Tag Archives: First Peter

How to Be a True Shepherd

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How does one know a good shepherd from a bad one? In the opening verses of John 10, Jesus says a good shepherd enters by the gate and no other way. The gatekeeper recognizes the good shepherd and opens the gate, while bad shepherds won’t be recognized so that their only recourse is to try breaking in by other ways. Jesus goes on to say that the sheep recognize the right shepherd’s voice and that is why they follow him through the gate. They will not follow the voice of a stranger.

John then says that the people did not understand this figure of speech, so Jesus tries again. This time he says that he is the gate, which actually seems to add to the confusion. The gatekeeper (whoever he or she was) disappears, no longer needed if Jesus himself is the gate. Through this gate, the sheep come in and out and by so doing, find pasture. When Jesus says that everyone who came before were thieves and bandits, the implication is that they pretended to be the gate but weren’t. What makes Jesus the true gate? Jesus says that he came so that the sheep can have life abundantly while thieves and bandits only come to kill.

Does this clarify things? Not altogether, but maybe it’s easier to understand this passage in John if we don’t try to put all the ducks in an ordered row. Throughout, we have an emphasis on the voice. The voice of another person is important to humans, but it is helpful to try to empathize with animals, the sheep in this case. Sheep get acclimated to a certain voice, or maybe several, and respond to those voices, but once habituated, don’t trust a strange voice. The tone of voice is important. The intonation of words is important to us humans, but comprehending the actual words can be distracting to the subtleties of the tone of voice. Animals have only the intonation to go on, so all of their attention is directed to that. This is why we talk to our pets with exaggerated tones to get our feelings across to them.

Jesus says that the right voice is a voice offering life, abundant life. He also says that the shepherd with the right, familiar voice, will lead the sheep out to pasture, which is where they feed. This promise of feeding echoes Jesus’ earlier promise, after he had fed the multitude in the wilderness, to give his people the bread from Heaven. Not only that, but Jesus discloses that he himself is the bread from Heaven that feeds them. This is an example of how a few basic themes in John’s Gospel keep circling round in different ways to enrich these themes.

The liturgical setting for this Gospel reading is the middle of Eastertide, which places the discourse of the Good Shepherd in the context of the Paschal Mystery. The Paschal Mystery is also, of course, the context for the whole Gospel of John. The crucified and risen Christ is now speaking to us when Jesus offers to shepherd us out of the gate to pasture. So the circling themes in the Gospel, such as that of feeding, are different ways of referring to the Paschal Mystery. In fact, just a bit further in this chapter, Jesus will say that a true shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The lectionary further accentuates the Paschal dimension of this Gospel by coupling it with these words from First Peter: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.” The reason given that Jesus had to suffer so is that we, the sheep, had been going astray, but we have now returned to “the shepherd and guardian of our souls.” (1 Pet. 2: 24–25) Here, the voice of Jesus is connected with what Jesus does.

The image of the Good Shepherd who feeds us by laying down his life may seem remote from our everyday lives, although in tense times such as these, it behooves us to look ahead to such possibilities. Meanwhile, the second chapter of Acts gives us a more everyday look at living the life of the true shepherd. The followers of the True Shepherd shared possessions and distributed to those in need. That is, they fed the sheep as Jesus feeds his sheep. (Acts 2: 45) To do otherwise is to be a thief and a bandit. If we feed others to give abundant life to them, we will also naturally speak with the voice of Jesus. We can all do as much as this. There is no other gate to life than this.

The Shepherd’s Voice

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When Jesus speaks of himself as a shepherd, he says that the sheep “hear his voice” and they follow him because they “know his voice.” (Jn. 10: 3-4) Interestingly, although this seems fairly straightforward, John says that his listeners “did not understand what he was saying to them.” (Jn. 10: 6) We get an important clue as to the problem if we note that Jesus is speaking to the same people who had taken umbrage at his healing of the man born blind, people who said they could see when they really couldn’t. It is not surprising if these people were hard of hearing as well.

Thinking of hearing the “voice” of the shepherd reminds me of one of the anecdotes told by Oliver Sachs in one of his books about neurological patients. A group of patients recovering from strokes were listening to the speech by a president (several years past now). Most of them were laughing although they could not understand a word of it as they were suffering from aphasia. They were laughing because they knew the president was lying. It seems that undistracted by any intelligibility of the words, they could sense the tone of the voice with great clarity. One woman had the opposite problem. She could not hear the inflections but she could understand the words. Undistracted by the inflection, she knew that the words were incoherent.

Many times, Sachs demonstrates that we learn how the brain works through various malfunctions. Normally, hearing the content and the inflection is one seamless phenomenon but the separation caused by events such as a stroke show that each is done by a separate part of the brain. Although the two functions are distinct, and there are advantages to noting the distinction, we want them to work well together. In some ways, the distinction between the two helps us use them well together.

This suggests that there are two dimensions to the art of hearing the voice of Jesus the Good Shepherd. There is the intelligible content, but there is also the intonation, the way the voice modulates and sounds in the heart. Let us start with the image of the shepherd that references many passages in the Hebrew Bible. There is David, who fought lions and bears to save his sheep, Psalm 23 where the Lord as shepherd guides us through the dark valley, and most of all, Yahweh as the true shepherd in Ezekiel 34 who cares for his sheep. We have the content, then, of caring, and the intonation would also need to convey the same degree of caring, even self-risking and self-sacrificial caring. Maybe the other lections can give us more guidance.

The image of the shepherd does not appear in the vision of the early church in Acts 2, but this vision shows each member caring for all the others, giving of their own substance to those who have need. The tone of voice of caring is matched by actions of caring. In a sense, each member is a shepherd for all the others.

In First Peter, we have the theme of caring taken to extremes. The suffering Christ is the touchstone for how each of us should suffer injustice. It is not mere meekness, for it takes great courage to endure such suffering and shame when one has the power to retaliate and gain the upper hand, something Jesus did not do. In John’s Gospel, this self-sacrificial style of being the shepherd is set up at the beginning when John the Baptist calls Jesus “the Lamb of God.” At the end of John’s Gospel, Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves him and when Peter says yes he loves Jesus, Jesus says “Feed my lambs.” In Revelation, Jesus is again the Lamb slain since the foundation of the world. Jesus, then, leads the sheep as the sacrificial lamb, rather than as the sacrificer, something even King David turned out to be in the case of Uriah the Hittite. Again, the tone of voice and the action must coincide with this sense of self-giving.

Edifying and powerful as the passage in First Peter is, there is a disturbing element here. In the verse immediately preceding this passage, Peter admonishes slaves to obey their masters. Does this passage, then, condone slavery? Here is a test case for tone of voice and content. A master may well consider himself a shepherd of his slaves, but what kind of shepherd would such a master be? Does such a master share of his material substance the way that they early Christians in Acts are said to have done? If a master acted in this way, could he even really be a master? Does a master sacrifice himself on behalf of the slave as Jesus sacrificed himself for his sheep? On the contrary, doesn’t the master expect the slaves to sacrifice their lives for his sake? A master who talks a good game of caring for his slaves would come across like the president whom the aphasic patients knew was lying, and the content of his words would be fundamentally incoherent unless he really acted like the Lamb of God, in which case, he would be the slave and the slave would be free. It needs to be noted that it is a lot easier to see this passage in First Peter in this way than it was when the letter was penned or in the US before 1865. That is to say, social pressures can drown out the voice of the shepherd when he calls to us and tries to lead us in new paths.

Perhaps these thoughts can help give us a sense of Jesus’ voice and help us recognize the voice of Jesus in the words and tone of speech of those who speak to us. And perhaps these thoughts, too, can help us speak with the tone of voice of one who will follow the Lamb of God wherever he goes. And if we do try to speak in this way, let us be honest if we halt and waver. After all, Jesus halted and wavered at Gethsemane. Being a Lamb of God is not a challenge to take lightly.