Tag Archives: Good Shepherd

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.

Following the Shepherds

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The shepherds adoring the Christ Child are a staple presence at Christmas time, so much so that we perhaps take them for granted. Most manger scenes and the Christmas Gospel make them seem respectable. Well, real shepherds weren’t the sort that respectable people invited to come and ooh and aah over their newborn babies.

Some of the recent writings I read about Christmas toned down the alleged marginality of shepherds. One writer pointed out that a famous Talmudic statement citing the dishonesty of shepherds was made several centuries after Jesus’ life. Even so, I doubt that shepherds had been respectable bourgeois gentlemen who went downhill a few centuries later. More important, though, these writers drew our attention to the symbolism of shepherds and the biblical allusions in Luke’s Gospel, suggesting that marginality wasn’t such an issue.

Most importantly, the shepherds in the field who, prompted by the host of angels, came to visit the Christ Child point to Jesus’ ancestor King David. They were just outside the city of David, after all. The story of David’s anointing as king is particularly interesting in this regard. (1 Sam. 16) Samuel asked Jesse to bring all of his sons before him. When he brought seven sons, one would thing he had brought them all. After all, seven sons is quite a few, and seven is often taken to be a number of completion in a way that six or eight are not. And yet God told Samuel that not one of the seven sons who passed in front of him was the one chosen to be the king in place of Saul. So Samuel asked Jesse if there is yet another son and finally Jesse admitted that there was one more, the youngest, who was with the sheep. When David was fetched, Samuel knew that this was the one.

The point is, the shepherd boy had been marginalized out of existence until God called for him. This is just one of many, and one of the more subtle, examples of God’s trick of bringing something out of nothing. David then did become something and was, figuratively speaking, the shepherd of Israel for many years. To this day, he is the archetypal king, even if he wasn’t always the best of shepherds. Interestingly, the prophet Nathan used the parable of a sheep to speak a condemnatory word to the king when he acted wrongly in regards to Bathsheba. (2 Sam. 12) Later in his Gospel, Luke contrasts this episode with Jesus’ Parable of the Good Shepherd who left the ninety-nine sheep to seek out the one stray. (Lk. 15: 1-7) The Davidic symbolism, then, actually highlights the marginality of the shepherds, of King David, and therefore, of Jesus himself. In fact, in a more literal way, Jesus has come out of nothing, as Luke tells us that Mary, who had not known a man when Jesus’ birth was announced to her, yet gave birth to this child.

After two thousand years plus, the Christmas story is a part of world culture, although its appropriation by some, maybe even all cultural groups, sometimes seems far-fetched from its beginnings. But do we really adore Jesus as our true king? The news feeds on the Internet raise serious doubts about this. Perhaps Jesus is still as marginal as he was when he was placed in a manger because there was no room for him anywhere else. Can we let the marginal shepherds shepherd us to the manger where the even more marginal child lies? Can we keep our ordered and apparently complete lives open for the One conceived by the Holy Spirit to enter? Do we really have room for Jesus today? Given the troubles in the world, can we open our hearts for God to bring something out of the nothing that surrounds us in our time?

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.

Hearing and Seeing the Good Shepherd

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With a bewildering shift, John 10 skips three months and interrupts the Good Shepherd Discourse with Jesus fending urgent inquiries as to whether or not he is the Messiah. (“How long will you keep us in suspense?) (Jn. 10: 24) For all of the intensity of asking, the Jews don’t really seem to be asking. Rather, they seem to have made up their minds that Jesus is not the Messiah. (Prophets don’t come from Galilee. Isn’t that obvious? Just look at the scriptures.)

Jesus then returns to the Good Shepherd theme, saying that those hounding him do not believe in him because they are not of his sheep. His sheep, on the other hand, know his voice and follow him. Are the “Jews” ontologically incapable of believing in Jesus? That doesn’t seem possible, but throughout his Gospel, John is showing us how it is possible to become willfully hard of hearing. This raises the question: Are we equally hard of hearing?

Being able to hear Jesus’ voice has to do with a certain amount of openness to Jesus. It isn’t just a case of being open-minded in general, although that can help. There is a special kind of openness that is required here. The ones who hear Jesus’ voice are the ones who respond to the works Jesus does, the works that testify to who and what he is. This whole Good Shepherd passage follows straight on from Jesus’ healing of the man born blind and the long hostile discussion with the Jews that followed. Those who rejected the miracle are the ones who are blind, but those who see the miracle for what it is, can see with the sharpness of the formerly blind man. These are the sheep who know Jesus’ voice and follow him.

What follows is an extraordinary verse that I admit has slipped by me all these years: “What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand.” (Jn. 210: 29 For Jesus, the sheep who see his acts of healing and hear his voice are the pearl of great price, the treasure in the field worth selling everything for it, including his life. But what of those who do not hear Jesus’ voice, and what of ourselves if we do not hear it? Does Jesus throw the blind and hard of hearing away? But Jesus says here that nobody can snatch this treasure, each and every one of us, out of his hand. Throughout the Gospel, and especially in the story of Jesus’ healing the man born blind and the Good Shepherd discourses, there has been a sharp division between those who see and hear and those who don’t, suggesting the deaf are doomed. Yet here Jesus gives us a pre-echo of his prayer in chapter seventeen that we all might be one. Here we enter a mystery where we do not take seeing and hearing for granted. If we all are going to be one in Jesus, we must all hear deeply the voices of those around us and seek deeply to speak in ways that can be heard in a healing way. Since Jesus himself is the Forgiving Victim, hearing his voice in the voices of other people includes special attention to the voices of oppressed people, the victims of racism and other social evils, learning to hear that whatever racism we hear and see in our hearts, and any oppression we inflict on others victimizes us as much as it does other victims. It is this deep listening, this deep seeing of God’s will to heal our blindness and deafness that will make us all one.

The Lamb of God is our Shepherd

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Ghent_Altarpiece_D_-_Adoration_of_the_Lamb_2We usually understand a shepherd to be one who leads a flock of sheep and protects it from harm. But in Revelation, the author proclaims “the Lamb at the center of the throne” to be the shepherd of the multitude of worshipers from all nations. The worshipers are praising this Lamb whom they follow and the Lamb “will guide them to springs of the water of life.” (Rev. 7: 17) Their white robes have been made white in the blood of this Lamb because the Lamb has lead his followers through the ordeal. This is an odd sort of shepherd since normally it is the job of the shepherd to protect the flock from danger, not lead the flock into it.

In John 10, often referred to as the Good Shepherd Discourse, Jesus claims that he is the true shepherd who protects his sheep, even to the extent of laying his life down for his sheep. (Jn. 10: 11) Jesus is not only the leader, but he is the gateway into the fold, the only gateway safe from thieves who come to destroy. When Jesus says: “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me,” (Jn. 10: 27) he is attesting to a much more intimate relationship between himself and the sheep than is usually the case. As the Good Shepherd, Jesus is not just leading us, his flock, externally by walking in front of us, Jesus is leading us from within, speaking in a voice that we learn to hear as quite distinct from bandits and robbers who come to destroy or hired hands who run away when there is danger.

Early in John’s Gospel, John the Baptist points to Jesus and calls him “the Lamb of God.” The reason that the sheep hear their shepherd’s voice and recognize it intimately is because their shepherd is a lamb, one of them. As the Lamb of God, Jesus protects his sheep from being snatched out of his hand. (Jn. 10: 28) But what does the Lamb of God protect the sheep from? We were not protected from bandits and robbers any more than the martyrs in white robes were protected from the ordeal. What the Lamb of God protects us from is being or becoming bandits and robbers. That is, we are protected from being people who shed the blood in which the white robes of the martyrs are washed. Most important, it is precisely by being the Lamb of God that this shepherd does not attack robbers and thieves with the violence they impose on him, but instead he lays down his life, not only for those of us in the sheepfold, but for those who attack him and the flock. This raises the question: In protecting us from becoming bandits and robbers, is Jesus laying down his life to turn those of us who have become bandits and robbers from what we have become? If the Lamb of God died for sinners as St. Paul claimed many times, then that is exactly what he has done and that is why, in following the Lamb of God as our shepherd, we do the same, secure in the sheepfold of our shepherd with the multitudes from every nation.