The Shepherd And The Sheep
THE SHEPHERD AND THE SHEEP
JOHN 10:1-10
Christ is the door for the sheep.
Chapter divisions in the Bible can be misleading. While in a sense the story of the man born blind is rounded off at the end of chapter 9, there is no evidence that the evangelist intended a break there. The blind man and the Pharisees are mentioned again in chapter 10, and, while the main figure changes from light and darkness to the shepherd and his sheep, the theme of judgment is still prominent.
First, Jesus distinguishes between two kinds of people who go into sheepfolds—there are those who use the door put there for the purpose and those who choose some other way in. The shepherd is known to the gatekeeper and to the sheep. Because of the shepherd’s personal knowledge of the sheep they are willing to follow him wherever he leads. They would do the opposite for strangers. This allegorical parable is lost upon the Pharisees. They are unable to apply the teaching of Ezekiel 34 about the true and false shepherds of Israel to their own situation.
Jesus therefore has to be more explicit. He identifies himself first of all with the door and then with the shepherd in two further “I am” sayings. Other claimants to spiritual authority over the people of God had a destructive purpose in coming. The purpose of his coming was to bring life—life in far fuller measure than they had ever had it before.
For the people listening to Christ, the picture of a shepherd calling his sheep one by one, by name, was familiar (10:3,27). It is a vivid picture of the fact that God knows people as individuals. In 1929 Dr. L.P. Jacks wrote a prayer which ended “Help us to regard each son of man not by his number but by his name.” Since then, vast increases in the population have made the impersonal numbering of people, and the placing of them under tighter control, almost inevitable. But God has not changed; he still knows his people by name—an indication of his loving care for us as individuals.
Notes 10:1: “the sheepfold” was probably the enclosed courtyard of a house. Some have seen significance in the description of Judas as a “thief” (12:6) and Barabbas as a “robber” (18:40), but it is false spiritual claimants who are in view in the first instance. 10:4: “brought out” comes from the same word as “cast out” in 9:34. It may suggest his bringing his flock out of the fold of Judaism. 10:6: “figure.” This is not the same as the sort of parable usually found in the Synoptic Gospels. It means a symbolic utterance but not every detail is necessarily symbolic. 10:9: here as in 10:7 a second metaphor is introduced, comparing Jesus to the door as well as to the shepherd. This “I am” saying is similar to that recorded in 14:6. Access to God is through Christ alone.