opened to all and not hoarded by us. And when that happens it quickly sorts out the dreamy idealists from those who are willing to pay the price of freedom.
We could hear this tonight in our reading from the first letter of Peter. It was written to a people who had every reason to feel paranoid and isolationist because they were facing genuine persecution for choosing a life that was out of step with the demands of society. They were being excluded — socially, economically, and politically.
But the Apostle does not call on them to rise up and strike back at their oppressors, feeding a cycle of ever-increasing retaliations. And nor does he call on them to barricade themselves away in a shipping container deep in the bush to stew on their solitary freedom. Instead the Apostle calls on them to keep modelling themselves on Jesus, paying the price in their own bodies for continuing to live with open hands and wide open hearts.
You know the words the Apostle uses here, because we prayed them every Sunday during Lent:
Christ suffered for us leaving us an example,
that we might walk in his footsteps.
When they cursed him he returned no curse.
Tortured, he made no threats.
He carried our sins in his body to the cross,
that we might die to sin and live for justice.
When he was wounded, we were healed.
This is not passivity. It is not wallowing in victimhood. Instead this is Jesus courageously refusing to get dragged into that escalating cycle of hatred and hostility. And the Apostle calls us to model ourselves on Jesus as he gently but resolutely resists the logic of trying to hoard the best for ourselves. And as Jesus shows us, if that means that we too end up being broken and poured out, it will be for the life of the world, for life in all its fullness.
Life flows outward or it doesn’t flow at all. We live it most fully when we pour it out for others. Jesus, the one who refused to hoard even his own life — and who warns us against hoarding ours — is the one through whom life now flows without limit.
Tonight we heard Jesus saying “I am the gate.” He doesn’t mean a gate in a barricaded wall, locked tight to keep the wrong people out. He said, “I am the gate for the sheep. Whoever enters by me will come in and go out and find pasture.” He is depicting himself as a gate that stands open, a gate that anyone can pass through. A threshold, not a barrier. It’s all about movement and freedom, not border control.
A Christian icon is exactly that kind of threshold. It is not an object to be admired or grasped. It is a window, not a wall. It is something you look through rather than at, something through which your eye is drawn toward a much larger living reality beyond it. An icon that draws attention to itself has failed. But an open icon draws attention to the light coming through it.
To call ourselves, our church, Open Icon is to say: this is what we are trying to become — a community as open as a gate, as transparent as a window through which something of the life of God might become visible to the world. Not because we have achieved it. Because we are opening ourselves to becoming it.
As I said in my sermon during our Paschal Vigil, the use of this word ‘icon’ to describe our calling goes right back to the opening chapter of the Bible, where human beings are created as icons — bearers of the image of God, made to be windows through which the divine life shines. The call is as old as creation. The name is just a new way for us to say yes to it again.
We gather this evening to worship the one whose image we bear. We gather at the table of the one who did not just speak nice words of justice and peace, who did not just say “I have come that you may have life to the full” but who stood firm in the face of the horrific opposition to the quest to share such life. We gather to encounter the one who not only faced those horrors but who turned them back so that his suffering itself became redemptive, became the means for prising open the window of life, that the light might shine in.
We gather around a table that is itself an icon — an open window into the abundance that God has in store for us — and in receiving that icon, we become that icon, open to all and for all. And we gather to worship the one whose risen life is the guarantee that the powers of death do not have the last word, but that life in all its fullness is flooding through the open window for all the world, and cannot be stopped even by the grave.