John 10:1-5

“ Verily, verily, I say unto you that he who does not enter by the door into the sheep-fold, but climbs up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber; 2 but he who enters in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. 3. To him the porter opens; and the sheep hear his voice; and he calls his own sheep by their name and leads them out. 4. And when he has put forth all his own sheep, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice; 5 they will not follow a stranger, but will flee from him, because they know not the voice of strangers. ”

This picture deserves the name of allegory rather than that of parable. In the parable, there is a story which assumes a form independent up to a certain point of the moral application; in the allegory, the application makes itself felt immediately through every feature of the representation: the image does not take a form independent of the thought. The parable is a picture, the allegory a transparency. The Synoptics also present pictures of this sort; for example, that of the leaven and the grain of mustard-seed.

It has been supposed that the figures employed here by Jesus must have been borrowed from the spectacle which He had before His eyes at this very moment; that it was the hour when the shepherds brought back their flocks from the surrounding country into the city of Jerusalem; and this supposition might be extended to the second picture by holding that Jesus was near the sheep-gate when He uttered the words of John 10:7 ff. These suppositions have no impossibility. But as Jesus, in the preceding discourses, has applied to Himself several theocratic symbols, it is possible that He continues the same method. David invoked the Lord as his shepherd (Psalms 23). Jehovah, in His highest manifestation, as Messiah, was represented by the prophets as the shepherd of Israel: Isaiah 40:11; Ezekiel 34; Zechariah 11. The last passage in particular offers a quite remarkable analogy to the present situation. Like the shepherd of Zechariah, Jesus at this moment, after having vainly sought to gather Israel, renounces the hope of saving the nation; and leaving to the Pharisees (the foolish shepherd of whom Zechariah speaks) the direction of the main portion of the flock, He confines himself to bringing out of this fold which is about to be destroyed the few poor sheep who, like this blind man, look to Him.

Lucke correctly observes that the formula amen, amen, never begins anything altogether new. It unites closely what follows with what precedes, either as a confirmation or as an antithesis. A sheep-fold in the East is not a covered building, like our stables: it is a simple inclosure, surrounded by a palisade or wall. The sheep are taken into it in the evening. Several flocks are ordinarily brought together in such an inclosure. The shepherds, after having committed them to the care of a common keeper, the porter, who, during the night, is charged with watching over their safety, return to their homes; in the morning, they return and knock at the door of the inclosure which is strongly fastened; the keeper opens it. They then separate each one his own sheep, by calling to them, and after having gathered their flock lead them to pasturage.

As for robbers, it is by climbing the wall of the inclosure that they try to enter into the fold. To recall to mind these details which Bochart has described in his Hierozoicon, and which are confirmed by modern travelers, is almost to have explained our allegory. It is impossible for me to understand how Weiss can deny that the sheepfold denotes the theocracy, or more exactly the Kingdom of God in its preparatory form. According to him, this figure does not have in itself any value and is only a condition for the setting forth of two different ways of acting, that of the shepherd and that of the robbers, which are to be described. But John 10:16 says quite plainly that Israel is the αὐλή, the inclosure of the sheep. There is a shade of difference between the κλεπτής or thief and the ληστής or robber; the second term suggests a more marked degree of violence and audacity than the first. The one steals, the other slaughters. Jesus means to describe thereby the audacity full of cunning with which the Pharisees had succeeded in establishing their authority in the inclosure of the people of God, beyond the limits of any charge instituted by God. Nothing in the law, indeed, justified the mission which this party had arrogated to itself in Israel, and the despotic power which it exercised. In opposition to this unauthorized ministry, the figure of the door quite naturally designates the legitimate entrance, consequently a divinely instituted function in the context, especially the Messianic office announced and prefigured in the whole of the Old Testament.

We need not allow ourselves to be turned aside from this altogether natural sense of the figure, as it results from the contrast between John 10:1-2, by the declaration of Jesus in John 10:7. That verse is not the explanation of the present parable; it is the beginning of a new parable in which different, although analogous, figures are freely employed in the service of an altogether different idea. Some interpreters,Lucke, Meyer, Reuss, Luthardt, etc., regard the door in this first parable as representing the person of the Lord Himself. Consequently they see in the shepherds who enter in by the door the true leaders of the sheep, who are introduced to them by Jesus. But with what fitness would Jesus proceed to speak here of the future pastors of His Church? Still if the disciples had played a part in the preceding narrative, this might help us to understand an anticipation which is so improbable! The door represents the Messianic office divinely instituted and forming the legitimate entrance into the theocracy prepared for its normal leader, the shepherd, that is to say, the Messiah. Undoubtedly, the word ποιμήν, shepherd, is in the Greek without an article, and consequently an adjective word. It designates the quality, not the individual: he who enters as shepherd (opposed to: as robber). But this form does not at all prevent the application of this figure to Jesus (John 10:12).

He who comes in the character of shepherd has no need, like a robber, to scale the wall of the inclosure: the porter opens to him. Who is this porter? Quite naturally: he who is charged by God with introducing the Messiah into His divine office. Can it be, as Bengel, Hengstenberg and Gess think, the Father, who draws souls to the Son (John 6:44)? But God, the owner of the flock, cannot be fitly represented as a servant of an inferior order, subordinate to the shepherd himself. According to Stier and Lange, He is the Holy Spirit: the same objection. Moreover, Jesus must designate by this figure an historical function, a ministry as positive as that of the Messiah Himself. According to Chrysostom, he is Moses, inasmuch as the law leads to Christ. This is very far fetched and refined. Lampe understood by the porter all those who were expecting Christ in Israel, and more especially John the Baptist. It seems to me that the nature of things and the beginning of our Gospel prove very clearly that Jesus, in expressing Himself in this way, thought of the forerunner and of the forerunner only. God had raised up John the Baptist expressly to point out the Messiah to the people and to introduce Him into their midst: “There appeared a man sent from God to bear testimony to the light, to the end that all might believe through him ” (John 1:6-7). It was he whose testimony had brought to Jesus His first believing followers, and should have opened to Him the heart of the whole people. As to those who, like Lucke, de Wette, Meyer, Luthardt, Weiss, see in this point only an embellishment of the picture without application, there is no argument, properly so called, to oppose them. This is a matter of feeling. My impression is that every point in this picture answers to an historical reality.

It is not only the mode of entrance which distinguishes the shepherd from the robber; it is also the manner in which, when he has once entered, he acts towards the flock. The robber lays hold of the sheep by violent measures; the shepherd simply makes them hear his voice, and his sheep, immediately recognizing it, separate themselves from among those which belong to other shepherds and come to gather around him. The words: the sheep hear his voice, might refer to all the sheep contained in the inclosure, and the words which follow: his own sheep, apply solely to the sheep of the Messiah.

But the expression: hear his voice, is used throughout all this passage in too internal a sense to apply to the purely outward hearing, as would be the case with the first sense. It appears to me, therefore, that it is better to apply the first words of John 10:3 already to the sheep of the Messiah in the theocracy, and that, if Jesus afterwards adds the epithet ἴδια (his own), it is, not to distinguish them from the preceding, but to emphasize the altogether new value which they acquire for His heart, when once, through the act of faith, they have really become His. These remarkable expressions rest upon the fact that between the voice of the Messiah and the heart of believers there exists a pre- established harmony, in virtue of which they recognize Him immediately when He shows Himself and speaks. This fact of which the experience of the first disciples (chap. 1), as well as that of the whole Church, bears witness, is explained by what has been said in the Prologue of the original pouring forth of life and light from the Logos into the human soul (John 1:4; John 1:10). It was from such words as those of our passage that John had derived that profound thought.

The shepherd pronounces the particular name of each one of the sheep this is the sense of the reading φωςεῖ or he summons them to follow him by calling them by their name; this is what the reading καλεῖ signifies. In both cases, the question is of something more special than the general call to faith indicated by the words his voice. When they have once come to Him with faith, He gives them a sign of recognition and favor which is altogether personal. The name, in the Scriptures, is, as Hengstenberg says, the expression of the personality. This special designation which is given to each sheep is the proof of the most individual knowledge and the most intimate tenderness. Recall the name of Peter given to Simon (John 1:43), and the apostrophe: Mary (John 20:16), in which Jesus sums up all that Mary is to Him and all that He is to her. Recall also the “Believest thou? ” addressed to the blind man who was cured, John 9:35.

In the general picturing of the parable, the words: “ And he leads them out,” designate the act of the shepherd leading his flock to pasturage. But the question is whether this feature refers only to the care which every shepherd gives daily to his flock, or whether it is not intended here to describe a definite historical situation: the going forth of the Messianic flock from the theocratic inclosure devoted to ruin. This sense only seems to me to correspond to the idea of the entrance of the Messiah into the sheepfold. In this is a historical fact to which that of the going forth of the shepherd and his sheep answers. Reuss resorts to ridicule, as usual: “If,” he says, “the question were of making the believers go forth from the ancient theocracy, these same believers would be found two lines below entering it again” (alluding to John 10:9: will go in and go out). But this critic forgets that this last expression is borrowed from another parable, where the figures, as we shall see, take an altogether different meaning. Jesus has recognized the signal of the inevitable separation in the treatment to which the man who was born blind has been subjected, in his violent expulsion (John 9:34), as well as in the decree of excommunication which strikes Him Himself in the person of his adherents (John 9:22); in general, in the violent hostility of which He sees Himself to be the object (chaps. 7 and 8). And it is the result of this condition of things which He describes in the term to lead out, as in the words: he calls them, He had described the historical formation of His flock.

Thus the shepherd has called and then has given a mark of tenderness to the sheep who have come to gather themselves about him; and now he causes them to go forth from the inclosure where they had been shut up. The term ἐκβάλλειν, to drive, cast forth, John 10:4, sets forth with emphasis the principal idea of the passage, as we have just pointed it out. This word designates an energetic and almost rough act by which the shepherd helps the sheep, which still hesitates, to break away from the other sheep of the fold and to give itself up to the chances of the new existence which the shepherd's call opens before it. The rest of the verse describes the life of the Messianic flock, thus formed, in the spiritual pastures into which its divine leader introduces it, then the persevering fidelity of the sheep, of which that of the blind man has just offered an example, and finally the intimate relation which exists henceforth between these sheep and their shepherd. There is great tenderness in the words: “When he has put them forth, he goes before them. ” While they were still in the inclosure, he remained behind to put them forth, that there might not be a single one left (πάντα, all, according to the Alexandrian text). But when the departure is once accomplished, He places Himself at their head, in order that He may lead the flock. We see how accurate are the slightest features of the picture. Οἴδασι, they know, means more than ἀκούει, they hear (John 10:3); the latter term designated the acceptance of the first call; the other refers to the more advanced personal knowledge which results from daily intercourse. Hence it is, no doubt, that we have the plural οἴδασι following the singular forms which precede.

All along the way which the sheep follow, strange voices make themselves heard, on the right hand and the left, which seek to turn them aside from the steps of the shepherd; they are those of thieves who, not being able to play openly the part of robbers, use means of seduction or intimidation, as did the Pharisees in the preceding scene (John 9:14-40). But they succeed no better in breaking the bond which has been formed, than these had succeeded by violence in preventing its formation. The sheep is for the future made familiar with the voice of the shepherd, so that every voice which is not his produces upon it a strange and repellant effect.

We have already refuted the interpretation of those who apply this picture to the pastors of the new covenant. Their principal reason (John 10:7: I am the door) has no weight, the two pictures being different, as we shall see. The figure changes, in any case, from the second to the third parable; comp. John 10:7: “I am the door;” and John 10:11: “I am the good shepherd.” Why not also from the first to the second? The application to Christian pastors wholly breaks the connection of the discourse, both with the preceding scene, and with the situation of the work of Christ at this moment, and finally with the representation of the development of the national unbelief which is the object of this whole part of the Gospel.

In this passage there comes out anew, in the clearest way, the idea of the organic unity of the Old and New Covenant, an idea of which Reuss and the Tubingen school assert that no trace is to be found in the fourth Gospel.