“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.”
This is reflected in 1st Peter 2. “Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that we should follow his steps.” Christ in “his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness.” The reading points to the image of shepherd and sheep, the image of being gathered to God after being like sheep who have gone astray. For “now” we are “returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of [our] souls.” The image of God as Shepherd and Bishop, meaning one who has oversight, is understood in terms of the radical love of Christ whose sacrifice gathers us and returns us to our life with God.
The Gospel story teaches us the radical meaning of care as cure. That is the real meaning of the laying down of his life. It is the overcoming of all sin and evil, past, present and future. This is yet another way for us to grasp the meaning of the essential life of God given to be our life with one another. John’s Gospel makes it clear that this shepherding love and care is not restricted to any one culture or people. It cannot be reduced to the static categories of group identity or to the conflicting assertions and assumptions of the therapeutic culture. “Other sheep I have,” Jesus says, “which are not of this fold; them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one flock, and one shepherd.” He is speaking to the Pharisees who are challenging Jesus about his teaching.
Jesus makes it clear that God cannot be the possession of any one group. The teaching of God is for all who hear his voice. There is an essential universality that arises out of the limits and divisions of our particular experiences and identities but which cannot be reduced to them. The “other sheep,” in the context of the New Testament, is generally understood to mean the Gentiles, a collective term that embraces all peoples and nations who are not Israelites. Jesus takes the Old Testament language of God as Shepherd to the people of Israel and extends it to all who hear his voice.
It is not by accident that the story and image of Christ the Good Shepherd belongs to the Easter mystery. Traditionally read on the Second Sunday after Easter, it speaks profoundly to the radical meaning of the essential and eternal life of God made known to us through Christ’s Death and Resurrection. The two are inseparable as we have seen. “For this reason the Father loves me,” Jesus says in the words which follow immediately from today’s Gospel reading, “because I lay down my life, that I may take it again.” The radical meaning of that free-willing sacrifice as grounded in the mutually indwelling life of the Trinity is made clear. “No one,” Jesus says, “takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again; this charge I have received from my Father.” .” [Once again, this testifies to the nature of our lives as embodied beings. Following Ross Douthat’s observations about the unreality of the virtual world that degrades the real nature of “friendship, education, love, art, and politics,” philosopher Kathleen Stock nicely notes that “few are prepared to speak up for embodiment over digitality, traditional experiences over what seem like shiny new ones — or the local over the global.” Such are the dominant features of our disconnected world and the disillusionment that it occasions.]
John’s remarkable passage in the Good Shepherd Gospel locates our human freedom within the self-giving life of God. Christ’s sacrifice for our sins redeems us from our wayward ways; “all we like sheep have gone astray.” But “by his stripes [we] are healed.” He returns us to the truth of our humanity as realized in his Death and Resurrection. Thus he is both sacrifice and example. The Resurrection opens us out to the radical life of God in itself and for us.
“I lay down my life for the sheep.”
Fr. David Curry
The Second Sunday after Easter 2025