I Am the Gate
John 10:7-9
So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture.
My Emmaus prayer partner recently gave me a book entitled “The God We Can Know” by Rob Fuquay, a senior paster of St. Luke’s UMC of Indianapolis. The book is about knowing God better by seeking out and better understanding the “I AM” passages of Jesus, like the scripture verses above. Fuquay makes this following statement, “Deep inside of every human heart is a desire to be loved. We want to know we matter and that someone genuinely cares about us.” What a profound statement! Rob then goes on to use the movie, “Trading Places” as a way to better understand our God.
If you are not familiar with “Trading Places,” the movie’s key character is Dan Akroyd. He plays a snobbish investor who gets scammed by his own bosses. They cancel his credit cards, take his identity away and they even pay-off the butler to not recognize him. His only hope ends up being a prostitute played by Jamie Lee Curtis, where they meet up in jail. She chooses to believe in Dan’s story and promptly gives all her monies to Dan so that he can spin it back into gold in the stock market. Her tag line, when Akroyd asks why she is willing to nurse him back to health is “I’m protecting my investment.”
What an analogy, comparing Jesus to a prostitute is NOT the one of the best of images here, but the movie plot does allow us a glance into what Jesus is saying above. Jesus calls himself,” the gate,” and in some translations the word “door” is used. A sheep gate was the doorway to sheep pens often built alongside buildings in a town. The types of enclosures were used to keep thieves out and the owner (not usually the shepherd) would charge rent for the pen’s usage. The shepherd paying the rent would have access to the gate. You were considered a thief if you chose not to go through this locked gate. Why would one climb over, but to steal a sheep for monetary purposes? The person who walked through the gate would be a person who owned or kept the sheep.
Now let us look at the other translation of “door.” When shepherds were out in the field, they used sheepfolds, structures of walls with no visible door, just an entrance. The shepherds would lie down to block the entranceway at night and keep predators out. So, Jesus calls himself this name to show us He comes to protect us and that He loves us, and that He is always “There!”
How wonderful to have a shepherd watching over us; thank God, for giving us the Word made Flesh! Thank Jesus for being your protector.
Karen Horton
