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Friends,
This coming Sunday is Good Shepherd Sunday. We’ll hear Psalm 23, which celebrates the dignity of the shepherd’s life. I’ll talk more about this in a moment. The New Testament lesson is John 10:1-10. Biblical scholars have titled this passage, “Jesus the Good Shepherd.”
John’s audience might have been taken aback by equating Jesus with a shepherd. The view of shepherding in first-century Judaism was deeply ambivalent. Palestinian Jews held in tension two views of shepherds.
On one hand, the patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David—were all shepherds. The shepherd was a figure of ancient honor, embedded in Israel’s founding narratives and in the royal vocabulary (the king as shepherd of his people).
On the other hand, by the first century the actual working shepherd has slipped considerably in social estimation. Reading rabbinic literature one sees the suspicion of shepherds. Shepherds were often listed alongside tax collectors and gamblers as people whose testimony could not be accepted in a court of law. The concern was partly practical—shepherds led their flocks across other people’s land and were suspected of petty theft—and partly about their ritual unreliability, since they spent long periods away from town, unable to observe purity laws or observe Sabbath properly.
The shepherd’s work was never done. At dawn, the sheepfold would be opened. In village settings, multiple families’ flocks were kept overnight in a communal sheepfold—a stone-walled enclosure, often watched by a hired gatekeeper. Each shepherd would come and call, and the sheep, recognizing the specific voice they had been conditioned to follow from birth. This is not sentimental: it was a practical daily reality, which is why Jesus’ audience in John 10 would have immediately understood the image—the shepherd calling her/his own sheep, and the sheep hear her/his voice.
At night, the shepherd would return the flock to the fold or, when traveling, to a temporary enclosure of thorn bushes—the shepherd sleeping across the gap in the entrance, literally becoming “the gate” with his own body. This is the image behind John 10:7, “Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep.’” There was no other guardian; the shepherd was the threshold.
The shepherd in first-century Palestine was simultaneously an ancient symbol of dignity and an everyday figure of marginality—someone who worked at the edge of society, in difficult terrain, with significant responsibility and modest reward, known intimately to his animals and relatively invisible to the powerful. That Jesus reached for this figure, and then identified himself with it, tells us something important about where Jesus thought the center of gravity of divine concern actually was.
Peace,
Rev. Tim
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