The True King
I tell you the truth, the man who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in some other way, is a thief and a robber. The man who entered 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 not follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognise a stranger’s voice John 10:1-5
These verses are a kind of parable. In the very next verse John calls it ‘a figure of speech’ but one which His listeners couldn’t understand (10:6).
Chapter divisions can break the continuity of an argument in scripture. We think of our passage as a new thought because it begins a new chapter but it needs to be understood in the context of chapter 9. The dominating questions there were: is Jesus from God? Is He a prophet? Is He the Son of Man from Daniel 7 who will judge the nations? Is He even the Messiah?
So where do shepherds and sheep fit in? The Bible regularly pictured a king and his people as a shepherd with his sheep. This is the image Jesus chooses to explain His own claim to be the true King of Israel.
Jesus’ imagery would have been familiar to His listeners. The sheep pen was probably a large, communal enclosure where several flocks were herded for safety at night. The calling of the sheep in the morning could only happen because the sheep knew the voice of their own shepherd and would not follow a shepherd whose voice they were not familiar with. As each shepherd called, only his sheep would leave the communal pen. A watchman would take over protective duties for all the sheep overnight, camping himself at the only opening to the enclosure. The only other way to get in would be by climbing the enclosure walls. The overnight watchman would know each of the shepherds and they would be the only ones allowed into the enclosure in the morning.
So who would Jesus be thinking of when He speaks of a ‘thief … robber … stranger’? He might have had in mind the revolutionaries in His day who wanted to lead Israel into confrontation with the Romans. Others, particularly the house of Herod, were eager to submit to Rome as long as they could keep their own power and wealth. Ezekiel 34:1-31 is the strongest Old Testament passage that pictured God’s people as sheep. There the false shepherds were the nation’s leaders who not only failed to care for the sheep, but used the sheep to better themselves. They didn’t care for God’s people.
In our passage Jesus was saying you could tell the real King the way you could tell the real shepherd. Many in Jerusalem and wider claimed to be true leaders but only the one who came by the way God appointed had the right to such a claim. A leader could call followers to himself but the sign of the true King would be the kind of response he got. When people heard Jesus’ voice, they followed Him in love and trust. Jesus was saying the fact that people were hearing and following Him was a sign that God had sent Him.
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