John 10:1-10 Commentary

The lectionary calendar separates Jesus healing the man born blind (chapter 9) with Jesus’s “I am” proclamation here at the beginning of chapter 10 by a number of weeks—the first being in Lent and now here in Easter. A quick review of the man’s experience of being kicked out of the synagogue makes it pretty obvious how we are meant to understand the difference between the true Shepherd/Gate and the thieves, robbers, and strangers. Furthermore, the man who was healed from blindness serves as an example of coming to recognize the voice of the Shepherd and follow him to abundant life.

As Jesus continues to speak to the Pharisees who have overheard his conversation with the healed man, Jesus switches from a metaphor of seeing to one of hearing. They cannot see the truth of the miracle and transformation standing in front of them, but will they hear it?

He is speaking to the people who are part of the group who believe themselves to be the gatekeeper—and worthy ones at that. But Jesus likens them to thieves and bandits and strangers wandering among the sheepfold of God. It will struggle to grasp what Jesus is saying to them because they have become “the establishment” so much that they will find it difficult to imagine the possibility of having snuck in over the fence. How can you sneak over the fence when you think of yourself as that fence?

I think that that’s why Jesus is so intentional about describing himself as both the Shepherd as well as the Gate. He is challenging the two roles these folks have given to themselves and calling them back to what ought to be among God’s people. As more and more people stop listening to their voice and listen to Jesus’s instead, they are going to keep running into this challenge of their role as God’s mediators. The Messiah is here and the Messiah is calling people out of this system and into a new identity and way of life. Jesus describes this way of life in verse 9 as freedom—free to go in and come out and find whatever is needed (pasture). As we know from what he’s done, there is room with Christ to break the rules for the sake of abundance—whether they be natural law and cosmic realities like turning five loaves and two fish into food for 1000s, or more cultic, religious rules like healing someone on the Sabbath day.

With Jesus as the Shepherd and the Gate, all of life, everything, is pasture. We are not confined to the walls of a religious community’s gathering place or its interpretations of God’s commands even as we are shaped by those spaces to hear God’s voice. The point is to always be listening for and to God above all, not idolizing the voices of God’s messengers who sometimes get too big in their britches about their roles as leaders and forget that they too are one of many among God’s sheep.

In the end, the healed man was kicked out of the synagogue because he didn’t obey them, but we could positively interpret it as him being led out by God and rejecting the Pharisee’s leadership, refusing to play the game or follow their rules. He heard their voice and came to realize that it did not belong to the true Shepherd—it didn’t even sound like someone who followed the Shepherd. As Jesus finds the healed man on the street afterwards, he hears the voice of the one he does intend to worship and belong to. In a very real (even literal) way, the healed man has been led out by the Good Shepherd through the Gate who was his healer.

The healed man has begun to experience the abundant life-pastures that the Shepherd and Gate God leads the sheep into. Whereas others wish to seek and destroy the good that God has done for him by denying it is real or possible, while others wish to steal his joy at being healed, Jesus gives him the gift of life and the possibility of abundance. With Jesus, the man’s world gets bigger, not smaller. And that’s partly because the man came to recognize that what he was hearing from those other gatekeepers was a life too small, too limited, too confined. To stay in that place of fear, he would have to deny his own true reality and the God who had done good to him.

So, he follows the voice and the character of the Shepherd even as he was kicked out. He enters the sheepfold of belonging to God the way it was always intended to be by God—through God’s own love and call. The healed man’s way of entering is also telling: he enters through hope-filled worship rather than fear.

Textual Point

Scholars point out that Jesus doesn’t really do parables in the Gospel of John, and that texts like this one, a paroimia “figure of speech” or proverb, are the closest we find.

Illustration Ideas

My toddler’s audio recognition of particular sounds is delightful. A train whistles and Phoebe puts her finger to her ear and says, “I hear train!” Much to our chagrin, she shows a strong preference for specific versions of her favourite songs, arguing about whether the one we’ve played counts if it isn’t the one she is thinking of. Or, when the sound of the garage door opening reaches her, she perks up, points to her ear and excitedly says, “I hear Daddy!” Like Jesus says, his sheep know his voice.

Long ago, in the days of my youth, I used to play this computer game called Lemmings. Lemmings followed whoever was leading and so you had to create a safe path for them through various scenarios. If you didn’t address a hazard, like putting a fence up in front of a cliff edge, your lemmings would follow one after the other over the side without any thought. We could say that those who follow the Pharisees for salvation are like lemmings whereas Jesus’s sheep are anti-lemmings. Jesus’s sheep take part in their discipleship by listening to the voice of the person leading them—they do not follow aimlessly.