John 10:1-21

11/01/09
John 10:1-21
Hudson UMC

Over and over again in Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus starts a lot of His teaching with, “The kingdom of God is like…” When He says this, it is usually followed by a parable of some kind. There is some kind of symbolism being used that is meant to help the people who are pressing to understand God make sense out of the mystery of the kingdom of God and to confuse those who are not interested in understanding. In John, we do not get much of Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of God, but we do hear a lot of Jesus’ teaching about himself. At several points during the Gospel of John, Jesus begins statements by saying, “I am…” In this passage, we have two such statements. Jesus tells us, “I am the gate,” and “I am the shepherd.”

Both of these images are part of an extended metaphor talking about believers as sheep. Sometimes, people do not appreciate being compared to sheep because sheep are not very smart animals. We resent being compared to animals that desperately need to be in a community of others but are so boneheaded, that they keep wandering off on their own and need to be brought back by someone smarter than they are. And yet, if we believe that Jesus, the good shepherd, is indeed God in flesh, this really shouldn’t bother us, because we should have no problems with the idea that God might know more than we do.

There is entirely too much to cover this morning, so I will get right down to business. What is Jesus trying to get at when He calls Himself the gate for the sheep? He says, “I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

Jesus’ words, “Whoever enters by me will be saved,” can be read two different ways. The first way is to emphasize the exclusive claim that Jesus is making. Later on, in chapter 14, Jesus declares that He is the way, the truth and the life and that nobody comes to the Father except through Him. Though Jesus does not, at this point, explicitly come out and say that, “There is no other way to God,” it is most certainly implied. This was an offensive idea at the time. How could this human being be the gate to God, through which we must go to be saved? How could the finite lead to the infinite? Today, the passage is still offensive, but for another reason. Our modern times are aghast at Jesus’ seeming arrogance. What makes Him so special? Why can’t the pasture of God have many gates? Why can we not get to God by following any of the multitude of great spiritual teachers like Ghandi, Mohammed, and others? Why can we not come to know God just as well through other ways?

I will dedicate my entire sermon next week to discussing the radical claims that Jesus makes about how we know God and how they are utterly unique in the history of the world, but suffice it for our purposes for today to say that, if, as Paul told Timothy, there is indeed only one God and only one mediator between God and humanity, the man Christ Jesus, then we are constrained by how things actually are and we are not free to say anything we want to about how to get to God or place other religious leaders on the same level as God in flesh, Jesus Christ.

However, though Jesus is making a statement about the unique relation between Him and God and, in doing so, is marginalizing all others, I think that we need to look at it from a way that is more in line with how Jesus actually speaks. I don’t think that the main meaning of this passage is to exclude people, but to include them. Jesus is trying to give us a way to know what is really good and Godly. He knows all too well our tendency to do our own thing, our almost compulsive need to do things our own way. Knowing that this is what we tend to do, He is giving us a key to understanding God that we would never have been able to come up with on our own. Jesus is telling us that He is the gate to God, the door into the very heart of God. When we look at the man Jesus, we are not seeing just another prophet, nor just another great moral teacher, nor even a man who has God living inside Him, but a man who is God in His own very being.

Despite the fact that the church has claimed to believe this for two thousand years, we often lose sight of it and are led astray. When we celebrate Christmas, which is coming up just next month, we are pointing out to the world that God has not held Himself aloof from us and only loved us from a distance, but has loved us so very much that the infinite entered into the finite, the almighty became weak, the rich became poor, and the immortal died, all for our sake, to deliver us from bondage to sin and death. When we look at Jesus, we learn so much more about God than we would ever dare to believe without Him. We would always be in doubt about the love of God, we would never be able to have confidence that the promises of God are indeed rooted and grounded in the very unchangeable being of God. Jesus is the one place where we can see the face of God.

Jesus then turns and explains what He means by saying that He is the good shepherd. “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away-and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep.” Jesus is painting a picture of compassion that demonstrates His sincerity. He is not “in it for the money,” so to speak. He does not love us in order to have us return something to Him. He does not say, “There, I’ve loved you, now what are you going to do for me?” The laying down of Jesus’ life in the crucifixion was not an investment that we are called to give back and turn a profit but an act of sheer love.

This is an astonishing thing to do. The other great moral and spiritual leaders in history were not quite like this, though many of them were killed. When other leaders died, it was for a noble purpose, to be sure, but their deaths were important primarily because they galvanized their followers and made them strive harder to achieve the desired result. When Jesus died, the disciples scattered. If He was hoping for His death to inspire them, it was a failure. After Christ died, the disciples returned to their careers as fishermen, by their deeds turning their back on Jesus and the three years they spent with Him. But that was not the reason that Christ died. Christ died to achieve something that did not need human action to bring it to realization. Christ lived, died, was raised again, and ascended to heaven so that He might defeat the power of death. Yes, it is true, that we must be involved for that to be realized in our own lives, but we do not each achieve salvation for ourselves, we only participate in the one work of Christ as a body.

Now, Jesus comes out and says this. He emphasizes that His ministry is indeed sincere, that He is not a liar and has come to heal humanity, but only time would turn His words into actions. What did Jesus say? “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.” Talk is cheap, and, while it is easy to make claims like this, it is very difficult to make good on them, to actually do them. And yet, that is precisely what Jesus does. Nobody took Jesus’ life from Him, that is, nobody made Him die against His will. He saw it coming, and deliberately chose not to stop it when He might have done so. He died willingly, having both the power to lay His life down and to pick it up again.

Again, this is different than other leaders. When other leaders were assassinated, there is a sense in which they died willingly because they saw their cause as something worth dying for. On the other hand, when death came, it was unexpected and unwanted. Given a choice, surely those leaders would rather have remained alive. Also, after laying down their lives, others did not have the power to pick it up again. Again, if we want to interpret this idea in an overly spiritual way, we could say that, after someone like Ghandi was killed, the spirit and attitude of Ghandi was awakened and strengthened in those who followed him. If we look at a post-pentecost church, we could interpret the boldness of the apostles this way. However, it falls apart if we look at a post-crucifixion but pre-pentecost church. Christ was dead but His followers were not galvanized, they were miserable and hopeless. They became strong, not because they worked through their grief and redoubled their efforts for social justice, but because Jesus had been raised from the dead and the Holy Spirit had been poured out on them, uniting their ministry to the ministry of Christ.

All of that aside, however, to say that Jesus “picked up his life” simply by encouraging His disciples to carry on His work is not really adequate, especially in John’s telling of the life of Christ. In the end, how does John describe how Jesus Christ picks up His life again? Simply in spiritual terms? No. John declares with no uncertainty and no qualification, that Jesus, the man, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, was physically, bodily, raised from the dead. In no other Gospel do we have the author going to such pains to show that Jesus was indeed bodily raised from the dead. After all, it is in John where we have the story of “doubting Thomas,” who refused to believe that Jesus was really alive until he could touch Him and put his hands in the wounds that He endured during crucifixion. Jesus indeed appears and Thomas touches Him, not simply a spiritual reality, but a real body, raised from the dead.

As something of a climax, both to the themes in this passage and in due acknowledgement of today’s celebration of All Saints Day, where we remember those who have gone on to the Lord before us, I want to bring out one more facet of Jesus being the shepherd. Remember way back to over a year ago to last September, when we heard John the Baptist declare that Jesus was the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Do you remember that? Well, now Jesus is saying that He is the shepherd. Which is He? Is He a sheep or the one who looks after the sheep? He is both shepherd and sheep. As God, He is truly the shepherd who watches over us and guides us, bringing us back into fellowship when we go astray. However, as a man, He is indeed also a sheep along with us. In the man Jesus, God and man, shepherd and sheep, are bound up together so that we cannot separate the two without destroying what God has done.

In Jesus, we have many things that seem to be in contradiction tbat are held in tension. Jesus is both shepherd and sheep, He is both God and man. We also read in the New Testament that Jesus is both the great high priest and also the one great sacrifice that is truly acceptable to God. Jesus is both priest and sacrifice, offerer and offering. In Jesus, we see God’s unconditional “no!” to the sin of the world. His ministry exposed sin everywhere it lurked, in people, in cultures, in tradition, and in organizations. He spoke of the utter hostility that God has toward sin and sin’s crippling behavior in our lives. And yet, in spite of the condemnation that our sin deserves, God does not simply inflict the punishment it deserves on us, but does something absolutely astonishing. He takes our place. The wrath of God against the evil of sin, the absolute horror of divine condemnation is seen for what it is, not in our lives, nor in the lives of those we would say are particularly evil, but in the crucifixion of the very Son of God!

We say that the cross is the greatest sign of God’s love, but why? How could something so horrible be a sign of God’s unconditional love for us? Simply because He died? No. The crucifixion of the Son of God is the single most destructive and evil act ever committed by human beings. And yet God took that moment, the moment when all of humanity attempted to get rid of Him once and for all, and used it as the means by which we are bound to Him. We cannot separate ourselves from the love of God. Not even when we take God in flesh and nail Him to a cross can we be rid of God’s love for us because He will simply transform our ultimate rebellion into a sign of His ultimate love and compassion.

Jesus boldly went to die. The one who had freedom to lay down His life and then pick it up again did exactly that, not for His own sake, but for ours. We are not able to lay our lives down. Even if we die willingly, it is still a lamentable and difficult time that we wish could be otherwise. We face death because we have to; Jesus did because He chose to. And this gives us great hope today. Our loved ones have died, we will one day die. Without the Gospel, we would have no hope but to make the most of this life. And yet, in Jesus, we see a God who overturns death, defeating it. When Jesus picked up His life again, it was God declaring to death, “You will not have the final word over my people. They will live with me forever.”

And so, as we grieve those who have left the church militant and joined the church triumphant, and indeed, even as we weep as we are reminded that they are no longer by our side, let us rejoice that they have followed their Lord and Savior into death and they will follow Him in resurrection in glory. God has shown us that He will raise the dead by raising the man, Jesus Christ. Let us do all things, remembering that our God loves us so much that He has not considered even death to be too high a price to pay to redeem us. Let us pray.

AMEN