In it, our Lord indicates two major things.
Ezra Commentary
First, the answer to the question, "How can you tell a true Christian from a mere professor? First, "My sheep hear my voice. They believe that what he says is the truth, and they long to hear more. One of the things that has encouraged me through 34 years of ministry by the way, I began ministering here at Palo Alto exactly 34 years ago next Sunday , has been the hunger of people for the word of Jesus.
How it has drawn people, and ministered to them, and fed them, and how they love to hear it! What brings out such a large crowd as we have here today on a holiday Sunday when you could be out in the mountains or down at the beach, as most people are? It is the voice of Jesus. It is his insight into life, his understanding of the secrets of existence, his solution to the problems with which every one of us wrestle, his offer of deliverance from the inner bondage which we experience as we seek to live life and find ourselves continually trapped and enmeshed in wrong things, in hurt and anguish and pain.
It is the word of Jesus that brings you here, the word declared in the Scriptures and by the confirmation of the Spirit within. That is the first characteristic of a true sheep: One who longs to hear the word of God. He wants to know more. He reads and studies and learns and comes regularly to hear the word of God. Secondly, "I know them. They know that this word of deliverance, this word of healing, applies to them. They know they belong. They feel a Father's arms around them and a Father's heart beating in their concern and their care.
They know that there is a personal relationship established. They have become the "children of God. One of the marks of true believers is they always have a sense they belong to God, that they are his children, part of his family, and welcomed by the Lord Jesus himself. This is what Paul refers to in Romans 8, "his spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God," Romans 8: Then the third mark: This does not mean that they always do so instantaneously, without struggle.
All of us struggle at times with what our Lord says; all of us resist at times. Sometimes the word needs to be brought clearly and sharply into focus in our life. But the point of it is, once we see what Jesus wants, the attitude of a true sheep is, "Lord, even though it hurts, even though it costs, I will do what you say. I will follow you. This is the mark of a true sheep: He obeys what the Lord says. We do not follow the world, we follow the Lord.
The two are going in opposite directions. When the choice is made, it is a choice in favor of obeying the Lord Jesus. The Apostle Paul says the same thing in his letter to Timothy: There is divine recognition. But that is not all: Let him turn his back on what is wrong and obey and follow his Lord. That is the mark of a sheep. Anybody who is not doing that has no right to call himself or herself a Christian. If we are resisting the Lord in an area that we know to be right and if we insist on living that way we have no right to the title of Christian.
Why do sheep act this way? What has made the difference? Jesus tells us three things that he has done which make his sheep act as they do. It is not something he will do when the sheep do their part -- this is not a chronological succession here; it is an explanation of what lies behind the actions of sheep. Again, there are three things:. First, "I give unto them eternal life.
Why do we gather here on a Sunday morning, exerting a lot of effort to get here?
Some dress up, some don't, but we all come. There is nothing that says you have to wear a tie on Sunday morning to be acceptable to God. It is the life he gives, the peace, the joy, the love that we feel, the sense of inner serenity, the forgiveness, the sense of belonging and being guarded and kept and loved, that is what brings us. It is a quality of life which comes so continually to us that we would give up anything else rather than give that up. We are drawn because he keeps on giving us life, eternal life, God's kind of life.
Secondly, that quality of life has an element of assurance: It has a certainty of safety, of security about it. It can never end. We will never perish. Isn't that a marvelous word? We live in a world that is perishing, a world that is headed for judgment, for ultimate destruction.
People all around us are committed to ways of life that end at last in hell -- we shall never perish! What a wonderful word of assurance. It is a life that survives death, that even disdains death. Everyone in this congregation is headed for death, yet many among us are unafraid.
They do not look with terrible tragic hopelessness toward the future. They know that a way has been provided by which they will not even know death or sense it when it happens, but they will be ushered immediately into glory and life and truth. Thirdly, this is a life which is guarded, kept, protected by two unconquerable Beings.
Jesus said, "No one shall snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand. What a wonderful view that is of our safety! No one, not even we ourselves, can take us out of the Father's hand. I remember my patron saint, Dr. Ironside, telling about preaching once on this theme of the safety and security of the believer. A woman came up to him afterwards and said to him, "I don't agree with your doctrine.
He said to her, "Let me read you a verse that says that. You are going to read John Would they be safe for 40 years? What it literally says is, "They shall not ever perish forever. At this point he used to say, "A man convinced, against his will, is of the same opinion still, and a woman -- is sometimes as bad as a man.
You cannot convince anybody who does not wish to be convinced. But the verse is very clear, isn't it? We are kept by the sovereign power and love of God. We may struggle, we may hurt, we may go through times of dark, deep depression and times of doubt and despair, but we shall never perish if we have come to him and are part of his flock. The Jews took up stones again to stone him. Jesus answered them, "I have shown you many good works from the Father; for which of these do you stone me?
Many hold that Jesus never claimed to be God, but the Jews clearly understood this to be such a claim and their immediate reaction is to run and find stones that is what is suggested by the word John uses here , in order to put him to death. They did so because the Law directed that if a man claimed to be God he was a dangerous person; he might influence others to think he was God, so he must be eliminated from society, put to death by stoning.
On hearing these words of Jesus, the Jews thought, "Aha, we've got him now. He has made a claim that is so clear we don't even have to wait for the Romans to rule on this. That is what the Jews never learned. They believed that they were God's chosen people and that God had no use for any other nation. They believed that, at the best, other nations were designed to be their slaves, and, at the worst, that they were destined for elimination from the scheme of things.
But here Jesus is saying that there will come a day when all men will know him as their shepherd. Even the Old Testament is not without its glimpses of that day. Isaiah had that very dream. It was his conviction that God had given Israel for a light to the nations Isaiah At first sight it might seem that the New Testament speaks with two voices on this subject; and some passages of the New Testament may well trouble and perplex us a little. As Matthew tells the story, when Jesus sent out his disciples, he said to them: When the Syro-Phoenician woman appealed to Jesus for help, his first answer was that he was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel Matthew But there is much to be set on the other side.
Jesus himself stayed and taught in Samaria John 4: It was of a Roman centurion that Jesus said that he had never seen such faith in Israel Matthew 8: What is the explanation of the sayings which seem to limit the work of Jesus to the Jews? The explanation is in reality very simple. The ultimate aim of Jesus was the world for God. But any great commander knows that he must in the first instance limit his objectives. If he tries to attack on too wide a front, he only scatters his forces, diffuses his strength, and gains success nowhere.
In order to win an ultimately complete victory he must begin by concentrating his forces at certain limited objectives. That is what Jesus did. Had he gone here, there and everywhere, had he sent his disciples out with no limitation to their sphere of work, nothing would have been achieved. At the moment he deliberately concentrated on the Jewish nation, but his ultimate aim was the gathering of the whole world into his love. Egerton Young was the first missionary to the Red Indians. In Saskatchewan he went out and told them of the love of God. To the Indians it was like a new revelation.
When the missionary had told his message, an old chief said: We heard him in the thunder; we saw him in the lightning, the tempest and the blizzard, and we were afraid. So when you tell us that the great Spirit is our Father, that is very beautiful to us. The only possible unity for men is in their common sonship with God. In the world there is division between nation and nation; in the nation there is division between class and class.
There can never be one nation; and there can never be one class. The only thing which can cross the barriers and wipe out the distinctions is the gospel of Jesus Christ telling men of the universal fatherhood of God. And on that mistranslation the Roman Catholic Church has based the teaching that, since there is only one fold, there can only be one Church, the Roman Catholic Church, and that, outside it there is no salvation.
But the real translation beyond all possible doubt as given in the Revised Standard Version, is: It is not an ecclesiastical unity; it is a unity of loyalty to Jesus Christ. The fact that there is one flock does not mean that there can be only one Church, one method of worship, one form of ecclesiastical administration. But it does mean that all the different churches are united by a common loyalty to Jesus Christ. Men cannot hear without a preacher; the other sheep cannot be gathered in unless someone goes out to bring them in. Here is set before us the tremendous missionary task of the Church.
And we must not think of that only in terms of what we used to call foreign missions. If we know someone here and now who is outside his love, we can find him for Christ. The dream of Christ depends on us; it is we who can help him make the world one flock with him as its shepherd. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own free will.
I have full authority to lay it down, and I have full authority to take it again. I have received this injunction from my Father. God had given him a task to do, and he was prepared to carry it out to the end, even if it meant death. He was in a unique relationship to God which we can describe only by saying that he was the Son of God.
But that relationship did not give him the right to do what he liked; it depended on his doing always, cost what it may, what God liked. Sonship for him, and sonship for us, could never be based on anything except obedience. He never doubted that he must die; and equally he never doubted that he would rise again. The reason was his confidence in God; he was sure that God would never abandon him. All life is based on the fact that anything worth getting is hard to get. There is always a price to be paid. Scholarship can be bought only at the price of study; skill in any craft or technique can be bought only at the price of practice; eminence in any sport can be bought only at the price of training and discipline.
The world is full of people who have missed their destiny because they would not pay the price. No one can take the easy way and enter into glory or greatness; no one can take the hard way and fail to find these things. Jesus stresses this again and again. In the garden he bade his would-be defender put up his sword. If he had wished, he could have called in the hosts of heaven to his defence Matthew He made it quite clear that Pilate was not condemning him, but that he was accepting death John He was not the victim of circumstance.
He was not like some animal, dragged unwillingly and without understanding to the sacrifice. Jesus laid down his life because he chose to do so. It is told that in the First World War there was a young French soldier who was seriously wounded. His arm was so badly smashed that it had to be amputated. He was a magnificent specimen of young manhood, and the surgeon was grieved that he must go through life maimed.
So he waited beside his bedside to tell him the bad news when he recovered consciousness. When the lad's eyes opened, the surgeon said to him: Jesus was not helplessly caught up in a mesh of circumstances from which he could not break free. Apart from any divine power he might have called in, it is quite clear that to the end he could have turned back and saved his life. He did not lose his life: The Cross was not thrust upon him: Many of them said: Why do you listen to him? Can a man with an evil spirit open the eyes of the blind?
The people who listened to Jesus on this occasion were confronted with a dilemma which is for ever confronting men. Either Jesus was a megalomaniac madman, or he was the Son of God. There is no escape from that choice. If a man speaks about God and about himself in the way in which Jesus spoke, either he is completely deluded, or else he is profoundly right. The claims which Jesus made signify either insanity or divinity. How can we assure ourselves that they were indeed justified and not the world's greatest delusion?
We could cite witness after witness to prove that the teaching of Jesus is the supreme sanity. Thinking men and women in every generation have judged the teaching of Jesus the one hope of sanity for a mad world. His is the one voice which speaks God's sense in the midst of man's delusions. He healed the sick and fed the hungry and comforted the sorrowing. The madness of megalomania is essentially selfish.
It seeks for nothing but its own glory and prestige. But Jesus' life was spent in doing things for others. As the Jews themselves said, a man who was mad would not be able to open the eyes of the blind.
The undeniable fact is that millions upon millions of lives have been changed by the power of Jesus Christ. The weak have become strong, the selfish have become selfless, the defeated have become victorious, the worried have become serene, the bad have become good. It is not madness which produces such a change, but wisdom and sanity. The choice remains--Jesus was either mad or divine. No honest person can review the evidence and come to any other conclusion than that Jesus brought into the world, not a deluded madness, but the perfect sanity of God.
It was wintry weather, and Jesus was walking in the Temple precincts in Solomon's Porch. So the Jews surrounded him. If you really are God's Anointed One, tell us plainly. The works that I do in the name of my Father, these are evidence about me. But you do not believe because you are not among the number of my sheep. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. And I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them from my hand. John begins by giving us both the date and the place of this discussion.
The date was the Festival of the Dedication. This was the latest of the great Jewish festivals to be founded. Its date is the 25th of the Jewish month called Chislew which corresponds with our December. This Festival therefore falls very near our Christmas time and is still universally observed by the Jews.
The origin of the Festival of the Dedication lies in one of the greatest times of ordeal and heroism in Jewish history. There was a king of Syria called Antiochus Epiphanes who reigned from to B.
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He was a lover of all things Greek. He decided that he would eliminate the Jewish religion once and for all, and introduce Greek ways and thoughts, Greek religion and gods into Palestine. At first he tried to do so by peaceful penetration of ideas. Some of the Jews welcomed the new ways, but most were stubbornly loyal to their ancestral faith. It was in B.
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In that year Antiochus attacked Jerusalem. It was said that 80, Jews perished, and as many were sold into slavery. It became a capital offence to possess a copy of the law, or to circumcise a child; and mothers who did circumcise their children were crucified with their children hanging round their necks. The Temple courts were profaned; the Temple chambers were turned into brothels; and finally Antiochus took the dreadful step of turning the great altar of the burnt-offering into an altar to Olympian Zeus, and on it proceeded to offer swine's flesh to the pagan gods.
It was then that Judas Maccabaeus and his brother arose to fight their epic fight for freedom. The altar was rebuilt and the robes and the utensils were replaced, after three years of pollution. It was to commemorate that purification of the Temple that the Feast of the Dedication was instituted.
Judas Maccabaeus enacted that "the days of the dedication of the altar should be kept in their season from year to year, by the space of eight days, from the five and twentieth day of the month of Chislew, with gladness and joy" 1 Maccabees 4: For that reason the festival was sometimes called the Festival of the Dedication of the Altar, and sometimes the Memorial of the Purification of the Temple.
1.1. The Meaning of Christ
But as we have already seen, it had still another name. It was often called the Festival of Lights. There were great illuminations in the Temple; and there were also illuminations in every Jewish home. In the window of every Jewish house there were set lights. According to Shammai, eight lights were set in the window, and they were reduced each day by one until on the last day only one was left burning. According to Hillel, one light was kindled on the first day, and one was added each day until on the last day eight were burning.
We can see these lights in the windows of every devout Jewish home to this day. These lights had two significances. First, they were a reminder that at the first celebrating of the festival the light of freedom had come back to Israel. Second, they were traced back to a very old legend. It was told that when the Temple had been purified and the great seven branched candlestick re-lit, only one little cruse of unpolluted oil could be found. This cruse was still intact, and still sealed with the impress of the ring of the High Priest.
By all normal measures, there was only oil enough in that cruse to light the lamps for one single day. But by a miracle it lasted for eight days, until new oil had been prepared according to the correct formula and had been consecrated for its sacred use.
So for eight days the lights burned in the Temple and in the homes of the people in memory of the cruse which God had made to last for eight days instead of one. It is not without significance that it must have been very close to this time of illumination that Jesus said: John also gives us the place of this discussion, Solomon's Porch. The first court in the Temple precincts was the Court of the Gentiles. Along two sides of it ran two magnificent colonnades called the Royal Porch and Solomon's Porch.
They were rows of magnificent pillars, almost forty feet high and roofed over.
Bible Commentaries
People walked there to pray and meditate; and Rabbis strolled there as they talked to their students and expounded the doctrines of the faith. It was there that Jesus was walking, because, as John says with a pictorial touch, "it was wintry weather. As Jesus walked in Solomon's Porch the Jews came to him. Tell us plainly, are you or are you not God's promised Anointed One? There were those who genuinely wished to know. They were on an eager tip-toe of expectation.
But there were others who beyond a doubt asked the question as a trap. They wished to inveigle Jesus into making a statement which could be twisted either into a charge of blasphemy with which their own courts could deal or a charge of insurrection with which the Roman governor would deal. Jesus' answer was that he had already told them who he was.
True, he had not done so in so many words; for, as John tells the story, Jesus' two great claims had been made in private. To the Samaritan woman he had revealed himself as the Messiah John 4: But there are some claims which do not need to be made in words, especially to an audience well-qualified to perceive them. There were two things about Jesus which placed his claim beyond all doubt whether he stated it in words or not.
First, there were his deeds. It was Isaiah's dream of the golden age: Every one of Jesus' miracles was a claim that the Messiah had come. Second, there were his words. Profound intimacy bespeaks profound love. This Gospel makes it clear that Jesus sees to the depth of the heart, and it is no wonder that the sheep perceive that and follow him. Eternal life in this Gospel is not mere longevity, but is rather life lived in the presence of God.
However, eternal life also involves longevity. This cannot mean that Christians will not suffer physical death; by the time of this Gospel, many Christians have been martyred. The security that Jesus offers is not security as the world understands security.
What they will not lose is their relationship to the Father and the Son or the salvation that relationship brings. Ancient manuscripts differ, making this a difficult verse to translate.
However, it is possible that Jesus is saying that the sheep that the Father has entrusted to him are truly a precious gift, greater than any other gift—a gift to be jealously guarded so that no one can snatch it. These are inflammatory words. In fact, if Jesus is not the Messiah, they are blasphemous words.
At the heart of this Gospel is the unity between the Father and the Son. Jesus prays that his disciples become a part of this unity. Stoning is the prescribed penalty specified by the Torah for serious sins Leviticus However, it involves a judicial process involving witnesses, and requires the witnesses to the sin to cast the first stone Deuteronomy However, in this instance, the Jewish leaders—men committed to insuring that people observe the Torah—violate the Torah by acting as a mob.
However, they fail to kill Jesus. When his hour comes, he will give up his life willingly. The ASV, which is also in the public domain due to expired copyrights, was a very good translation, but included many archaic words hast, shineth, etc. The Saint Andrew Press, Bauckham, Richard in Van Harn, Roger ed. The Gospels Grand Rapids: Thomas Nelson Publishers, John , Vol, 25A Nashville: Brown, Raymond, The Anchor Bible: The Gospel of John Grand Rapids: Clinton; and Newsome, James D.
Westminster John Knox Press, Trinity Press International,