Author: CCW

“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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“Behold my hands and my feet”

The Gospel for Easter Tuesday follows immediately upon the beautiful story of the Road to Emmaus, one of the most comprehensive accounts of how the Resurrection comes to birth in us. The crucial feature is that Jesus teaches us the Resurrection most clearly and most fully.

In Luke’s account in the Gospel read on Easter Monday, two things stand out: first, the opening of the Scriptures and the opening of our eyes in making himself known through the breaking of the bread. In the first, the opening of the Scriptures, Jesus gives us a way of understanding the events of the Passion by reference to Moses and the Prophets “the things concerning himself” but it is the second, his action in breaking the bread and giving thanks that crystallizes and confirms the teaching.

On Easter Tuesday, two things also stand out that are critical to the making known of the doctrine of the Resurrection: first, he shows them his hands and his feet and he opens our understanding again through the Scriptures. The first shows us one of the primary aspects of the Resurrection. It is made known through the signs of the Passion. This underscores the theological point that the Resurrection is known in the Passion and the Passion in the Resurrection as testament to God as life and love made manifest and alive in us. The point here is that Jesus shows them the marks of his Passion in his hands and his feet. He bids us look on him whom we have pierced but those marks of sin and human cruelty have become the signs of transforming love and life.

The second is the opening of the Scriptures which follows upon his showing us his hands and his feet. This is the reverse order from Easter Monday where the opening of the Scriptures precedes his making himself known in the breaking of the bread. All these ‘events’ go together and complement one another in the gathering of the understanding into the mystery of Christ now risen but showing us the marks of the Passion now transfigured, we might say, to become the means of our learning about the radical truth of God as love and life, that is to say, Resurrection.

The Easter Tuesday Gospel underscores the point that it is really the opening out of the whole of the Scriptures – meaning the Hebrew Scriptures – that provide the Christian understanding of the Resurrection but through Jesus as the exegete we might say. Luke here has Jesus makes reference to what is “written in the Law of Moses, and in the Prophets, and in the Psalms” concerning himself; in short, the TANAKH, the acronym for the Torah (the Law), the Nevi’im (the Prophets) and the Ketuvim (the Writings) as embodied in the Psalms. But Luke also shows us what this means for us: the preaching of repentance for the forgiveness of sins as belonging to our witness to the truth of the Passion and the Resurrection.

Just as our heart burned within us when he walked with us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us on Easter Monday, an image of being inwardly pierced or moved in our hearts and minds, so on Easter Tuesday, we are inwardly pierced by beholding Christ pierced but alive. The marks of the Passion are like words written in his body that open us out to the radical understanding of the Resurrection.

“Behold my hands and my feet”

Fr. David Curry
Easter Tuesday, 2026

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“Did not our heart burn within us?”

This complements the text which has carried us through Holy Week and Easter: “a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed”. Luke’s story of ‘The Road to Emmaus’ is the most comprehensive account of the coming to birth in us of the idea of the Resurrection. It shows us its most essential principle: It is the Risen Christ who teaches most clearly the doctrine of the Resurrection and its meaning for us and in us.

This Gospel story read on Easter Monday presents us with the logic of our learning about the Resurrection. Two disciples are fleeing from Jerusalem in fear and uncertainty following the events of the Passion and the first report of the Resurrection via the witness of the empty tomb and the vision of the Angels’ to the women. Jesus comes alongside Cleopas and the other disciple and enters into their conversation. He is not recognised by them because they think he is dead. But he effectively draws out of them exactly what they think has happened about which they are in perplexity.

It is a perfect scene of teaching in its Socratic sense. They are in fear and utter confusion about what has happened. Only then are we capable of learning because we can no longer be “assured of certain certainties” (T.S. Eliot, The Preludes). Jesus draws out of them an account of what has happened – the crucifixion, the finding of the empty tomb by the women, the angelic vision, all which is conveyed to the disciples but all as uncertain and confusing. Only then Jesus says, “Foolish ones and slow of heart to believe”. Only then does he explain the Scriptures from Moses and all the Prophets “the things concerning himself.” In short, he provides them with a way of understanding his Passion and the culmination of its meaning in his Resurrection. All through the opening of the Scriptures, meaning the Old Testament as Christians would later say.

But that isn’t the whole story. They don’t get it all just yet. Only in the last part of the story does the proverbial penny drop. They reach Emmaus and persuade Jesus to stay with them. “And it came to pass,” Luke tells us, that “he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them.” This recalls the Last Supper. Luke simply tells us, “their eyes were opened, and they knew him.” The action crystallizes and confirms the teaching; a perfect witness to the complementarity of Word and Sacrament. And it changes them wonderfully, piercing them with a new understanding. “Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the Scriptures?” They return to Jerusalem no longer in fear and anxiety and tell the other disciples “how he was known of them in the breaking of the bread.”

The moving principle in the making known of the Resurrection is the Risen Christ by the Word audible and visible, his Word spoken in the witness of the Scriptures and his Word enacted in the Sacrament. Their hearts are moved and they are changed. And so may we.

“Did not our heart burn within us?”

Fr. David Curry
Easter Monday, 2026

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