Reflections on John 10: Jesus as the "Good Shepherd," Part 6

And so our lengthy series of reflections based on Jesus' parable of the Good Shepherd and his sheep in John 10 comes to its inevitable conclusion …

The dialectic between Jesus' historical mission as Israel's would-be Messiah and the church's subsequent mission to the Gentiles plays a significant role in both Matthew and Luke-Acts, not to mention the letters of Paul. For example, in Matthew, though the eschatological pilgrimage of the Gentiles to Zion (cf., inter alia, Isaiah 2:2-4) is adumbrated in the story of the Magi in chapter 2, and the inclusion of Gentiles in the blessings of the kingdom―to the detriment of many "sons of the kingdom," that is, Jews, who will be excluded―is briefly mentioned by Jesus in response to the faith shown by a Roman centurion (Matthew 8:5-13), explicit mission to the nations is seen to be the consequence of Jesus' post-resurrection investment with authority given to him as the exalted Son of Man of Daniel 7 (Matthew 28:19-20). For John, on the other hand, in keeping with his presentation of Jesus' career as a "two-level drama,"* the Jew/Gentile dynamic has largely been replaced with his famous "believer"/"world" conflict which, to be sure, includes the other but transcends it in keeping with the situation confronting John in the late first century CE.

But traces remain, as becomes clear in Jesus' curious interpretation of the parable in John 10:14-16:

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. And they will be** one flock, one shepherd. (NRSV, alt. JRM)

The notion of there being "one flock, one shepherd" clearly is based on the prophetic text we earlier determined to be the subtext for Jesus' claim to be the Good Shepherd, namely, Ezekiel 34:

I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall fed 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. (Ezekiel 34: 23-24, NRSV)

Note also, from a few chapters later: 

My servant David shall be king over them; and they shall have one shepherd. They shall follow my ordinances and be careful to observe my statutes. (Ezekiel 37:24, NRSV)

The latter passage is especially instructive in that it immediately follows Ezekiel's famous vision of the dry bones (Ezekiel 37:1-14) and YHWH's promise to restore and reunite the divided and scattered houses of Israel and Judah (Ezekiel 37:15-23).

But who are these "other sheep" Jesus claims he "must" (dei) bring who don't belong to the fold of those for whom he was to give his life as the Davidic Good Shepherd, those who entered via himself as the "gate" and who thus "know his voice?" Surely it is not his unbelieving interlocutors later in the Temple precincts at Hanukkah, to whom he emphatically states that they do not belong to his sheep (John 10:26). Certainly it refers, in a broad sense, to those who, at the time, were at a physical distance from Jesus and who thus may not have heard of him, let alone heard him. But can this group of sheep be limited, as in Ezekiel's prophecy, to the dispersed sheep of Israel and Judah? Clues may be found later in John's story.

The first such clue may be found in John's editorial comment on the high priest Caiaphas's ironic, contemptuous statement to the Sanhedrin that "You know nothing at all! You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for (hyper) the people than to have the whole nation perish (apolētai)" (John 10:49b-50, NRSV, alt. JRM). Caiaphas, says John, spoke as an unwitting prophet in his capacity as high priest:

He did not say this on his own, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God. (John 11:51-52, NRSV)

This is a remarkable theological statement, and not only for its explicit claim that Jesus' death in the place of the people would ultimately redound to their benefit.*** More significantly, Jesus' death for the sheep in John 10 is here restated in terms of his death "for the dispersed children of God." It is thus these scattered offspring of God who are to identified as Jesus' "other sheep not of this fold" in John 10. In this regard, note that the expression "children of God" occurs just one other time in John's Gospel, in the Prologue, where they are identified as those who "receive" and "believe in" Jesus in contrast to "his own people"―that is, the Jews―who did not (largely) thus accept him (John 1:11-12). Indeed, John famously extends the saving work of Jesus beyond the ethnic borders of Israel to the dark, hostile "world" (kosmos) now under the grip of Satan (John 12:31):

• God loves the world (3:16)
• God "gave" or "sent" his son to save the world (3:16-17)
• Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the world's sin (1:29)
• Jesus is the Savior of the world (4:42)
• Jesus is the Bread who gives his life that the world may have life (6:33, 51)
• Jesus is the Light of the world (8:12; 9:5)

This extension of the saving effects of Jesus' mission beyond the bounds of Israel is likewise intimated in a curious incident, unique to John's Gospel, recorded to have taken place following Jesus' "triumphal entry" into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Certain Greeks, in town for Passover (were they so-called "God-fearers"?) approached Philip (because he, a Galilean with a Greek name, could speak Greek?) with a request to be granted an audience with Jesus (John 12:21). When Andrew reaches Jesus with this request, the latter's response is peculiar, at first glance unconnected to the request at all:

Jesus answered them, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. (John 12:23-24, NRSV)

Clearly this is a statement dealing with the theological significance of his forthcoming death just five days hence, a death which John characteristically, through the textual interface of Isaiah 52:13 and Daniel 7:13, interprets as his exaltation to glory. Note, however, the claim that his death was necessary precisely to "bear much fruit." What is this "fruit?" Remember earlier, in John 10, Jesus had made the peculiar claim that he would give his sheep eternal "life" (zōē) precisely through giving his own "life" (psychē) on their behalf. Jesus is implicitly saying something similar here in a logion that nicely factors in the salvation-historical realities of the situation. Earlier in the narrative, "the Jews," confused when Jesus, at Tabernacles, spoke of "going" away to where they could not come, had wondered whether or not Jesus was going to go away and "teach the Greeks" (John 7:33-35). Here some Greeks sought an audience with him unsuccessfully. Why? Jesus gives an answer, but does so by implication: Yes, the time is coming when Greeks would hear the message; but that time must await his coming death, a death that would, in the words of Richard Hays, "be necessary to generate the fruit-bearing mission to the Greeks and 'to draw all people to myself' (12:32)."**** Indeed, as Jesus says only a couple of verses later, "Whoever (ean … tis) serves me must follow me, and where I am, there my servant will be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor" (John 12:26, NRSV)

It is impossible not to notice here what Hays refers to as "a hermeneutical transformation and expansion of Ezekiel's vision for 'one shepherd' who will preside over one flock."***** Indeed, the fervent hope of a restored ethnic Israel is not abandoned, but reconstituted and expanded with universal, what John himself would describe as "cosmic" (i.e., world-wide) dimensions. And it seems that John saw in this more than the heretofore-expected eschatological pilgrimage of Gentiles to Zion. Note the translation of John 10:16, which I quoted above, in which I deliberately altered the NRSV rendering in order to reflect the preferred, 3rd person plural reading genēsontai: "And they shall be one flock, one shepherd." Ultimately, for John, Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus constitute one flock of sheep, and it was in order to constitute them as one entity (hina … synagagēi eis hen) that Jesus died for these scattered children of God (John 11:52).

So it would seem that Paul, the famous Apostle to the Gentiles, was not alone in his belief that the church, consisting of Jews and Gentiles as one entity, was the true progeny of Abraham, the singular eschatological covenant people of God, in which ethnic distinctions have forever been made irrelevant and redundant because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Messiah, the true son of Abraham (cf., famously, Galatians 3:28).****** Soli Deo Gloria!

* I.e., John's narrative is meant to speak at two levels, with the situation confronted by the Johannine community at Ephesus in the 80's-90's CE coloring his presentation of the events of Jesus' historical, einmalig ministry. Cf. J. Louis Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel, 3rd ed. (Louisville, Kentucky: WestminsterJohnKnox, 2003).

**Reading genēsontai (with P45, B, D, 33) instead of genēsetai (with P66, Aleph, A, Byz).

***Playing on the dual significances of the preposition hyper.

****Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco, Texas: Baylor, 2016) 342. Note the coherence of this perspective, which most certainly can be traced to the historical Jesus himself, with Matthew's version of Jesus' healing of the demon-possessed daughter of a Canaanite/Syrophoenician woman, in which Jesus tells her, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel" (Matthew 15:24; cf. 10:6). As in John, explicit and purposeful mission to the Gentiles awaited his death and resurrection.

*****Ibid. 

****** I will let James D. G. Dunn have the last word: "So for John as much as for Paul, the good news of Jesus reaches far beyond the nation of Israel and reaches out to all the dark world. The particular issues which framed and shaped Paul's expression of the gospel have changed, but the concept of a good news which embraces a much wider realm than Israel alone is the same message dressed in different clothes" (Neither Jew Nor Greek: A Contested Identity [Christianity in teh Making, vol.3; Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2015] 363).