Reflections on John 10: Jesus as the "Good Shepherd," Part 2

Last week I began a series focusing on the presentation of Jesus as the "Good Shepherd" in John 10. In it I discussed what, at least as far as I had been taught from childhood and conditioned by my ecclesial background, could be considered the "surface meaning" of the figure in John's Gospel. In his "interpretation" of the parable found in John 10:1-5, Jesus claims to be both the "gate" whereby the sheep enter the fold and the noble "shepherd" who both leads the flock to pasture and, by laying down his life for their benefit, protects them from perishing. As valid as this reading is and (thus) consonant with the theology found in the Gospel, it merely scratches the surface of the theological significance the author intends by employing the figure.

   William Dyce, Jesus the Good Shepherd (1859) 

Beginning in chapter 2, with the placement of Jesus' "cleansing" of the Temple at the outset of his ministry and the uniquely Johannine miracle at Cana of Galilee, it becomes clear that John is telling his story of Jesus in terms of Jesus' relation to the Judaism that provides the hermeneutical matrix within which his significance is to be understood. By changing the water associated with Jewish purity rituals to wine, he thereby signals the plenty of the eschatological age he would bring about (2:1-11); his body, which would be destroyed and, in three days, rebuilt, supersedes the Temple in Jerusalem as the locus of God's presence (2:12-22); he would provide the water of eternal life that satisfies thirst at a far deeper level than that provided by Jacob's well (4:13-15); most shockingly, his healing of a paralytic on the Sabbath signals that the age to come to which the weekly Sabbaths pointed, the age of the resurrection, was even then being inaugurated (5:1-45).

Nowhere is this dynamic more clear than with regard to the various festivals that routinely pop up in the narrative. These are not simply time markers to provide historical context or verisimilitude to the proceedings. As always with John, his choice to include these stories is determined by their theological significance as pointers to Jesus. Indeed, the premise of John's understanding of the relation between Jesus and the Hebrew Scriptures is found in a logion placed on the lips of Jesus himself: "You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf" (John 5:39, NRSV, emphasis added).

So it is with the various festivals that punctuated Israel's yearly cycle of worship.  For John, the symbolism of these festivals was divinely designed to point eschatologically to Jesus, who embodied their significance and thus transcended and superseded them. This is true, first of all, with regard to Passover, mentioned repeatedly in the Gospel, not only in conjunction with Jesus' death, but also as the time signature for John's record of the twin signs of the Feeding of the 5000 and Jesus' Walking on the Sea.* Jesus, who was crucified at the time of the slaughter of the Passover lambs, and whose bones were thus not broken (John 19:14, 28-37), not only is the true, eschatological paschal lamb of the hoped-for Second Exodus (John 1:29); his miraculous feeding of the 5000 is illustrative of his being the eschatological "bread from heaven" corresponding to the manna given to the Israelites during their wilderness wanderings (John 6:25-59), and his walking on the sea (6:16-21) corresponds to the Israelites' passing through the Sea of Reeds in their Exodus from bondage in Egypt.

The same is true of the harvest festival of Sukkoth (Tabernacles), designed to commemorate the wilderness wanderings prior to the Israelites' entrance into land under Joshua. This festival featured prominently in the prophet Zechariah's apocalyptic vision of the day, following the judgments of the anticipated Day of YHWH, when "The LORD will be king over the whole earth" (Zech 14:9) and Sukkoth would be celebrated, not only by Israel, but by the survivors from among the nations as well (Zech 14:16). Most significant is Zechariah's description of that day:

And there shall be continuous day (it is known to the LORD), for at evening time there hall be light. On that day living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem, half of them to the eastern sea and half of them to the western sea; it shall continue in summer as in winter (Zech 14:7-8, NRSV).

As a result of this expectation, the rituals at Sukkoth included, in addition to the reading of the Torah, both the pouring of water and the lighting of lamps. Thus it is no accident that it was at Tabernacles that Jesus both encouraged listeners to come to drink of him as the one from whose belly the promised "streams of living water" would flow (John 7:37-38)** and proclaimed himself to be "the light of the world" who would bring "the light of life" to his followers (John 8:12), illustrating that claim by his healing of a blind man on the Sabbath at the festival (John 9:1-12).

It is not surprising, in view of the Jewish hope for a new Exodus, that Sukkoth would kindle hopes for the promised eschatological deliverer. Hence no one should be surprised that Jesus' teaching at the feast kindled speculation as to whether he could be the Messiah (John 7:25-44). Neither is it insignificant that Jesus tells his parable in John 10 in connection with his dispute with the Pharisees consequent upon his restoration of the blind man's sight (John 9:13-41). The "spiritually blind" Pharisees who quibble about the timing of the healing and thus conclude that Jesus is not from God (John 9:16) are, on the face of it, the targets of Jesus' barbs in describing the "thieves and bandits" who came into the fold the wrong way and were not listened to by the sheep (John 10:1, 8; cf. 9:35-39, where the formerly blind man believes in Jesus, thus not taking the counsel of the Pharisees).*** By contrast, Jesus as the Good Shepherd is the fulfillment of what Sukkoth both signified and anticipated.

The same is true as well with regard to the Festival of Hanukkah (ḥǎnukkǎ; Gk. enkainia, "renewal") (John 10:22-42), where Jesus also refers back to his previous discussion about sheep. Hanukkah, of course, was not among the three prescribed pilgrimage festivals, celebrating, as it did, the rededication of the Temple by Judah Maccabee in 165 BCE after it had been desecrated for three years by the Syrian ruler, Antiochus IV "Epiphanes," culminating in the "abomination of desolation," the sacrifice of a pig on an altar to Zeus in the Holy Place (1 Maccabees 4:36-61; on the "desolating sacrilege," cf. Daniel 9:26-27; 11:31). Alas, the renewal of Jewish temple worship and political independence was short-lived; indeed, the steady spiritual decay of the Hasmonean priesthood long pre-dated the loss of political independence to the Romans under Pompey in 63 BCE, and the death of the Idumean "King of the Jews" Herod the Great in 4 BCE led to a split-up of his kingdom and ultimately direct Roman rule of Judea through prefects beginning in 6 CE. The yearly celebration of Hanukkah brought to the fore the suboptimal situation in Palestine and thus focused hopes on the promised ultimate deliverance from Gentile overlordship through the Davidic ruler promised in Scripture.

Hence it is not coincidental that John sets the stage by locating Jesus in "Solomon's Colonnade" (John 10:23), the enclosed cloister on the east edge of the Temple Mount. Solomon, of course, was David's Son and successor, the likely immediate subject of David's famous Royal Psalms (e.g., Psalms 2 and 110) and prototype of the promised "Son of David" who would fulfill the covenant made with his father (2 Samuel 7:12-16) and reign as king in Jerusalem. The Evangelist is setting the scene for the question which follows: "So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, 'How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly' (John 10:24, NRSV)."

In effect, Jesus had in fact already answered their question, but he had done so obliquely by using the figure of the Good Shepherd.**** Apparently, his hearers got the message, but wanted to make sure they were hearing him correctly. Indeed, it is well that Jesus cloaked his claim in this vivid metaphor, for, as N. T. Wright says, "the statement was as dangerous a claim as Jesus could have made."***** The Jews were certainly not alone in the ancient world in picturing rulers as shepherds. But the image, evocative as it would have been in such a pastoral society, whose greatest historical king, David, had been a shepherd in his youth, had particular resonance in their prophetic literature of the exilic period when the people were scattered as sheep due to the spiritual malfeasance of the shepherds that had been placed over them.

Of particular significance is the classic chapter 34 of the Book of  Ezekiel. There YHWH, through the prophet, excoriates the nation's shepherds for their failure to protect the flock, which as a result had been scattered to the four winds. In response, YHWH makes this promise: 

For thus says the Lord GOD: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land; and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the watercourses, and in all the inhabited parts of the land (Ezekiel 34:11-13, NRSV).

What follows speaks directly to what can be referred to as the nation's messianic hope:

I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd. And I, the LORD, will be their God, and my servant David shall be prince among them; I, the LORD, have spoken … 

They shall know that I, the LORD their God, am with them, and that they, the house of Israel, are my people, says the Lord GOD. You are my sheep, the sheep of my pasture and I am your God, says the Lord GOD (Ezekiel 34: 23-24, 30-31).

Jesus the Good Shepherd is Jesus the promised Davidic King, the Messiah expected by large swaths of Palestinian Jews in the first century CE. But did the Jesus of John's Gospel fit their expectations? Did he even intend to do so? John chapter 10 has much to say in that regard. That will be the focus of my next installment.

*If, as appears likely, John has temporally displaced the episode of the cleansing of the Temple for theological reasons, his narrative would coincide numerically with the Synoptics, who all record one such cleansing, but who by contrast place the episode at the end of Jesus' life during Holy Week.

**The punctuation of John 7:37-38 is disputed. Most translations connect the participial phrase ho pisteuōn me with what follows and understand the following kathōs eipen hē graphē ("just as the Scripture said") as parenthetical. The NIV, for instance, reads, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him." However, in view of both Zechariah 14:8 and Ezekiel 47:1-2, the likely scriptural referents alluded to by the Johannine Jesus, it is better to understand the phrase ho pisteuōn me as the subject of the preceding verb pinetō; hence, "Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the Scripture has said, 'Out of his [i.e., Jesus's, the embodiment of the eschatological Temple] belly shall flow streams of living water'." For a thorough, compelling defense of this reading, cf. Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2016) 315-16.

***Jesus' remark that the "thief" comes only to "slaughter" (thysēi) as well as to "steal" and "destroy" suggests an oblique secondary reference to the Sadducees as well who, though not mentioned in the preceding context, later find themselves allied with the Pharisees in the final plot against Jesus in John 11:45-53). Cf. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel according to John I-XII (AB 29; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966) 351.

****Of course, John's readers already know the answer, both from his description of the Word-made-flesh as Jesus Christ in 1:17, and by the private confessions of Andrew (1:41), Nathanael (1:49), and the Samaritan woman of Sychar (4:26). Jesus' interlocutors here in John 10 were, of course, not privy to those conversations.

*****N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird, The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians (London: SPCK/Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019) 670.