John 10:1-10

William F. Schnell

April 26, 2009

   As Neil Young put it, "In the field of opportunity it’s plowin’ time again!"  After 14 years the Schnell family is finally back into vegetable gardening.  A patch of ph neutral, not-so-fertile but perfectly situated ground has been cleared for the planting of corn, beans, vegetables, fruit and even some nuts—all the stuff we love to eat fresh in the summer and put by for the balance of the year.  We love good food that you cannot buy at any market.  Unfortunately, so do the deer, raccoons, possums, groundhogs, rabbits, foxes, skunks, squirrels, turkeys, coyotes, myriad songbirds and innumerable other critters that can be found upon our property at any given time or another.

   I love wildlife, until it gets into my garden.  The last time we had a big vegetable garden in Milwaukee, I would walk among the sweet corn feeling the ends for the plumpness that signaled full ripeness.  I would yell to Nancy, "Cancel everything for tomorrow because we are putting up the corn."  Translation: we are picking, shucking, parboiling, cutting kernels and bagging corn for the freezer.  Wouldn’t you know that very night would be the time when all the neighborhood raccoons and their extended families would show up for a sweet corn festival at our place?  Nancy would wake me with a shout and I’d run out into the backyard in my underwear, pick up a Tonka truck out of the sandbox and hurl it into the corn patch in the hopes of crippling a raccoon as an example for all the other masked bandits.

   I can’t stand critters in my garden.  So how am I going to keep them out of our new one?  In a word: landmines.  We are going to lay a perimeter around the entire garden and, for backup, call in air strikes against the crafty ones who find a way through.  Seriously, we need a fence.  Not a permanent fence which would require a permit from the city, because we wouldn’t want to bother the city, but a super effective temporary fence with one way in and one way out.  I’m talking about a fence a groundhog can’t dig under, a raccoon can’t climb over, a rabbit can’t squeeze through and a deer won’t want to get near.

   Believe it or not, I think I have all that figured out.  What I haven’t figured out yet is the gate.  After all, I can’t make the garden so secure that I can’t get in and out myself.  A fence, by nature, is designed to keep things out.  A gate is the one component of a fence designed to allow ingress and egress.  The fewer gates you have the more secure your fence.  Ideally, you put in a single gate that you take special precautions to secure.  Then you get the best of both worlds--coming and going by invitation only.

   Today we are beginning a four sermon series on the Gospel of John.  In our text for this morning Jesus, speaking figuratively as he almost always does, likens himself to a gate.  I don’t know if that made any sense to you when I read our New Testament lesson for this morning.  If not, you are in bountiful company.  The Gospel writer says, Jesus used this figure of speech, but they did not understand what he was telling them (Verse 6).  In order to understand this text we have to consider what precipitated it and what concluded it.

   Jesus’ remarks are precipitated by a controversy he is having with the religious powers-that-be.  It is a Sabbath day and Jesus has come across a blind man.  Jesus spits on the ground, makes some mud, puts it on the man’s eyes and tells him to go wash in a nearby pool.  The blind man does as he is told and, viola, his blind eyes are opened.  This creates quite a stir, which gets the attention of some religious legalists called the Pharisees.  Being the legalistic extremists they are, the Pharisees could care less that the man was healed.  What concerns them is that Jesus violated the law against working on the Sabbath when he spit on the ground, made the mud and put it on the man’s eyes.

   Isn’t that ridiculous?  How ironic that those who presume to be the spiritual guides of God’s people should be so blind themselves.  No wonder they are so threatened by Jesus’ spiritual authority and popularity, and no wonder they are out to get Jesus.  Jesus knows this, of course, and responds to their challenge in our text.  "I tell you the truth, the man who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber (Verse 1).

   Throughout the Scriptures, indeed in our Call to Worship, we are referred to as the sheep of God’s pasture.  The Lord is our shepherd.  Sheep need a shepherd because, frankly, sheep are not too bright.  They will walk right into a pool of water to get a drink and drown as their wooly coats soak up water and weigh them down.  Sheep are vulnerable to predators.  They don’t have big, sharp teeth.  Many do not have horns.  They cannot run very fast or very far.  They can’t climb trees or burrow into holes.  Left to their own devices, sheep don’t last very long.

   Sheep need a shepherd, especially one well-equipped with a rod and staff—a rod to drive off predators and a staff to pull them out of the drink when they fall in.  They need a shepherd with access to a sheep pen where they can bed down for the night in safety.  A typical sheep pen was like my garden enclosure design with its single gate: one way in and one way out.  Anyone seeking to climb in any other way is up to no good, sort of like a robber breaking into your house through a window instead of using the door like typical family and friends.

   The Pharisees fancy themselves as shepherds of God’s flock.  The only problem is that the sheep of God’s fold are not drawn to the Pharisees like they are to drawn to Jesus.  As a result they have to steal sheep through religious intimidation, guilt and coercion—sort of like they are beating Jesus up for healing a man on the Sabbath, which is a violation of one of 619 religious rules and regulations they had come up with to structure daily life.

   No wonder the people are not naturally drawn to the Pharisees as they are to Jesus.  Consider the formerly blind man whom Jesus healed.  The Pharisees badger him to discredit Jesus as a sinner.  At first he politely declines.  "Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know.  One thing I do know.  I was blind but now I see" (9:25).  Upon further badgering the healed man takes a stand for Jesus. "We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly man who does his will. Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind.  If this man were not from God, he could do nothing."  To this they replied, "You were steeped in sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!"  And they threw him out" (9:31-34).

   The Pharisees threw the man out of the synagogue.  As a result, the man becomes yet another follower of Jesus.  Jesus said, "The man who enters by the gate is the shepherd of his sheep.  The watchman opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice.  He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.  When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice.  But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice" (Verses 2-6).

   I had a political science professor in college named Dr. Martin.  Dr. Martin kept a flock of sheep for a hobby.  A couple students and I went to his homestead to see his sheep.  They were very afraid of us.  We called them like we would call a pet but they kept their distance.  When Dr. Martin called them, it was a different story.  He was their meal ticket, and they knew it.  He didn’t have to drive his sheep.  He just called them and they lined up behind him and followed him through the gate from pen to pasture and back.

   The sheep of God’s pasture naturally follow Jesus through the gate because he is the Lord is their shepherd.  The Pharisees avoid the gate and climb into the pen by another way.  They have to steal sheep because the sheep will not naturally follow them.  Jesus repeats this for emphasis by switching metaphors a bit.  Therefore Jesus said again, "I tell you the truth, I am the gate for the sheep.  All who ever came before me were thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them.  I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved.  He will come in and go out, and find pasture (Verses 7-9).

   This metaphor is really not as strange as it sounds.  In those days shepherds had sheep pens located in the fields—perhaps a cave or a makeshift structure—to keep from having to herd the sheep long distances between pasture and pen.  You will recall from the birth narratives of Jesus, And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night (Luke 2:8).  Again, all pens had just one opening so that a shepherd could situate himself in the opening and keep watch during the night-- could guard against predators and thieves sneaking in and sheep sneaking out. In this way the shepherd became a human gate.

   Jesus says twice: "I am the gate"—the gate through which the sheep go in the morning to find pasture and still waters, and through which they go at night to find security and protection.  Jesus is the gate that provides and protects.  Jesus has the best interests of the sheep at heart, in contrast to the thieves who avoid the gate and break into the pen by other ways.  As Jesus concludes, The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full (Verse 10).

   Somebody once asked me in a "Question from the Pew" what my favorite text of scripture is.  That is a hard question, because there are so many texts that speak powerfully to me.  But I had to pick one, and this verse is the one I picked.  As a pastor, whose title comes from the Latin word by the same spelling meaning "shepherd," it really clarifies my role for me.  My calling is to help people live life more abundantly, which is not to be equated with legalistically maintaining some rigid code of religious rules and regulations.  Indeed, as in the case of Jesus we are considering today, sometimes the two functions are diametrically opposed.

   One time in the first church I served a fellow whom I had never before met came storming into my office with a Bible in one hand and his wife in the other.  He had to practically drag her in because she clearly did not want to be there.  He slammed the Bible down on my desk and said, "Show her in there where it says that God hates divorce."  That particular quote happens to be found in the book of Malachi, but I didn’t go there because I wasn’t interested in browbeating this woman with the Bible.

   As it turned out, she had already been beaten enough by her overbearing husband with the violent temper.  She had had enough and wanted out with her two daughters.  When I found that out I had a couple questions for that fellow: "How would you feel if someone abused your daughters?  How do you think our heavenly Father feels about you abusing his precious daughter?  I don’t care what the legal status of your marriage is, you have broken your marriage covenant and violated your marriage vows to love, honor and cherish your wife.  You have destroyed your marriage and if she wants the state to recognize that it is fine with me."

   I would hope my daughter would make the same decision if she was in that woman’s situation.  I did not bring my children into this world for them to have messed up lives.  I want them to live life to the fullest and that is exactly what our heavenly Father wants for his children.  That is why he sent his Son, according to the Son himself.  I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.  Jesus also said: I am the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6).  If you are interested in the life, Jesus is the way to it and the truth about it.  Jesus is the gateway to life—"The Lifegate" as the title our message puts it.

   I hope you will never let me or anyone else lay some legalistic religious rap on you that burdens you down and messes up your life.  I hope you will never burden yourself with an unbearable load of guilt, or a self-destructive compulsion or anything else that messes up your life.  I hope you will never settle for less than the good, full and abundant life God created you to have here as a foretaste of what you can expect hereafter in the kingdom of heaven.

   That is exactly where the Good Shepherd wants to lead us.  Let us follow in faith and accept God’s gift of life through him—"The Lifegate."