Reflections on John 10: Jesus the Good Shepherd, Part 1

 

Over the past four decades of my work on the New Testament, my focus has largely been on Paul and the Synoptic Gospels. Things were not always so, however. Indeed, throughout my youth, raised in a Protestant household convinced of the Reformation slogan, sola fide, I was drawn, both by polemics and temperament, to the Gospel of John. After all, the first verse I learned as a Kindergartner at my home church, Grace Chapel, in Havertown, Pennsylvania, was John 3:16. Indeed, John's Gospel uses the expression "eternal life" (zōē aiōnios) 17 times and the verbal expression "believe in(to)" (pisteuein eis) 36 times, with the latter, as in John 3:16, consistently presented as the means of attaining the former. I may have had difficulty integrating much of Matthew, Mark, and Luke into my burgeoning theological understanding of soteriology (the doctrine of salvation), but one thing I knew from John: it was belief in the Jesus who died on the cross for me ("faith") that led to "everlasting life" (as the KJV consistently rendered zōē aiōnios) now and thus forever in "heaven" when I died (which at that stage of my life was simply a theoretical matter!).

Years ago I wrote a post based on the children's hymn, "Jesus Loves Me," which I learned to love back in that aforementioned year of Kindergarten at Grace Chapel in the 1961-62 school year. I remember little else from those days of yore, but one memory has stayed with me all these subsequent years: being taught the story of Jesus as the Good Shepherd based on the parable found in John 10:1-5. The comfort that story provided/provides perhaps stuck in my imagination due to the superb stained glass window (pictured above) located in the back of the church's modified Gothic sanctuary. What I would like to do is to take a second look at John 10 and offer some reflections on Jesus' capacity as the Good Shepherd. In this installment, I will consider the "surface" meaning I have been taught since childhood, which, it should go without saying, is still valid! [It also should go without saying that what we view as the "surface meaning" is conditioned by our own personal cultural and social location, which determines both the questions we ask the text and what we observe from it: in my case, as a white Protestant male who has, despite modest economic means, lived his whole life in the circles of middle class America.] In future installments, I will explore further historical and theological matters that sharpen the focus on how this image, and the story that elaborates it, coheres with John's theological portrayal of Jesus.

Jesus' parable or "figure of speech" (paroimia) reads as follows:

"Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers." (John 10:1-5, NRSV)

The complexity of this paroimia, with adversaries portrayed both in terms of a "thief" (kleptēs) and a "robber" (lēstēs) ("revolutionary"? cf. Barabbas, John 18:40), has led many to surmise that John has fused two originally discreet parables.* Be that as it may, the paroimia, as recorded by the Evangelist, speaks of two distinct matters. First, there is a right way, and there is a wrong way, to enter the aulē, the enclosed, open fold for a flock of sheep. The proper way, of course, is through the thyra, the gate. The shepherd, accordingly, approaches the sheep in this way. Thieves and bandits, however, don't, so as to avoid detection by the gatekeeper or undershepherd. Second, the true shepherd, as opposed to imposters, has a vital relationship with "his own" (ta idia) sheep such that they "follow" (akolouthei) him as he leads the flock out to pasture.

As always in the Gospel traditions, the crowds are perplexed by Jesus' story (cf. also Mark 4:13 with regard to the disciples' bewilderment over Jesus' parables of the "mystery" of the kingdom). So he provides the following lengthy interpretation:

So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

“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 10:7-18, NRSV)

Jesus' self-referential interpretation of the parable is both clarifying and confusing: clarifying, in that he provides explanations for both seemingly disparate aspects of the story, namely, the gate and the shepherd; confusing, in that, not only does he identify both the gate and the shepherd with himself―are we to suppose, as E. F. Bishop argued years ago, that the picture is of a shepherd sleeping astride the entrance to the fold, thus serving both personally as the shepherd and functionally as the gate?**―his explanation of the sheepgate also veers off in a direction not expected from the story itself.

For our present purposes, I will discuss Jesus' explanation in terms of the twin foci of the parable itself. First, Jesus identifies himself as the gate in his story. However, whereas the story may have led us to expect hē thyra tōn probatōn (lit. "the gate of the sheep") to refer to the gate to gain access to the sheep, Jesus takes the interpretation in another direction in verse 9. Indeed, there Jesus becomes the gate through which the sheep enter the fold. In effect, drawing on Old Testament imagery such as that found in Psalm 118:20,*** Jesus portrays himself as the gate of salvation. The language of "salvation" is far less characteristic of the Fourth Gospel than it is of the Synoptics, let alone Paul. Nevertheless, John had earlier referred to Jesus, via the unexpected medium of some Samaritans from Sychar, as the "savior of the world" (4:42), and had, in his expansion of Jesus' early conversation with Nicodemus, stated that Jesus was sent with the express purpose of "saving" the world (3:17). Here he defines this "saving" mission of Jesus characteristically in terms of him giving them "life" (zōē).**** This "life," in John's presentation, is not simply "natural" life, for which he uses the term psychē.***** "Eternal life," in John's idiolect, may reflect the expression hayyē 'ōlām in Daniel 12:2 and thus refer to the "life of the age (to come) in the prophet's apocalyptic worldview. Such life was not simply quantitatively different ("everlasting life"), but qualitatively different (hence "eternal life"). This is life that cannot be destroyed by death (11:26). Thieves may try to "destroy" (apolesēi) the sheep (10:9), but, as John has written in his most famous verse, God "gave" the Son so that those who believe in him would not "perish" (apolētai) (3:16). This life is the divine life which the eternal Word had/has in himself (John 1:4) and which the Father has granted the Son to have in himself (5:26). Thus Jesus the Son can claim to "be the life" (11:26; 14:6) in that he is the one who grants life to those who "enter by him" (di' emou … eiselthēi [10:9]). And, in the classic expression of Johannine "realized eschatology," this is life to be experienced even now in the time before the resurrection of the last day. Not only that, but the sheep who receive this life experience it "abundantly" (perisson). In the words of Marianne Meye Thompson, "Abundant life is found at the intersection of created life and eternal life: each is given by God through the Son (or Word) and experienced as knowledge of and union with God."******

Second, not only does Jesus present himself as the gate, he also identifies himself as the "Good" (agathos, "ideal" or "noble" in the sense of being "for" the sheep) Shepherd. Just as in the parable, where the shepherd calls out to each sheep by name, so Jesus the Good Shepherd and his flock know each other with a reciprocal, intimate knowledge patterned after that between the Father and the Son. But the most interesting element of Jesus' explanation is his claim to being the "good" shepherd because he "lays down" (tithēmi in the present [!] tense in verses 11 and 17)******* his life "for the benefit of" (hyper) the sheep. One might have expected the shepherd to be said to be willing to die for his sheep. After all, in rural life, a dead shepherd is not optimal for the health of the flock! But Jesus, having already cryptically foretold both the means of his death and its salvific benefits in his nocturnal discussion with Nicodemus (3:14), argues that the only way to give life (zoē) to his sheep and thus protect them from perishing is to lay down his life (psychē) on their behalf. Herein lies the heart of John's theology of Jesus' death.

Much more could be said about this text. And much more will be said. But this in itself was good news to me as a 5 year old. And it remains good news to me now as a grizzled 64 year old. Jesus is my shepherd. And he is the only shepherd. Soli Deo Gloria!

*E.g., Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel according to John I-XII, Anchor Bible 29 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966) 392-93.

**E. F. Bishop, "The Door of the Sheep―John x. 7-9," Expository Times 71 (1959-60) 307-9.

***Though the expression in Psalm 117:20 (LXX) is pylē tou theou. Note that Psalm 118 features prominently in the Gospels as a text foreshadowing Jesus' ministry, particularly his death. Both John (12:13) and the Synoptics (Mark 11:9 et par.) quote verse 26 ("Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD") in connection with the Triumphal Entry. The Synoptic triple tradition (Mark 12:10 et par.) also has Jesus citing verses 22-23 "("the stone the builders rejected …") concerning himself at the conclusion of the Parable of the Tenants.

****John 3:15, 16, 36; 4:10, 14; 6:27, 33, 35, 48, 53, 54; 10:10, 28; 11:25; 14:6; 17:3; 20:31. Cf. 8:51-52.

*****John 10:11, 15, 17, 24; 12:25, 27; 13:37, 38; 15:13.

******Marianne Meye Thompson, John: a Commentary, New Testament Library (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2015) 224. For discussions of John's use of "life" language, cf. Thompson, 87-91; Brown, 505-9; James D. G. Dunn, Neither Jew Nor Greek: A Contested Identity, Christianity in the Making, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids/Cambridge, 2015) 359-60.

*******Nestle-Aland 28 reads tithēmi as well in verse 15, though the variant didōmi, attested by P45, P66, Aleph, and D, is likely to be preferred.