We’re Called to Be Channels — Not Filters
Today’s gospel sets two figures against each other — the man who climbs the wall to take, and the shepherd who waits at the gate. We have built almost everything we live inside on the climber’s logic.
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The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. — John 10:10
Most of what runs the world rewards the climber — the person who scales the wall, takes what is on the other side, and is celebrated for when they’re done.
We have built our economy around it. Our politics. Most of our institutions. Even, increasingly, our churches.
Today’s gospel is Jesus’s quiet evisceration of that arrangement.
“Anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit.”
A sheepfold in first-century Judea was a stone enclosure with a single low opening, no door, the shepherd lying across the gap at night so nothing could get in or out without crossing his body. There were two ways to come to the sheep.
You could enter through the shepherd, who knew them, called them by name, and had nothing to hide. Or you could climb the wall.
Pope Leo XIV ordained ten new priests in St. Peter’s Basilica this morning and preached on this gospel. The line that has not left me all afternoon was not the most quotable one. It was simpler. “You belong to everyone and are for everyone.”
He told the new priests that today, especially when statistics suggest a growing distance between the Church and ordinary people, the answer is not to pull the gate tighter. “Keep the door open. Let people in, and be prepared to go out. You are a channel, not a filter.”
That is the whole homily for me. The whole season, maybe.
I write this as someone who has spent the last few years watching almost every institution I belong to become a filter.
