Day: May 4, 2025

“I lay down my life for the sheep”

In one succinct phrase we have the entire essence of the Christian Faith. It is nothing less than the total self-giving life of God in the sacrifice of Christ. To be more precise, it is the radical meaning of the Trinity. We are familiar, perhaps, too familiar with the image of Christ the Good Shepherd and often misunderstand it. It signals, to be sure, the care of God towards us, God for us, we might say. Yet that is entirely grounded in God himself. Our text follows immediately upon the revelatory words of Jesus about the deeper and truer meaning of the image of the Good Shepherd. He is, as he says about himself, “the good shepherd,” but beyond making a certain assertion and identity claim, he explains what it means in relation to us and what it is grounded upon.

“I am known of mine,” he says, but that is followed by the sentence in which our text is embedded. “As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep.” Our knowing him is ultimately grounded in the knowing of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit; our knowing as grounded in God’s eternal knowing of us. For where there are two, there is a third, something which we see in the story on the Road to Emmaus where Jesus comes alongside the disciples in their perplexity and confusion, their unknowing, to bring them into an understanding. How? Through “interpret[ing] to them in all of the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” That is what we have here too. He is interpreting to us the meaning of himself as the Good Shepherd. We are gathered into the spiritual relation of the persons of the Trinity, the divine communion of eternal and total self-giving love.

What that means for us is seen in the Epistle and Gospel for today as concentrated in the Collect. The Father has given his only Son “to be unto us both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life.” What is revealed to us about the self-giving life of God himself through the sacrifice of Christ is meant to become our life; we are meant “most thankfully” to “receive that his inestimable benefit” and “daily [to] endeavour ourselves to follow the blessed steps of his most holy life.”

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