4th SUNDAY OF EASTER (B)

I am the good shepherd, and I know mine and mine know me. 

Jn 10: 11-18

v. 11. I am the good shepherd. A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

The 'good', rather than the normal Johannine 'genuine' or 'real' shepherd, because Jesus does not contrast so much in reality of his rule, but in its character and quality. Others may 'lord it' over men as they govern; he has come to minister and do the office of a servant (cf. the feet-washing of ch. 13).

v. 12. A hired man, who is not a shepherd and whose sheep are not his own, sees a wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away, and the wolf catches and scatters them.

Hired man is now mentioned for the first time, though it discloses the depth of the difference between Jesus as a shepherd who owns his sheep, and cares for them, and will protect them as he will his own life and those who have no such ties of ownership or care for those they govern, and who are thus moved by motives of reward.

vv. 14-15. I am the good shepherd, and I know mine and mine know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I will lay down my life for the sheep.

These verses set out again the parallel between the relation between Jesus and his disciples and that between Jesus and the Father. Mutual knowledge and love, and a life-giving care are the marks of that relationship.

v. 17. This is why the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.

“This is why the Father loves me.” It is not to be supposed that the Father only began to love the Son when he had offered himself upon the cross. Rather the evangelist is saying that the Father's eternal love for the Son rests upon the Son's eternal sharing of the Father's love for men. This finds expression in the incarnation, and in the self-offering of the cross.

v. 18. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own. I have power to lay it down, and power to take it up again. This command I have received from my Father.

The claim to be able to lay down life and to take it again must not be disconnected either from what precedes, or from what follows. What precedes is the series of affirmations that Jesus is the good shepherd (ruler), that he lays down his life for the sheep, and that the Father loves him because he lays down his life that he might take it again. What follows is the assertion that to lay down his life and take it again has been received as a charge from the Father. This therefore cannot mean that laying down life is made easy or terrorless. The Father loves the Son because in obedience he will lay down his life - the only way by which it may be eventually retained. He must resign his crown to secure it. And that laying down, the resignation, must take place while the Word is in the flesh.

REFLECTION

We are not to think of Jesus as a shepherd who is the true ruler of his people and who happens to lay down his life for his sheep, but rather as the true ruler of God’s people only in that and because he lays down his life for the sheep. 

His sacrifice is part of his office, and his reign in part consists in his self-offering for those he governs. Those who are able to trace the story of Hebrew religion the way in which the people of Israel had been able (or been enabled) to transmute the surrounding pagan new year rituals of the dying and rising of the king into their own rigorously spiritual worship can detect here the final fulfillment of the human conception of a divine king who dies for the life of his people. 

Those who remember the language of Second Isaiah concerning the 'servant' whose life is offered as a 'ransom for many" (Is 53:10-12) will catch the overtones of reference to one who although and because he is the one true ruler or shepherd of God's people is yet the servant of all; and as the servant will, like the suffering servant hymned in Isaiah 53, suffer to liberate his people and give his life for the sins of many.

Here is the crown and the highest fulfillment of ‘authority’ and ‘rule’ - that the one who governs should be the one who sacrifices his life.

The flock of Christ does not consist simply of those who are called out of the fold of Israel, but includes sheep not of that fold, whom Christ must bring, and make into one flock with those called out of Israel under his one shepherding. Such a figure is the very concise Johannine parallel to the Pauline exposition in Romans 9-11 of the way in which God elected Israel-after-the- flesh to be his people, only to have them reject the Messiah when he came, thereby bringing about the gathering in of the Gentiles. In this way their accession to the body of God's people—both Jews and Gentiles—should be fully brought into one. “So there shall be one flock, one shepherd” might well serve as a text for those three chapters in Romans which some have thought to be a sermon on the theme of the unity of God's purpose in history. The Good Shepherd is the savior of the world.

Finally, the evangelist makes it unmistakably plain that for the Good Shepherd to lay down his life for the sheep is not art inescapable submission to some power or authority that is out of control in God's universe, but a voluntary self-offering in loving fulfillment of the Father's will, in order that the life laid down might be taken up again in a new fullness and victory. 

The story of the 'passion' in John is not an account what men did to Jesus, but rather the story of what he did for them. Paradoxically it can be put in the form that where he was most passive (in yielding himself up to death) there he was most active (in bringing eternal life).That Jesus himself initiated the particular chain of event that resulted in his hanging on a cross the readers of the gospel could learn from any one of the synoptic. John makes it clear that not only at the moment of the initiation of these events, but all the way through, even when he hung upon the cress, Jesus was active and in complete control. 

John would not deny the witness of the synoptics and the writer of Acts that Jesus was crucified according to the determined purpose of God. He would hardly contest a claim that the cross was for Jesus an inescapable destiny. But he is even more concerned himself to witness to the truth that all through the events of the passion, crucifixion and death of Jesus, the true agent, the true actor remained Jesus himself His active will turned what might otherwise be a blind fate or an ineluctable destiny into a self-offering and a self-sacrifice. And it all finds its origin and its enactment in the love of the Father for the world which the Son, sharing the Father's love, came to save. Such a figure, such a person is the one who claims to be the Good Shepherd.