John 10:9

John 10:9. I am the door: by me if any one have entered in, he shall be saved, and shall enter in, and shall go out and find pasture. From the thought of the ‘thieves and robbers,' Jesus turns to mat of ‘a shepherd of the sheep.' And as entering by the door has been mentioned (John 10:1) as the first mark of a true shepherd, He emphatically repeats His former saying, ‘I am the door.' In John 10:7, however, as John 10:8 shows, it is of the release of the flock from the fold that we must chiefly think (and therefore the words ‘of the sheep' were naturally added). The repetition here introduces the other application of the thought. Whoever has entered through this Door (Christ) shall be saved, and shall enter in (to the fold), and shall go out and find pasture (for the flock over which he is placed in charge). The repetition of ‘enter,' it will be seen, involves no tautology: first the shepherd passes through the door, then goes into the heart of the enclosure to call to him his sheep. He goes in for the purpose of coming out to find pasturage for the flock that follows him from the fold. The chief difficulty lies in the interpretation of the words ‘he shall be saved.' The sudden introduction of this thought in the very midst of figurative language most consistently preserved (the door, enter in, go out and find pasture) at first appears strange. But the very place which the words hold supplies a key to their interpretation. We cannot content ourselves with saying that the whole parable is instinct with the thought of salvation in its general sense, and that what is present in every part may surely be expressed in one. It is true that in our Lord's parables we sometimes find a rapid transition from the sign to the thing signified; but such an intermixture of fact and figure as (on that supposition) is found here, we meet with nowhere else. Whatever difficulty may arise, the words must connect themselves with the imagery of the parable. The Chapter s of Ezekiel and Zechariah, referred to in the note on John 10:1, show at once how this is possible. We have before seen (see chap. John 3:3; John 7:39; John 8:33, etc.) how suddenly our Lord sometimes removes His hearers into a familiar region of Old Testament history or prophecy. To the teachers of the law, who were the hearers of most of the discourses related by John, the letter of the Old Testament was well known; and, moreover, it is very probable that in the discourses as delivered other words may have been added, not necessary to the completeness of the thought, but helpful to the understanding of the hearers. One of the connecting links between this chapter and the last is the evil wrought by unworthy and false shepherds; in this word suddenly introduced in the portraiture of a true shepherd we have vividly brought before us all that the prophets had said of the fate of the unworthy. Those shepherds who had no pity on the flock, but said, ‘Blessed be the Lord, for I am rich,' the soul of the prophet ‘loathed,' and he gave them to destruction (Zechariah 11:5; Zechariah 11:8; Zechariah 11:17). From all such penalty of unfaithfulness shall the true shepherd be ‘saved.' That He whose love to His flock assigns this punishment to the unworthy will reward the faithful, may not be expressed in the figure, but in the interpretation it holds the chief place: to such a shepherd of souls will Jesus give salvation. It should perhaps be said that (probably in consequence of the difficulty which the words ‘he shall be saved' seem to present) this verse is usually understood as relating to the sheep and not to the shepherds. It seems impossible, however, to compare the language here used with that of John 10:1-2 without coming to the conclusion that all the three are identical in subject.