The Rev’d Ivica Gregurec

Sunday, April 26 2026. Year A, Easter 4 (2026)

Readings: Acts 2:42–47; Psalm 23; 1 Peter 2:19–25; John 10:1–10

We live in an age that knows what it means to be a sheep without a shepherd. In the weeks since Easter, weeks in which the Church sings of risen life, the world has not paused its agonies, as wars continue, countries are shelled, families flee across borders carrying nothing but their children and whatever grief fits into a bag, armies occupy territories that do not belong to their countries. Those speaking against war and injustice are confronted with dismissal, despise and whataboutism (OK, you speak about this, but what about things 2, 50, 80 years ago). Elsewhere, older and quieter violences persist: the violence of poverty, of displacement, of systems that grind the vulnerable into dust. The Resurrection has been proclaimed. And yet the wolves are still abroad.

Into precisely this world, not some idealised one, the Fourth Sunday of Easter places before us the image of the Good Shepherd. Today, however, we do not yet reach the full tenderness of that image. We pause at the threshold. We stand at the gate. And the Lord says: ‘I am the gate for the sheep’.

Our era is obsessed with gates: nations build walls, borders are militarised and access to safety, to life itself, is gatekept by the powerful. Against this backdrop, Christ’s claim is startling: ‘I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture’. The gate Christ describes protects the vulnerable from those who ‘come only to steal and kill and destroy’. In our time, we need little imagination to name such thieves: the arms dealers who profit from war, the demagogues who inflame hatred, the systems that consume human dignity. The gate is not only a barrier, but also an opening. The life Christ offers is not fearful enclosure, but abundance: the shalom of which the prophets sang, peace not merely as the absence of war, but as the presence of justice.

The first reading from Acts of the apostles shows what this abundant life looks like in practice. Luke’s description of the Jerusalem church is almost disarmingly beautiful: devotion to teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread, prayer; possessions are held in common; daily care is given for those in need. Great St Basil of Caesarea, reflecting on this passage in the fourth century, wrote with characteristic force:
‘The bread you do not use is the bread of the hungry; the garment hanging in your wardrobe is the garment of those who are naked; the money that you keep locked away is the money of the poor.’ To enter through Christ’s gate is to be drawn into a web of mutual obligation with real material consequences, one the wider Church has not always been willing to honour, not even to speak about the guiding principles in the society. Solidarity and care are almost dirty words and the powerful rely on ‘do-gooders’ to do the work of compassion and care.

Peter’s letter reminds us that passing through this gate does not mean being sheltered from suffering. Writing to persecuted communities, Peter speaks of those who ‘endure pain while suffering unjustly,’ and holds before them Christ himself: the one who, ‘when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly’. This is not an endorsement of passive submission to abuse. Peter is describing the inner disposition of the one who refuses to be defined by the violence done to them, who bears witness in their suffering to a different order of things. The Servant of Isaiah does not collaborate with injustice, but bears its weight so that it can be seen for what it is, and so that healing can come. Sarah Coakley, whom I often mention, in her work on kenosis and power, has argued that the self-emptying of Christ is not the erasure of the self, but its transformation. Power exercised in love, she suggests, is a different kind of strength altogether, one the world’s systems cannot finally comprehend or overcome. We have seen something of this in the quiet courage of those who refuse to become what has been done to them: the doctors who continue healing under bombardment, the priests and imams who bury the dead and baptise the newborn/or welcome them in the community in the same week.

This weekend, across New Zealand and Australia, the nation pauses to observe Anzac Day. At dawn people gather at memorials to remember those who died at Gallipoli, on the Western Front, in the Pacific, and in every conflict since. We will hear the ode: ‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old’. People observe silence.

But Anzac Day has always carried within it a harder question: How did those young soldiers come to be on that beach? Who sent them, and why? The grief is real and must be honoured, and so must the interrogation. To remember faithfully is not merely to mourn; it is to hold the powerful accountable across time. Peter speaks of those who bear pain unjustly, and of the Shepherd who went, like a sheep to the slaughter. The Anzac tradition at its most honest does not sanitise the waste of war.
It names sacrifice; it names the cruelty of wars declared by the powerful and fought by the young. And it binds those of us who survive and remember to be more worthy of the cost. Anzac does not glorify neither war, nor sacrifice, but gives us the opportunity to be grateful and commemorate.

In the light of the Resurrection, Anzac solemnity takes on another dimension. We do not grieve as those without hope. The dead are not abandoned. Precisely because we hold that hope, ‘Lest we forget’ cannot mean only mourning those who died. It must mean refusing to forget what war costs, refusing to send the next generation into avoidable catastrophe. The Shepherd calls each by name, every one. Each of those casualties has a name. To pray for peace is not sentimentality, but obedience.

Psalm 23 gathers all these threads together. It is perhaps the most beloved of psalms precisely because it is so honest about the terrain. ‘Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil’. This is not denial, as the darkness is real. The table is spread in the presence of enemies, not in their absence. In the liturgical tradition, this psalm has always been associated with the Eucharist: the table is prepared, the cup is overflowing. To receive Communion in a world at war is a profound act: to assert, with the body, that abundance is the final word, not scarcity or death; to practise, in miniature, the banquet of the Kingdom, where all are fed and none are turned away. The liturgy is not an escape from history: it is a training ground for inhabiting history differently, for carrying the Shepherd’s peace back out through the gate into the broken world.

Before Christ names himself the gate, he speaks of those who climb in by another way, thieves and bandits, whose voice the sheep do not recognise. This places a solemn responsibility on all who exercise pastoral authority. We who preach and lead are called to speak with a voice recognisable as Christ’s: carrying compassion for the wounded, challenge to the comfortable, refusal to abandon the lost. In a world where religious leaders have too often blessed wars and kept silence in the face of atrocity, this is a searching word.

Friends, the Gate stands open. The thief has not prevailed. Death has not closed the way. The Shepherd has passed through the darkest valley and come out the other side, and the gate he has opened cannot be shut. We go from this place into a world still torn by war, still scarred by injustice, not as heroes, but as a community shaped by the Shepherd’s voice, practising the economics of abundance, refusing the logic of violence, bearing witness in our own small and faltering ways to the life that is stronger than death.

May we know that voice. May we follow where the Shepherd leads. And may the God who spread a table in the wilderness spread mercy upon a hungry world.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.