Progressive reflections on the lectionary #13

Monday 22nd April 2024

John 10: 11-18 What's so good about shepherds?

In terms of ‘greatest hits’ of the Gospels, this passage has to be in the top ten. The Good Shepherd who lays his life down for his sheep? Wonderfully evocative language and imagery, a sure fire hit.

Shepherding is something which I happen to have a small amount of experience of - when I was a boy my dad was a shepherd. I mentioned this to a farming friend of mine, “what did he do after he left shepherding?” He asked. “He ended up working with people who have Hansen’s disease, the disease that used to be called Leprosy,” I said. “He really took the Jesus thing seriously,” my friend said, thoughtfully.

Although my experience of shepherding is limited, and is now quite distant too, I do know enough to think there are a few strange things about this particular passage. Among the anomalies is the idea that a good Shepherd is one who would ‘lay his life down’ for his sheep. It is intriguing.

Usually ‘lay your life down’ is taken to mean ‘be ready to die for’. If that is, indeed, what it means here then this poses some practical issues when it comes to looking after a flock. Laying your life down for a flock of sheep means to leave them with no shepherd, and thus completely at the mercy of whatever comes along to attack them next (thieves, wolves, etc.) As sheep are also on a permanent mission to self destruct, this is inadvisable.

There is a similar problem with the good shepherd parable in Matthew’s gospel, where the shepherd leaves the flock ‘on the mountain’ in order to go off and find the single lost sheep. This is not good, sensible, or efficient, shepherding. You would leave the bulk of the flock unguarded in order find one lost animal? Try explaining that to the farmer who wants to know why there is now only one sheep.

Some people claim that John’s gospel doesn’t contain any parables (the apparently simple but deceptively complex, allusory sayings of Jesus that are sometimes likened to Zen koans) but I disagree. I think John’s good shepherd passage is a parable - that would explain some of its strangeness.

One of the strangest, most parable like, bits of the reading is when Jesus says, in verse 16, that he has sheep who ‘don’t belong to this fold.’ It’s hard not to read this as a Messianic statement: a claim that the ‘lost sheep’ of Israel, the 10 tribes who long ago disappeared into exile, will respond to the voice of the Messiah. The Messianic expectation was that the anointed one would restore Israel, which is to say gather the whole nation together, and finally reunite the 12 tribes. The final verse of the 20th chapter states the intent of the writer: “these [things] are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

Looked at in this way the passage becomes a parable about the willingness of the Messiah to do the unthinkable in order to achieve the impossible. John has Jesus declare, in opposition to the tradition found in the other gospels, that he is in fact control of the ‘laying down’ of his life. “No one,” he says, “takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.” There are, of course, contemporary resonances to this passage which can make one feel very uncomfortable.

The language of shepherding would have been very familiar to early readers, less so to us, now, perhaps. The image of God as shepherd of Israel would also have been very familiar to readers of the time. That John has Jesus, in this parable type scenario, subverting expectations of what it would mean to be a shepherd, and of what it would mean for God to shepherd Israel, is typical of the wider Jesus tradition which is full of ‘you’ve heard it said, but I say…” type stuff.

It leaves us pondering a parable about the strange nature of the Messiah, the one who is willing, who has the agency, to die to save his scattered, shattered, people. It’s a message that the impossible is, in fact, possible. But it also warns that the means of achieving this impossible goal is by way of the unthinkable.

This blog is taken from Simon's Substack email series, to subscribe please go to https://simonjcross.substack.c...

Image:Stained glass: Alfred Handel, d. 1946[2], photo:Toby Hudson, CC BY-SA 3.0 <;, via Wikimedia Commons