The Lamb who is the Shepherd

Fourth Sunday of Easter: Ps 23; Revelation 7:9-17; John 10: 22-30.

The sheep/shepherd motif every fourth Sunday of Easter may be a bit underwhelming, but the first step to better interpretation is to realize that all this pastoral material is more a shared world of images than a single idea. Not every sheep has the same needs, nor does every shepherd have the same ambitions.

So while a preacher or other reader may be tempted to fasten on the metaphor itself, that is usually a mistake. There is precious little news, let alone good news, in something like “God is [like] a shepherd,” or “Jesus is a shepherd.” The point will lie in the tensions contained between the lived experience of the metaphor and how the clichés of sheep and shepherd are qualified or re-worked in scripture.

The most consistent offering across all three years is the Psalm. Despite its “pastoral” feel, it is the prime example of shepherding as political imagery which is found through the Bible (cf. Jer 23 and 25; Ezek 34). “Shepherds” again and again are leaders in the Old Testament, but they are not “good” just because they are shepherds. The point here is who the shepherd is, not just that he is. God is in charge,

Tradition ascribes the psalm to David—once a shepherd in the literal sense, and then king. Even the king is in turn dependent on the provision and discipline of God. Without the king’s own recognition of divine leadership—not just in a narrowly religious sense, but in the sense of understanding the necessity of justice and care as the true work of leadership—earthly government fails to understand its own nature and call.

The Gospel of course works with this same world of sheep and shepherds and with the tradition of its political use. The three-year cycle provides different pieces of John 10 on this Sunday each year. This can make it hard to see the real point of the whole, where just as in other “I am” passages of this Gospel there is a movement from obscurity to revelation (and to judgement) through the discourse of Jesus.

In the sections read in the two previous years Jesus is introduced as the good shepherd, clearly riffing on Ps 23 and the traditional political imagery—so as a caring shepherd, and also as one who lays down his life. This year comes the third excerpt, after the private discourse is finished; so is the only case among these three where we see something of its implications.

Three Sheep at Rest, Edwin Henry Landseer. Yale Center for British Art

Commentators often see this as a new section rather than as part of the Shepherd discourse, even though the mention of sheep provides a link. The mention of a feast (10:22) is a characteristic marker of time in John, but it is unlikely to have any hidden meaning, but simply to say we have moved on. The mention of winter could perhaps underline the necessity of the pastoral relationship included in the image and the vulnerability of the sheep.

In any case the point of the Good shepherd discourse turns out to be more than that Jesus is a good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep (which we have to recall from 10:15 because it is not part of this passage). It is also that his sheep are a particular group. His shepherding talk is not just some general statement about divine providence or care for the world, but uses how there are various flocks and different shepherds to illustrate something about the distinctiveness of following him.

The exchange begins and ends though with the question of Jesus’ own identity. There is, as so often in John, a tension involving “the Jews” which reflects the life of the early readers of the Gospel and conflicts with (other) Jewish groups. All those involved in this tension are probably Jewish, even though the broad-brush use of “the Jews” to refer to leaders makes clear how far this tension has already developed for John’s readership. The passage actually emphasizes Jesus’ Jewish identity despite this; Jesus is asked about his being Messiah which, given that David is the prototype of anointed king, already makes a further connection—or allows Jesus to do so—with the Israelite shepherd imagery.

While his accusers want him to answer plainly, Jesus’ response is both clear and mysterious (as it must be): since he has these sheep, he is indeed a new David and hence Messiah, but only those who are his sheep will understand that. The question of Jesus’ identity also closes out the reading with the remarkable “I and the Father are one” (v. 20). This statement of Jesus’ identity with the Father is of course an allusion to divinity, but the point here is not just metaphysical; he and the Father being one is not so much about teaching readers something like the Trinity, but asserting that because Jesus acts for his sheep just as does that Lord who is David’s shepherd, they are one and the same.

It is the “Epistle”—actually from Revelation in this season—which is most concrete about the paradoxical nature of the Shepherd himself. In fact it is Jesus as sheep, or rather lamb, who takes center stage here. The fact that the lamb, rather than any figure of grandeur, is receiving the praise of the great throng makes this the most powerful statement from this other John about the nature of God. It was in last week’s Revelation reading (5:12) that this same glorious lamb was said to have been “slaughtered,” which is often true of lambs, but not as often of shepherds (although this is hinted at in John 10 too); yet now the lamb not only lives, but is shepherd too.

John the Divine describes the promise of salvation in a way that combines the insight of the Gospel (that the good shepherd lays down his life) with the beauty of the Psalms’ famous waters, and defies further comment:

The Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.