I want to start my address today with two questions: “What is a shepherd?” And “Who is Jesus?” Simple questions, somebody may say, of course we know the answers! I would challenge that. To me both questions are worth exploring.
First; what is a shepherd? The most astonishing answer to this question I have heard, came from a little boy in a Sunday School class I once taught. As we were starting our discussion about Jesus as a good shepherd, I asked the children this question: What is a shepherd? These were rather underprivileged children in the suburbs of Helsinki. My question was met with a blank silence. After a while one little boy timidly made an uncertain attempt to raise his hand. I asked him what he thought. He said: “It is a gray box that ticks.” For a while I was totally puzzled by this answer. What on earth was going on in his mind? And then it dawned to me. This boy had been on a farm and he had seen an electric fence, which in Finland is called an ‘electric shepherd’. Part of the system was a box which made ticking sounds. Of course we had to spend quite some time discussing other kinds of shepherds before we could talk about Jesus.
What comes to our mind when we think of a shepherd? Is it perhaps a scene from a film like the Brokeback Mountain, where huge masses of sheep are moved to their summer pastures? Or is it something like in a song I learned in my youth, where a shepherd girl is singing about her loneliness on Sunday morning, when everybody else is on their way to church. She then settles to regard the forest as her church and trees as the organ playing for her.
Living in urban areas we are very far from the rural life of the past generations, and even further from the life in Palestine some two thousand years ago. Depending on our mental image of a shepherd we can come to very different conclusions about the meaning of the words “good shepherd”.
My image of the shepherd girl would have the implications of romanticism, being alone in the nature with your flocks. Modern mass shepherding would emphasize the relationship of a sheep and a shepherd as part of an economic arrangement, designed to profit the owner. And from my Sunday School student’s image we would conclude that the shepherd’s role is to keep the sheep within certain limits by punishing any attempt to trespass with an electric shock.
I want to take a break now from the shepherd theme for a while and ask the other question: “Who is Jesus?” This question has frequently been asked by Theologians in the last decades. There has been extensive literature written on the “historical Jesus”. The attempt has been to return to the origins of the Jesus story by using all available historical sources and critical methods of research. Recently the question seems to have gained a lot of secular interest too. It has become subject of fiction, like in “DaVinci Code”. And finding of long forgotten texts like “The Gospel of Judas” has got people all excited about these new “revelations”.
In his Easter message the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, speaks of this interest. He says that the fact that the Gospel of Judas and some other similar gospels were not included in the authorized version of the Bible, seems to many people like a conspiracy on part of the official church. They think that the church wanted to suppress some information about Jesus. For that kind of conspiracy to exist there would need to be a church that had that kind of power, Rowan Williams says. But, he goes on, we have to remember that the Christians of the first centuries were a persecuted minority. What they taught about Jesus exposed them to a risk of losing their lives. The collections of stories about the life and teaching of Jesus were not approved or disapproved by some pre-existing authority. The collection of the New Testament writings was determined by their usefulness in proclaiming the Jesus the disciples knew. How the New Testament became to be what it is now, was a sort of natural growth process, which then became finalized in church synods, meetings of representatives of the new expanding church.
So back to the question “Who is Jesus?” We know that he lived human life as Jesus of Nazareth. In the New Testament writings we see that he taught, he healed, he often came into conflict with religious and political authorities. He was followed by disciples, who constantly seemed to misunderstand what he was trying to teach. These stories about his earthly life were told and eventually written down after his death, in the light of the experience of Easter morning. The disciples had to rethink their understanding of Jesus as they come to the conclusion that he is alive and with them in a new way. What he had said, what he had done, what he had been had to be put in a new framework of the resurrection. Jesus becomes Christ, God’s anointed, for them. Now their continuing experience of his presence gives them a new understanding of his previous teaching.
For us it is difficult, yet important, to see the difference between the Jesus of Nazareth and the risen Christ. Jesus of Nazareth as a human being can be an object of our historical research. The risen Christ is an object of faith, of the faith of his disciples and of our faith. Jesus’ humanity is part of the empirical world where we live. We can improve our understanding of the historical Jesus by means of research and study. The divinity of Christ is a matter of faith. We can do research on this faith as a human phenomenon, but the divinity of Christ is not something we can approve or disapprove by any scientific criteria.
In the New Testament Scriptures these two threads are intertwined. What is said about Jesus of Nazareth is colored by the disciples’ new understanding of the risen Christ and his divinity. But it is important to acknowledge the existence of these two threads. Too often we talk about the earthly life of Jesus as if he was not really a human. His suffering and death can become something which is not real, because we think he knew he was divine and could not really die.
After all this discussion I now return to the Shepherd theme. What did it mean when Jesus said he was a shepherd? I mentioned earlier some images of a shepherd which may not be very helpful in understanding Jesus’ words. What images might his original listeners have had in their mind? A shepherd in Palestine worked in a difficult territory. To feed the sheep the shepherd had to be on move with the flocks to find the grassy spots on the mountains. On the narrow paths the shepherd led the way and the flock followed. The psalm attributed to David, who some centuries earlier had shepherded his sheep, speaks of the shepherd making his flock to lie in green pastures and leading them to still waters, where they can eat and drink. The shepherd’s rod and staff are comfort to the sheep. They mean security when the shepherd is defending them against the wolves and jackals. With the crook of his staff he can pull the erring sheep back to the path from the thorny bushes.
Jesus surely new Psalm 23 as psalms were the hymn book of the synagogue worship. He knew that David described Lord as his shepherd using the familiar images of the shepherding tasks of his youth. John in the Gospel reading tells that these images also fitted Jesus. As a shepherd he knows his flock intimately, he knows his sheep by name. To defend his flock the shepherd has to risk even his life. If he is not ready to do this, he is not a true owner- shepherd, but a hired hand who does not care of the fate of the sheep.
John was writing the gospel after Jesus’ death and resurrection. In his account of Jesus’ words he was interpreting the experience of the disciples, who had come to believe that Jesus’ had laid down his life for them on the cross. They had the security of being his flock and they knew that he was still defending them against their enemies. He was there rescuing them when they lost their way and were in danger of perishing in the roadside thickets. But already their horizons are widening, they begin to understand that Jesus is not just for them, not just for the Jewish people, but there are other sheepfolds to whom he is equally a shepherd.
And what does it mean then to have Jesus as a shepherd? In the letter of John the writer draws a conclusion: Jesus’ love towards people is known from the fact that he laid down his life for them, so the love of his followers is also seen in their willingness to lay down their lives for others. Here is probably the most profound answer to the question “What is a shepherd?” He is somebody who lays down his life for his flock. And at the same time it is the answer to the other question “Who is Jesus?” He is the shepherd who lays down his life. He leads his followers to be shepherds to each other, and also to those outside their own sheepfold.
Rev. Kyllikki Pitts
May 7, 2006