CHRIST AND OUR HOMELESSNESS

"I AM the Door: by Me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture." — St. John x. 9.

A Door forms an extremely significant symbol. It may be open, or it may be shut; and, if it be shut, there is all the difference in the world between being on one side of it or on the other. The opening and shutting of certain doors, such as those of the Temple of Janus in Rome, have been attended with great solemnity. Artists have lavished their highest skill on doors, and significant legends have been engraved over them. The door is the crucial point; pass the door and you are all right; be turned back at the door and you are all wrong. On the duty of keeping some doors open that are too often shut, and also on the duty of keeping some doors shut that are too often open, much might be written. The subject is a wide and a fascinating one. The idea evidently appealed specially to the mind of our Lord, for He makes no less than three, different uses of the symbol to express the relation between Himself and His people. Sometimes He is inside the door, as where He says, "To him that knocketh it shall be opened," or in the parable of the Virgins, where "the door was shut." Sometimes He is outside the door. "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock; if any man will hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me." But sometimes, as here, He is Himself the Door, and this is His most significant use of the figure. "I am the Door: by Me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture."

The Occasion.

As usual, the circumstances under which the words were spoken shed considerable light on their meaning. In the previous chapter we read of a work of healing performed by our Lord — the restoration of sight to a blind man. The gratitude which this man showed towards his Healer brought him into conflict with the authorities of the synagogue, with the result that they "cast him out" — shut their doors upon him. On his meeting Jesus shortly afterwards, our 'Lord asked him, "Dost thou believe on the Son of God?" It needs but a few words to show him that Jesus is indeed that Son of God; he says, "Lord, I believe," and worships Him. The words about the sheepfold come almost immediately afterwards, and probably refer in the first instance to the case of this man. From the religious point of view lie is homeless, outcast, excommunicate. What Jesus offers him, accordingly, is a new and better home. He invites this man who has been "turned out of doors" to enter the Door of the kingdom — to accept Himself.

Many have been comforted by the assurance that Christ’s door is open to them though other doors be shut. At the degradation of Savonarola prior to his execution, the Bishop of Vasona said, "I separate thee from the Church militant and triumphant." "From the Church militant," corrected Savonarola, "not from the Church triumphant. The latter is not in thy hands." At the deposition of John Macleod Campbell by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the young man’s father said, "I am not afraid for my son. Though his brethren cast him out, the Master whom he serves will not forsake him."

Christ the Door.

This figure of Christ the Door is apt to be obscured by the still greater figure of Christ the Good Shepherd. From His picture of the sheepfold He selects these two images, and applies them successively to Himself. The relation of the two to each other may indeed be closer than we are apt to think. "Door" and "Shepherd" are not such mutually exclusive words as they appear to us. A well-known traveller in Palestine has told how he once entered into conversation with a shepherd at work near a sheepfold. Many things he learned from him, but the best of all came unexpectedly. Every feature the traveller expected to see was there, excepting one. "Here," he said, "is the fold; there are the sheep; this is the doorway; but where is the door?" "Door?" asked the shepherd. "I am the door! I lie across the entrance at night. No sheep can pass out, no wolf come in, except over my body." It is better for our present purpose, however, to take the two figures apart than to press them as the component parts of a single parable. We do not, it is true, find it easy to discover to which figure some of the verses apply. None of the attempts to divide the allegory sharply into two have been quite successful, or need be repeated here. It seems enough to observe that Jesus saw the suggestiveness of both the figures Door and Shepherd, Door being the more obvious and general figure, Shepherd lending itself to greater elaboration. It is therefore the Shepherd-figure rather than the Door-figure that He treats in detail. With regard to the Door He does not say much, yet He says enough. The essence of what He says is contained in this one verse.

Its central lesson is that Christ is the one Door, the one entrance into the kingdom of heaven; that it is by Him and by Him alone that men can enter their Father’s home. There is no room for the thief and robber, the formalist or hypocrite, who climb over the wall instead of entering by the gate. If the one Door be open, it matters little what others remain shut; but, conversely, if that Door be shut, it matters little what others are open. Christianity must start from Christ. It is impossible to teach it apart from Him. Not without significance was the temple-veil rent at His death, opening forever a door into the Holiest of all. The very panels of a common door are often arranged so as to produce the figure of a Cross. It is said that this originated with a guild of Carpenters, who. took as their emblem the Cross on the Door, with the words of our text as motto. The symbolism, at all events, is a true one. Christ and His Cross are inseparable. Whoso enters by the Door must take up the Cross. Dr. Elder Cumming’s poem expresses the same idea —

Hast thou ne’er seen the Cross upon the Door?

     Yes! it is on thine own!

Look, even now, across th’ accustomed floor.

     Thou deemest so well known!

 

You hare not noticed it? The Cross unseen.

     Though on the Door it stands?

Large, clear, in full relief, as it had been

     Carved there by reverent hands?

.          .          .          .          .          .          .          .

O Man! could’st thou have thought it possible

     That this thing could have been?

The Cross so large, so plain, so close to thee.

     And yet so long unseen?

Yes — the Door that we enter must be the Door with the Cross upon it. We may find it a strait gate; we may have to leave much behind as we go in. But it is the one Door into the home of our Father. And the Door is Christ Himself.

We have called this theme "Christ and our homelessness" because what He offers us here is neither more nor less than a Home. The crossing of the threshold is an entrance in to life: — life on a higher plane — life hid with Christ in God.

The chief benefits of such a life, as described here, we may define as Refuge, Freedom, and Nurture.

1. A Home of Refuge.

"By Me if any man enter in, he shall be saved." That is the first and most obvious blessing. It is to a friendly door that we look for refuge in a storm. Readers of The Pirate will remember the anger of the hospitable Shetlanders at the bare idea of keeping a door bolted against a stranger who sought its protection from the tempest. The idea of refuge or sanctuary is one of those most deeply rooted in the feelings of mankind. We find the rudiments of it even in savage peoples, such as the natives of Central Australia and the North American Indians. Among more advanced nations certain places, such as the tombs of kings, were regarded as asylums where a fugitive might find safety. We find the erection of Cities of Refuge commanded in the Mosaic law, and we find something resembling them in both Greece and Rome. But especially in the Church of Christ has the idea of refuge or sanctuary found favour. Churches were long regarded as places where the offender was safe, at least till his case could be fairly tried. His capture or molestation within the sacred walls was deemed an act of impiety. No doubt the practice was often abused. Criminals of the worst description were sometimes harboured, who could pursue their evil courses undeterred by the fear of consequences. Yet, as Dean Milman well remarks, "there is something sublime in the first notion of asylum." We cannot wonder at the association of refuge with God Himself, as One who is at once strong, just, and loving. "God is our refuge and strength," says the 46th Psalm, "a very present help in trouble." And when our Saviour calls Himself the Door, He gives refuge as one of the first benefits enjoyed by those who enter. "By Me if any man enter in, he shall be saved." Saved from what will most harm him; saved from the dangers outside; saved from evil men and evil spirits; saved from himself and from his sins. Such hymns as Charles Wesley’s "Jesus, Lover of my soul," and Toplady’s "Rock of ages, cleft for me," breathe the instinctive cry for refuge and safety, for deliverance from peril, for salvation from sin. This is what Jesus offers. Whatever else He is, He is the Saviour — the One who seeks and saves and rescues. The primary idea of a home is that of a roof to shelter us, a protection from danger. These things we have in Christ.

                      O call Thy wanderer home;

To that dear home, safe in Thy wounded side,

Where only broken hearts their sin and shame may hide.

2. A Home of Freedom.

"By Me if any man enter in, he shall. . . go in and out." The allusion is in the first place to the door of the sheepfold. But the words may be used with a wider reference, and may remind us of the liberty wherewith Christ makes us free. At first sight the idea of "going in and out" may seem inconsistent with what was said before. We must be either inside or outside the gate of mercy. But the inconsistency is only apparent. When the door has once been opened to the homeless, he is free to go out as well as to come in. He does not need to knock a second time; he is made free of the house and can enter it when he chooses; even when out he is no longer homeless. The door is not shut to him on the inside, any more than on the outside; the home is no prison. It is "hot to the cloister-life that Christ calls His people. His service is perfect freedom. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." Jesus found bondage and slavery everywhere. Not merely was the country of His birth in subjection to a foreign yoke; but its citizens were enslaved in bonds that they had forged for themselves. No one was free. One class was governed by its traditions and prejudices; another had intolerable burdens laid on it by priestcraft; another was in a worse bondage through being cast off by the rest of society: all were in that deeper slavery that sin itself must cause, when no way of escape from it is seen. From all this Christ came to make men free. Not by force, not by political agitation, not even by schemes of social reform, but by His Spirit working from within. He led men into the free, fresh atmosphere of God’s own truth. This sense of freedom we find in all the writers of the New Testament; freedom from the curse of the law; freedom from the burden of their sins; freedom given them by Christ Ability to "go in and out," then, is one of the chief privileges of the Christian life. It is not inconsistent with this to say that it may make that life harder to live. To have our conversation on earth, yet in heaven; our affection set on things around, yet on things above; our life open with men in the world, yet hid with Christ in God; the task is no easy one. Yet the true Christian is the man who can go in and out. He is the same man in his religion as in his business. He can come out from the inner sanctuary of his life, fortified by all he has learned there, and he can re-enter it with all the experience he has gained in the world of affairs. He obeys and is judged by a law, but it is the "law of liberty."

3. A Home of Nurture.

"By Me if any man enter in, he shall. . . find pasture." He shall find pasture without as well as within; perhaps more without than within. But his power to find it and to feed on it will depend on what he has gained within the Door. What Christ offers us, as we have seen already, is, briefly, a home; and a home gives nurture as well as protection. In the home we not only live; wegrow. And while that on which we feed may come from many sources, the home is the centre of all. We get ideas from this source and from that; but our impressions are steadied, focused given their due perspective and proportion, under the roof which shelters us. Of course this is not always so; there is bad home influence as well as good. But we are speaking of the ideal; and the home Christ offers is such. We may feel that the figure of the Door has retreated, so to speak, into the background. But this is only because it has opened the way to so much more. Implicitly it contains a great deal beyond itself. Admit a man within your door, and you have gone far towards admitting him to your fireside and your table. The beginning and the fruition of membership in Christ are symbolically represented in some churches by the font at the western entrance and the Holy Table at the eastern end. But both are under the same roof, and represent only different stages in the Christian life. Admission within the door leads on to nurture and fellowship. The life in Christ is a life rich in spiritual blessing and progress. We come to find riches in it of which we never dreamed when we first embraced it. It is a growth, whose end is potentially contained in its beginning, as the flower and fruit are in the seed. "You may say," writes Marcus Dods, "you are saved when you fairly put yourself into Christ’s hand, but you must also remember that then your salvation is only beginning, and that you cannot, in the fullest sense, say you are saved until Christ has wrought in you a perfect conformity to Himself." Christ does not develop here the idea of nurture. It is given fuller expression under the figure of the Bread of Life. Here it is only mentioned and no more. We get, as it were, only a glimpse through the Door into the life within, with all its privileges and benefits. But the glimpse should be enough to inspire us with confidence, and to encourage us to enter if we have not done so before.

Christ the Door, then, is Christ as the entrance to the Christian life. He is the Alpha as He is the Omega; He meets us at the very beginning. What He offers us is a home: a centre from which to live, a standpoint from which to view everything else. His only condition is that we do enter the Door; that we take our stand inside and not outside. For if we do, though we may go in and out, and find pasture without as well as within, we are saved, and shall be saved from the evil both in ourselves and in the world.

Let us not be afraid to make a beginning. True, the beginning is not all; many have begun to build and have not been able to finish. The worst enemies of Christianity have been those who first espoused and then deserted its cause; Judas, who betrayed his Lord; Demas, who loved this present world. We are warned not to begin without counting the cost But with many of us the danger rather lies in the direction of never beginning at all; and while the man who begins may not finish, the man who never begins cannot. If the road to hell be paved with good intentions, the road to heaven is paved with them too. There is truth in the proverb, "Well begun, half done." Enter, then, by the Door. Enter, and you will never regret the step you took. Enter, and you will be led on from grace to grace and from strength to strength. There is no good to be got from hesitating on the threshold; you must be on one side or other. Choose you this day whom you will serve. Now is the accepted time. The Door that stands open to-day may, for one or other of many causes which we cannot foresee, be shut to us tomorrow.

"Would a man ’scape the rod?"

     (Rabbi ben Karshook saith)

"See that he turn to God

     The day before his death."

 

"Ay, could a man enquire

     When it shall come!" I say.

(The Rabbi’s eye shoots fire)

"Then let him turn to-day!"