“I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine”

Jesus says that he is “the good shepherd”, emphasis on the adjective “good” which, I will argue, is also substantive, meaning the Good that is God. He is “the good shepherd,” he says, not once, not twice, but three times. And he explains what it means.

It is one of the most concrete of the seven so-called “I am” sayings of Jesus. All the others are to some extent or other more abstract and general: the bread of life, the light of the world, the door of the sheep, the resurrection and the life, the way, the truth and the life, the true vine. They are notable metaphors for the nature of our incorporation in Christ. They speak to who he is essentially and absolutely in himself and what that means for us in our lives. They are, in this sense, analogies that point us to the mystery of God understood universally through the particularities of human experience that at the same time reveal who he is in himself. Like his saying “before Abraham was, I am”, they echo God’s Revelation of himself as “I am who I am” to Moses in the burning bush.

Good in Greek, (αγαθος) also means beautiful, (καλος). The terms are interchangeable. Three times Jesus says that he is the “good shepherd” (καλος). Beautiful. It is a strong statement. You know, of course, the Parable of the Good Samaritan, one of the essential stories for Christians about the ethical understanding, meaning what is it that is right to do because it is what is true and good to think and be. Nowhere in that parable is the Samaritan actually identified as the “good” Samaritan. That is, understandably, an interpretation that arises from our reflection on the power and truth of that story.

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“He showed unto them his hands and his side”

They were behind closed doors, huddled in fear and uncertainty. It is an apt metaphor for ourselves and our culture hiding behind the closed doors of our minds in the endless confusion of opinions and uncertainties about ourselves and our world, caught in a maelstrom of conflicting ideas, no longer “assured of certain certainties”, (or, for that matter, chained to our digital devices whose whole purpose is to make us think in a mechanical manner). The closed doors of our minds are like tombs where we are buried in ourselves. Yet in the wonder of the Resurrection the tomb becomes the womb of new life, the radical new and ever renewing life that is Resurrection. This story shows that transformation from death to life most compellingly.

The seventeenth-century preacher, Lancelot Andrewes, preaching on this Easter text in 1609, notes that there are five Resurrection appearances of Christ on Easter Day but suggests that this story is the chief or the most significant. Christ appears to Mary Magdalene, to the women coming from the sepulchre, to the two on the Road to Emmaus, to St. Peter, and now here to eleven of the disciples and those with them behind closed doors. As Andrewes suggests there is something comprehensive and universal in these stories. They transcend, I think, the conflict narratives of competing universalities and point to something greater, more complementary, and inclusive.

He observes that “the first two appearances of Christ are to women, the last three to men; so to both sexes. To Peter and to Mary Magdalene, so to sinners of both sexes. To the eleven as signifying the clergy, and to those with them signifying the laity; so to both those states of life as well … But of all the five, this is the chief for this here is when they were all together rather than scattered.” Gathered not scattered.

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