Readings of the day: Acts 13:14, 43-52; Psalm 100:1-2, 3, 5; Revelation 7:9, 14b-17; John 10:27-30
Appropriately, on this Good Shepherd Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Easter, our readings present us with all kinds of images and metaphors of shepherds and shepherding; of lambs and sheep. And, every fourth Sunday of Easter, especially if I am in an urban area with few if any sheep or shepherds (like Edmonton), I think how amazing it is that this image of shepherding; of sheep is still one of the most pervasive images we have of Jesus. This is true even of people who have little or no experience of sheep or shepherding.
Jesus is the Good Shepherd. We have art and icons that depict Jesus slinging a lamb over his shoulders, carrying it to safety. Today we hear the end of Jesus’ Good Shepherd Discourse from John’s Gospel. Jesus makes bold claims to be no ordinary shepherd. While the best of shepherds, we could presume, would protect their sheep from predators and other threats to their life and well-being in this life, only Jesus can claim that he, the Good Shepherd, guarantees his sheep “eternal life”: “They will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.”
If we continue in John’s Gospel just past the end of today’s reading, John says that the Jewish leaders who listened to Jesus became infuriated with him: They “took up stones again to stone him.” Going back to the Book of Leviticus in the Old Testament, stoning was the penalty prescribed for blasphemy; for claiming to be God.
Today Jesus clearly claims to be one and the same with the one God of Israel: “The Father and I are one.” To address God in this way, let alone claim to be God, was preposterous and a great evil in Israel of Jesus’ time. Such a claim would violate the great commandment-prayer of Deuteronomy: “Hear, O Israel, the LORD is God; the LORD is one.” If the LORD is one, Jesus, this man of Nazareth, could not possibly be the LORD, God of Israel, so the Jewish leaders thought, in a way reasonably.
Put another way, as I remember Dr. Denis Lamoureux, Science and Religion professor here at St. Joseph’s College, saying, Jesus’ claim to oneness with the one God of Israel would have left the people hearing Jesus with three ways to interpret his claim: First, that Jesus is out of his mind; second, that he is a liar; and third, that he is in fact God.
We know the answer as to which of these three options is true. Or at least we presume and believe it, or else we would not be here: Jesus is God. But we (I think we need to understand) have the gift of hindsight that the people who first heard Jesus claim, “The Father and I are one,” did not have.
Even before Jesus got to this decisive line, “The Father and I are one,” his use of shepherding metaphors were clear references to the depiction of the God of Israel as a shepherd in the Old Testament. We can think of one of the most memorable Psalms of trust and consolation, Psalm 23: “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.” The prophet Isaiah also depicts the God of Israel; our God as a shepherd: “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.” And we know that when the St. Louis Jesuits write a hymn after a Bible passage, it is a memorable passage: “Like a shepherd he feeds his flock, and gathers the lambs in his arms; holding them carefully close to his heart, leading them home.”
There are other people in the Bible who are shepherds. We might think of Moses, “tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law” before he climbed Mount Horeb and encountered God in the burning bush. And King David is first introduced as a shepherd in 2 Samuel. But these great biblical shepherd figures are really stand-ins for the God of Israel. David was the shepherd-king after the LORD’s own heart. God worked through Moses to shepherd the people of Israel back to their homeland from slavery in Egypt.
The main point in all this, though, is that, when Jesus applies the image of the Good Shepherd to himself, it is no accident. Already, well before Jesus explicitly identifies himself as one with God the Father, he has claimed to be one with Israel’s God by invoking these Old Testament images of God the shepherd.
These are images that carry over into the New Testament. One of the most frequent ways of depicting God; depicting Jesus in the New Testament is that of the shepherd. We hear this today from the Book of Revelation, but with a counter-intuitive twist. In John of Patmos’ vision of the “great multitude” of the saved—the “great multitude” of those who had given their lives for our faith—the Lamb seated on the heavenly throne is also the shepherd. This lamb, also the chief shepherd, Jesus Christ, “will guide” these martyrs for our faith, all who are saved, “to springs of the water of life, [where] God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
The image of the sacrificial lamb who becomes the chief shepherd, and who leads the saved to springs of living water, also recalls several Old Testament depictions of lambs and shepherding, and other images of agriculture; growth and giving of life. If we were at the Easter Vigil, the mother-of-all-church-celebrations that begins this fifty-day celebration from Easter to Pentecost, we would have heard (not really a shepherding metaphor, but) the majestic song from the prophet Isaiah to which we respond, “With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.” Psalm 23 refers to the LORD as shepherd leading the Psalmist “beside still waters.” Our Psalm today speaks of us as God’s “people, the sheep of his flock.”
In the familiar story of the first Passover, the people of Israel are prepared to escape slavery in Egypt, shepherded by Moses and Aaron. The LORD tells the people of Israel to slaughter a lamb per household and eat it hurriedly. The people of Israel are also to put blood from their lamb on the doorposts and lintels of their houses. The LORD will pass through Egypt and “strike down every firstborn” of Egyptian households but leave the firstborn of any house showing lamb’s blood at its entrance.
These images that compare God; compare Jesus to a lamb, a shepherd, or both at the same time continue in history through the prayer of the Church; our liturgical prayer as a community of faith and individual prayer. Our prefaces that introduce our Eucharistic Prayer during Eastertime are especially rich in these images of the Lord as a lamb. The preface we will pray today says that Christ “never ceases to offer himself for us, but defends us and ever pleads our cause before [God]: He is the sacrificial Victim who dies no more, the Lamb, once slain, who lives forever.” In our prayer after communion, we will pray, “Look upon your flock, kind Shepherd, and be pleased to settle in eternal pastures the sheep you have redeemed by the Precious Blood of your Son.” And, of course, just before we receive communion (and at the beginning of Mass, during the Gloria), we pray together, “Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us… Lamb of God… Grant us peace.”
So we remain familiar with these images and metaphors of lambs, sheep, and shepherding to describe the Lord and his relationship with us, down to the present day. And it does not matter whether we have ever (or often) seen a real shepherd or sheep.
We understand, we believe, and we celebrate, sisters and brothers: Jesus Christ is both lamb and shepherd. He is the Passover lamb sacrificed once for all, “who dies no more.” Yet he is the shepherd who “leads us by still waters” to nourishment, peace, protection from evil, and to eternal life. He is not out of his mind, or a blasphemer, or a liar. He is God; the Good Shepherd-“Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” In him and only in him, the Good Shepherd, do we find salvation.
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