Last month we explored the theme of sacrifice in Christianity and noted that there was a paradox, of Jesus being the sacrifice as well as taking on the mantle of the priest who offers the sacrifice. The readings set for the 4th Sunday of Easter just gone, prompted me to reflect on Jesus as Shepherd. These images too produces complex ambiguities.
In the short Gospel reading (Jn 10:22- 30), Jesus implies that he is the shepherd of his people, his sheep, who hear his voice and follow him. Another reading is from Revelation (Ch 7) where we read about the Lamb on the throne; also that the Lamb...on the throne will be their shepherd. In other circumstances we would be laughing at the use of mixed metaphors
I guess the two things that immediately come to mind when you hear the words ‘good shepherd’ are Psalm 23 and the Parable of the Lost Sheep, which incidentally would have been better served with the title, ‘Parable of the Good Shepherd’! But then, many a parable has a title that apparently misses the point of the parable!
The shepherd searching for the one sheep that wasn’t accounted for, out of a hundred he had counted into the pen at night, gives us so much comfort and hope: we are each one of us precious enough to God to come searching for us.
In passing: I can’t help feeling a great sadness that not many people in this country use the General Confession from the Book of Common Prayer any longer, thus losing among other things the beautiful imagery of our having ‘erred and strayed from [God’s] ways like lost sheep’.
When we picture the pastoral idyll of a shepherd gently walking along with his flock following him, we probably don’t appreciate that Jesus referring to himself as the shepherd of his people was subversive in his day. We note that in John’s gospel it was at the special festival of Hanukka (Dedications) that Jesus claimed that he is a shepherd.
For Jews, the idea of a shepherd had connotations of being anointed king, like David. Of course we will all also remember the 23rd Psalm where David says, ‘The Lord is my shepherd’. So this passage from John would have been Jesus claiming to be the anointed one, the Messiah, expected to establish a worldly kingdom.
But Jesus’s sheep are those who hear and receive the message of a different kingdom – where wrongs are righted, and there will be justice. He is under no illusion that everyone will hear the message, but he is confident that some will and work for the kingdom. We are among those who are called to be those people - to hear and obey his voice.
So to references to the Lamb. In the gospel, Jesus calls himself the good shepherd. At another time he calls himself the door to the sheepfold. It is interesting that he never called himself the Lamb of God and that the only reference in the gospels to this phrase is when John the Baptist said of Jesus, “Behold the Lamb of God” and that is (only) in John’s Gospel.
Revelation, however, has another bit of subversion. The imagery is twisted round again – from shepherd and the door to the sheep pen, to that of a Lamb. It would be fair to say that the source if the important idea of the Lamb of God, or Agnus Dei, is mainly the vivid imagery in the book of Revelation.
The element of subversion is about what this Lamb, the sacrificial animal has come to mean. “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and the Lamb”, and ‘The Father and I are one’, we read. It is symptomatic of God’s Kingdom that leadership is redefined – the victim that becomes the leader; and the shepherd that becomes the sacrificial lamb. Or, as we see the role reversal in Isaiah, ‘a small child shall lead them’.
We are Easter people, belonging to an Easter God; we too are called to subvert the values of our world and to lead by serving.
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