Читать книгу New Daily Study Bible: The Gospel of John vol. 2 - William Barclay - Страница 36

THE DOOR TO LIFE

John 10:7–10

So Jesus said to them again: ‘This is the truth I tell you – I am the door of the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the door. If any man enter in through me, he will be saved, and he will go in and out, and he will find pasture. The thief comes only to kill and to steal and to destroy; I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.’

THE Jews did not understand the meaning of the story of the good shepherd. So Jesus, plainly and without concealment, applied it to himself.

He began by saying: ‘I am the door.’ In this parable, Jesus spoke about two kinds of sheepfolds. In the villages and towns themselves, there were communal sheepfolds where all the village flocks were sheltered when they returned home at night. These folds were protected by a strong door of which only the guardian of the door held the key. It was to that kind of fold Jesus referred in verses 2 and 3. But when the sheep were out on the hills in the warm season and did not return at night to the village at all, they were collected into sheepfolds on the hillside. These hillside sheepfolds were just open spaces enclosed by a wall. In them, there was an opening by which the sheep came in and went out; but there was no door of any kind. What happened was that at night the shepherd himself lay down across the opening, and no sheep could get out or in except over his body. In the most literal sense, the shepherd was the door.

That is what Jesus was thinking of when he said: ‘I am the door.’ Through him, and through him alone, we find access to God. ‘Through him’, said Paul, we ‘have access to . . . the Father’ (Ephesians 2:18). The writer to the Hebrews calls him ‘the new and living way’ (Hebrews 10:20). Jesus opens the way to God. Until Jesus came, people could think of God only as, at best, a stranger and as, at worst, an enemy. But Jesus came to show people what God is like, and to open the way to him. He is the door through whom alone entrance to God becomes possible.

To describe something of what that entrance to God means, Jesus uses a well-known Hebrew phrase. He says that through him we can go in and come out. To be able to come and go unmolested was the Jewish way of describing a life that is absolutely secure and safe. When people can go in and out without fear, it means that their country is at peace, that the forces of law and order are supreme, and that they enjoy perfect security. The leader of the nation is to be one who can bring them out and lead them in (Numbers 27:17). The person who is obedient to God is said to be blessed when he comes in and blessed when going out (Deuteronomy 28:6). A child is one who is not yet able by himself to go out and to come in (1 Kings 3:7). The psalmist is certain that God will keep him in his going out and in his coming in (Psalm 121:8). Once anyone discovers, through Jesus Christ, what God is like, a new sense of safety and of security enters into life. If life is known to be in the hands of a God like that, the worries and the fears are gone.