The Keymaster and the Gatekeeper
[Readings of John 10:1–10 and John 14:1–14 in conversation with Exodus 3, Acts 17, and more]
The 2 texts from John have a similar theme, and the other readings help unpack that theme. This timing is intriguing as I have recently begun reading “Universal Christ” by Richard Rohr, a Franciscan Catholic priest fascinated by the mystical world. Today is going to get a little philosophical, so try and keep up.
Who or what is Christ? As Rohr states, Christ is not Jesus’ last name. Christ is not an afterthought to deal with a rebelling humanity. Christ is the Word of God, affirmed in the beginning of John’s gospel. Christ is God’s incarnation in the physical world since the beginning of time. Jesus is the human manifestation of Christ, but Christ existed long before Jesus was born of Mary, and long since Jesus’ ascension. In Colossians 1, Christ reconciled all creation to himself. In Colossians 3, Christ is all and is in all. In 1 Corinthians 15, we see that Through the work of Christ, once all is complete, God is all and is in all. It was from the beginning, is now, and is still happening. Christ has always been and is still working, and is yet to come. Because of Christ, everyone and everything is holy and sacred. This is the holy mystery of our faith.
Ancient mystic, John Crossan points out that as we look at the beginning of the gospel of John, where it says the Word of God, Christ, became flesh, that the text does not say became a single human being, but used the word that means flesh as a whole. All creation. Rohr points out that the name Jesus does not get mentioned at all in the whole prologue because Christ is bigger than the man Jesus. Christ is the whole incarnation of God in creation. Jesus is the Christ, yes, but Christ is even bigger. Christ is the word of God, the very essence of God, made flesh.
It’s also worth noting what Paul says earlier in that 1 Corinthians passage. Christ Jesus, fully man and fully God, was resurrected as a human man, because death entered the world through a human man, Adam, now resurrection enters the world through a human man, this time with the fullness of God living in him, Jesus Christ.
Now, back to the text at hand, John 10. Here, Jesus is saying that as the Christ, he is the gate to the Father. The Christian tradition, rooted in our understanding, affirms God as Father, Son, and Spirit. While Father and Son are male terms, these are relational terms. In Genesis, it is stated that humanity was created in the image of God, male and female. God is not limited by gender.
Christ is the gate. There is no other gate than Christ.
In John 14, we have one of Jesus’ most famous sayings: I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me. Again, Jesus is saying he is the gate. He is the key master and the gatekeeper, and we have to get these two together. I hope some of you picked up on that reference.
So that settles it, those who are in Christ are saved, and those who aren’t, aren’t, right? Is that really what Jesus is saying though? What does it mean to be in Christ? Does it mean to pray that you allow Jesus in your heart individually? Does it mean you came to a mental understanding, a cognitive belief? Let’s take a look through scripture what it means to be in Christ.
In Matthew 25, Jesus tells of the end of times when all the people will be gathered before him as sheep and goats. Sheep know their shepherd’s voice, goats do not. The goats are baffled when Jesus said to them that they did not see Jesus in need. The sheep are also baffled. The sheep cared for those in distress, the goats did not. Neither of them saw Jesus! Neither group recognized him here. But one group, “knew” Christ, because they cared for those that were in need. It wasn’t what they said, it wasn’t what they believed, it’s what they did. They did it because they instinctively acted as Christ to these people and instinctively recognized Christ in these people, even if it was subconscious. It was in their DNA. What if some of these sheep that met “Christ” in need are Muslim? Are atheists? Are native people practicing their native religions? In Matthew, Jesus says:
Here we have people that “believed,” that confessed their belief, that Jesus has he does not know.
Now, let’s look at what God says about who God is. Let’s look at Exodus 3:
God said I am who I am. I am sent me to you. It can also be translated to I will be who I will be. In verse 15, it says The Lord. The Hebrew word translated to the Lord, here, is for consonants. In the image, not footnote (b). Here we have the original translation of the Hebrew word in the text: YHWH (yod, he, vay, and he). Originally, it was 4 letters.
‘YHWH the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.
In verse 15, about 2500 years ago, the Jewish people replaced the original name here with the Hebrew word Adonai, meaning The Lord. This has been their tradition, as I understand it, for 2500 years. The name of the Lord was not to be spoken, thus, The Lord. Jews said it could not be spoken. It is actually unpronounceable. Yod he vad he. Transliterated into Greek or Latin, or now English, the yod is between a J and Y, and the vad is between a W and a Y. So some transliterated it into YHWH. Others translated it into JHVH. This is where Jehovah and Yahweh come from. Try speaking it without letting a vowel slip in. Jehovah and Yahweh each have vowels. The name of God, given to Moses, has no vowels, so it’s not Jehovah or Yahweh.
Here is a take from Jewish Rabbi, Arthur Waskow
It is unpronounceable in my view not because we are forbidden to pronounce it — that understanding is in my view a way of avoiding the deeper truth — but because if one tries to do so, pronouncing these four strange letters (semi-vowels, semi-consonants; linguists call them aspirate consonants) WITHOUT any vowels, one simply breathes.
The notion of YHWH as “the Breath of Life” accords with a deep sense of God as intimate and transcendent at once. If we have no breath in us, we die. If there is no breath beyond us, we die.
Some, perhaps many, Jewish and Christian mystics believe that the very act of breathing is proclaiming the name of God. That is the only way to “speak” such a name. In that name contains all life. All living creation must breathe to live, meaning all creation is praising God at all times. We literally cannot live without praising God, and everyone and everything, regardless of religious understanding continues to speak God’s holy name through each and every breath.
Here we have God says God’s name is I am who I am, I will be who I will be, and every breath you take. As Rohr puts it,
“The God of Israel’s message seems to be ‘I am not going to give you any control over me, or else your need for control will soon extend to everything else.’ Controlling people try to control people, and they do the same with God — but loving anything means you give up a certain amount of control. You tend to create a God who is just like you — whereas it was supposed to be the other way around.
Now, let’s look at how Paul deals with this topic when he debates with Greek intellectuals in the Book of Acts.
Here we have Paul, acknowledging that these people know in their hearts that God is real. They just do not know God’s name. God’s name cannot be controlled by Christians. We are not the gatekeeper nor the Keymaster. That is Christ, the resurrected Christ Jesus. Christ decides who is in. Christ knows who knows him, regardless if they proclaim “Lord Lord,” regardless if they profess the ancient creeds.
Rohr has this take on the topic:
As St. Augustine would courageously put it in his Retractions: ‘Augustine For what is now called the Christian religion existed even among the ancients and was not lacking from the beginning of the human race.’ Think about that: Were neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, Mayans and Babylonians, African and Asian civilizations, and the endless native peoples on all continents and isolated islands for millennia just throwaways or dress rehearsals for ‘us’? Is God really that ineffective, boring, and stingy? Does the Almighty One Operate from a scarcity model of love and forgiveness? Did Divinity need to wait for Ethnic Orthodox, Roman Catholics, European Protestants, and American Evangelicals to appear before the divine love affair could begin? I cannot imagine! (P. 49–50)
As Paul points to here and hits in other parts of his writings, God’s existence has been written all over creation and has been written on our hearts, whether we consciously realize it or not. Even before Jesus walked the earth, there were sheep, people that knew him by caring for him through loving others as themselves.
I think of a story, I’m not sure if it is an urban legend or factual, but it goes like this: Missionaries were deep in the Amazon and came across a tribe. They learned to communicate with the tribe. When they spoke with the spiritual leader of the tribe, they told him about Jesus. He responds with, “oh yes, I’ve known him my whole life, I just never knew his name, thank you.”
Rohr continues:
I cannot help but think that future generations will label the first two thousand years of Christianity “early Christianity.” They will, I believe, draw out more and more of the massive implications of this understanding of a Cosmic Christ. They will have long discarded the notion of Christian Salvation as a private evacuation plan that gets a select few humans into the next world. The current world has been largely taken for granted or ignored, unless it could be exploited for our individual benefit. Why would people with such a belief ever feel at home in heaven? They didn’t even practice for it! Nor did they learn how to feel at home on earth. (p, 48).
Is truly knowing Christ an evacuation plan? Is that, knowing the heart of God, revealed in Christ Jesus? Jesus states in our earlier text that when you see him, you see the Father. We have the lens as to how we can best see God. God was first revealed in creation. All creation. Then God was revealed in Jesus. This is Christ, the revelation of God to all creation.
The question this might pose is, well, if everyone is in Christ, then why are we told by Jesus to make disciples across the world? Why would we be a witness for our faith? What is salvation? If we think of salvation only as escaping death at the end of our lives, that’s in God’s hands. Jesus said he’s the gatekeeper and the key master. Just because all have this knowledge, it is incomplete. It’s even incomplete for us, as we are still discovering Christ and learning what that all means.
Christ is revealed in all, throughout the world. Always has been. Universal truths can be seen across all the major faiths. Love others. Care for those in need. Be selfless. Welcome the stranger. Often, people of other faiths, or no faith seem to do it better.
What makes our story different from every major religion, and this brings us back to where we are, in the season of Easter, is atonement. Or as Rohr likes to rethink its pronunciation and emphasis, “at-one-ment.” In all the other major faiths, you work out your salvation. You have to make sacrifices, repent, something of that sort. That is part of the Christian story as well, but what Christ did, was he did the work for us. No other major religion teaches that. By living a perfect life, dying at the hands of angry sinners, and that’s every human being, then being resurrected, changed that whole game.
Because of Christ, we have been atoned, or we are now “at one” with God, “at one” with one another, “at one” with creation. But we have to live into it. We have to believe it, and sadly, I do not see many Christians that live into it. I don’t mean falling short, we all do that. I mean actually believing that we are now at one with all creation and with God. If so, there would be no racism, no climate change, no hate crimes, no crimes period, no greed. And then, maybe in that tribe in the Amazon, maybe they knew “at one ment,” even if they didn’t know Jesus’ name.
“The proof that you are a Christian is that you can see Christ everywhere” — Richard Rohr
Sources for this lesson:
- Richard Rohr: Universal Christ
- Rabbi Arthur Waskow: https://theshalomcenter.org/content/why-yahyhwh
