Careful! Isn't this a theme for Christmas, you may say. What has it do do with Holy Week or Easter?
Our problem with knowing God is that God is too big to grasp. And even when God comes to meet us in human form, in Jesus, what Jesus has done for us is too big to grasp as well. Films and narratives can bring home to us the ghastly pain and the unjustness of the Crucifixion. We can almost get our minds round the events at the Empty Tomb. But there was more to the Crucifixion than ghastly pain and unjust punishment. The countless Jews who died at Auschwitz suffered no less cruelly and wrongly than the one Jew who died at Golgotha. The Crucifixion is indeed about suffering and death, but it is also about salvation.
To help us understand this, we use images. Our worship abounds in images: from the stained-glass windows, though the bread and wine and the Lord's Table, down to what we say and sing, and how we say and sing it, heads bowed in prayer or arms uplifted in praise. Far more so, our Bible abounds in images. The images bring home to us how God comes to meet us and to greet us at his heavenly banquet: two recurring images. Jesus talks in images - parables which carry his message. Not everyone understood his parables ("They hear, but they do not listen"), and even the disciples were slow to make the connection between Jesus' words and the truth that lay behind them.
Some of Jesus' images were startling - imagine your reaction if he had said he was a daffodil or a plate of rösti. But he didn't. He was the True Vine. He was the Bread of Life. And his listeners would have recalled that their Bible had spoken of Israel as God's vineyard, and of how manna had appeared from nowhere in the desert to sustain God's people.
Almost as startling (when you consider that Jesus' father was a carpenter and many of his disciples were fishermen) is Jesus' assertion "I am the Good Shepherd." Again, his listeners would have recalled that the Bible had spoken of God as Israel's shepherd. They would have recalled Psalm 23, with its promise of rest and repose in "green pastures". And they would have given weight to each word - not any kind of shepherd, but The Shepherd, the Good (on a par with the True, the Living - a shepherd in the deepest sense). Even the "I am" would have recalled God's self-revelation to Moses from the burning bush (Ex.3:14).
God was Israel's shepherd. The religious leaders were also shepherds - though bad ones, hungry for power without responsibility. Jesus was the True Shepherd, who would lay down his life for the sheep. And this brings us back to Good Friday.
The shepherd tends the flock, leads it, seeks out the best for it. When a member strays, the shepherd makes sure that the rest of the flock are safe and then goes out to find it. And the Good Shepherd will go further: when the wolf comes, he will guard his sheep at the risk of his own life. The early church recognized this as one of many images giving significance to Jesus, who died so that we might have life.
Indeed, Jesus' words continue by reminding us that he has "other sheep not of this fold". His listeners would have seen "this fold" as the Jewish people, bound together in covenant with God. But Jesus, and God, is not only "Shepherd of Israel" (Ps.80:1). We are all God's sheep, and Jesus died for all, as shepherd and, paradoxically, as sheep too: God's sacrificial lamb.
Images are not meant to be taken too literally: the shepherd, the lamb, the door to the sheepfold all light up part of the truth about Jesus. But when the shepherd has laid down his life for the sheep, they are not left defenceless. "I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered," as Jesus reminds the disciples of Zechariah's prophecy (Zech 13:7, Mark 14:27), but "after I am raised up, I will go before you" and lead the disciples again out into the world.
So at the end of the narrative of the resurrection, Jesus calls Peter, the same Peter who in fulfilment of Zechariah's prophecy has denied him three times. Three times Peter affirms his love, and at the end, Jesus says to him: "Feed my sheep." And later in the New Testament, in Acts and 1 Peter, the same command, to "tend the flock of God" (Acts 20:28, 1 Peter 5:2), passes on to the leaders of the church. God's flock, God's family, have been saved from the power of evil by the shepherd who laid down his life for us. But the message of Easter is that the shepherd lives on and still calls others to guide us all to the green pastures and still waters where we can enjoy the goodness of the presence of God. Alleluia!
HD