Flock and Shepherd: A Reflection on John 10.11-18

One of my favourite things about John’s Gospel has always been the “I am” statements, the seven places where Jesus says (with an emphasis that’s hard to get across in English) “I am” followed by a big and illustrative metaphor: “I am the bread of life,” “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” “I am the light of the world,” and so on. Today’s Gospel reading is another of these seven sayings: “I am the good shepherd.” It’s one I remember loving ever since I was a small child, so it caught my eye once again this week.

The shepherd is a metaphor with a long history in the Bible. Even in Genesis, Israel (formerly known as Jacob) called God “the God who has been my shepherd all my life to this day” (Genesis 48.15; cf. 49.24). King David started out as a shepherd boy and in the famous Psalm attributed to him, sang “The LORD is my Shepherd…” (Psalm 23.1). Through him, and likely also as part of the wider symbolism of Ancient Near Eastern culture, the shepherd became an important royal symbol in ancient Israel and Judah. And, later, the Prophet Isaiah uses the metaphor in an oracle looking forward to God’s redemption of Judah:

He will feed his flock like a shepherd;
he will gather the lambs in his arms and carry them in his bosom
and gently lead the mother sheep. (Isaiah 40.11)

It’s an interesting metaphor, then, as it connects God to royalty, and both of these to the humblest of occupations. For being a shepherd was a dirty business — so much so that by the time of the New Testament, it was thought that one could not be a shepherd and properly fulfill one’s religious purity obligations under the Law. So there’s a lot going on in the background of Jesus’ saying here.

Let’s look at the whole text to see what he might be telling us:

Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it 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. I have received this command from my Father.” (John 10:11-18)

The first thing he points out is the old problem of personal investment. Just as a ruler is always going to be more invested in the success of a military venture than his mercenary army, or a business owner more invested than a minimum-wage employee, the true shepherd is willing to sacrifice life and limb for his sheep. Thehired hand may flee at the first sign of trouble, but the good shepherd stays to defend the flock.

The second point is is relational: the good shepherd knows each of his sheep and they know him. When he calls, they know to follow, and he knows which are his, having marked them as his own. As a side note, this one is particularly special to me, as when I was in the beginning stages of recovering from my ‘Dark Night’ experience, the biggest thing that started drawing me back towards my faith was this deep sense of being marked by Christ, that he was still my shepherd and I was still his sheep.

In this teaching, Jesus then returns to the self-sacrificial aspect of his shepherding. This is interesting because, as much as we may think of keeping sheep being about practical goods like wool and dairy, in the Ancient Near East, it was also about sacrifice. From the story of Cain and Abel on, a sheep was the sacrifice par excellence in the Bible, and there is some suggestion that the domestication of livestock was originally motivated by a desire to have a ready supply of sacrifices at hand, and the rest of the uses were bonuses. With this in mind, the image has some powerful nonviolent atonement symbolism too: For the shepherd sacrifices himself to save the lives of those destined for sacrifice. There may be “one flock, one shepherd,” but in a sense, the flock and shepherd also become one. As one of my favourite contemporary exegetes, Paul Nuechterlein, puts it:

Something that resonates with me about this text is that, since Jesus, there are two species of innocent sacrificial lambs: the kind who have existed since the beginning of time as fodder for the sacrificial machinery, and the Lamb of God and his disciples who offer themselves into the sacrificial machinery in a way that progressively gums up the works. When I speak of disciples of the Lamb / Good Shepherd, I think of saints such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., who led intentional movements of risking being fed into the sacrificial machinery as lambs to the slaughter. They shepherded large numbers of folks who essentially were willing to give themselves as substitute lambs, if it meant that future sheep might be saved from the slaughter.

The shepherd who makes himself like a sheep is the one who leads the sheep to safety.

So there’s a lot going on in this image of Jesus as the good shepherd. What a beautiful image it is not just of the nature of God and the ministry of Jesus, but also for all of us who call ourselves by his name.