'I am the Good Shepherd'—What that means for Christians
Surrounded by enemies plotting his death and excommunicating his followers from the Synagogue, the Good Shepherd declares his love for his sheep.
Surrounded by enemies plotting his death and excommunicating his followers from the Synagogue, the Good Shepherd declares his love for his sheep.
Editor’s Notes
In this part, Fr. Coleridge tells us…
How Christ proves His identity as the Good Shepherd by laying down His life for His sheep.
That the love between Father and Son is the model and source of Christ’s love for each soul.
Why His foreknowledge, sacrifice, and intimacy with the faithful mark Him as no hireling but the true Shepherd.
He shows us that His love is eternal, personal, and sacrificial—flowing from the Father to each soul.
For more on the context of this episode, see here.
The Good Shepherd
The Preaching of the Cross, Part I, Chapter XV
St. John x. 1–21.
Story of the Gospels, § 96
Burns and Oates, London, 1886
Sung on the Second Sunday of Eastertide
Why does Christ call the Chief Priests 'thieves and robbers'?
Why Christ is 'the door' through which every good shepherd must come
Why the Good Shepherd told the wolves they had no power over him
Effect of 'The Good Shepherd' on the different classes of the Jews
The Good Shepherd giveth His Life
‘I am the Good—that is the excellent, the perfect, the faultless—Shepherd. The Good Shepherd giveth His life for the sheep.’
In those countries, as we see in the history of David, the shepherds might have to expose their own lives for the saving of the sheep. Thus the idea is not far-fetched or foreign to the subject, and no doubt it was one on which the Heart of our Lord delighted to dwell.
And what could more fitly suggest it than the occasion on which this parable was spoken, when our Lord had before Him some of the very men who were to be the human instruments of His death, for the salvation of the world? Their malice had already shown itself in many ways. He had already declared to them that He knew they wished to kill Him, and now they had added to their former measures of hostility and persecution this new instance of the excommunication of a man on whom He had wrought a miracle, which of itself was enough to convert them.
These words were a secret warning to them that He would not prevent, by any exertion of Divine power, the final accomplishment of the action which they meditated, and which they coloured to themselves with the pretext of zeal for the honour of God and the keeping of the Law.
The hireling
‘But the hireling and he that is not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and the wolf catcheth and scattereth the sheep, and the hireling flieth because he is a hireling, and hath no care for the sheep.’
These words may be understood simply as drawing the contrast between our Lord as the Good Shepherd, and an impostor such as the Pharisees were endeavouring to make Him out to be.
Or they may convey a tacit comparison between Himself and the Pharisees themselves, who certainly had no true care or love for the sheep committed, in a certain measure, to their charge, who would not exert themselves to help them in the smallest things, or to bear the burthens which they laid upon them, as our Lord afterwards said of them. Much less, therefore, would they have risked their lives for the sheep.
There is this twofold reference running all through this passage—the defence of our Lord Himself, by showing how differently He was disposed towards the sheep from any one who was an impostor, and also the contrast between Himself and the enemies who were attacking Him and denying His title to be considered a lawful shepherd of the sheep of God. But He seems to dwell far more lovingly on the sacrifice He is Himself to make and on the love which He is to display for His sheep, than on the other side of the picture.
Characteristics of the Good Shepherd
He goes on in the following verses to draw out this truth concerning Himself still more fully.
‘I am the Good Shepherd and I know Mine and Mine know Me. As the Father knoweth Me and I know the Father, and I lay down My life for My sheep. And other sheep I have that are not of this fold. Them also I must bring, and they shall hear My voice, and there shall be one fold and one Shepherd.’
Here it may be said that our Lord gives four proofs that what He says about the Good Shepherd is true, four characteristics which are found in Himself, and which mark Him out as the Good Shepherd.
In the first place He knows His sheep, and in the second place His sheep know Him. He compares this mutual knowledge of Himself and His sheep to the knowledge whereby His Father knows Him and He knows His Father.
The third mark of the Good Shepherd is that He lays down His life for His sheep.
And the fourth mark is that He has other sheep which are not of this fold, and that He is to show His care and love for these distant or wandering sheep by bringing them home, and making of them with the others one fold under one shepherd.
His knowledge of the sheep
Our Lord has already said, in His description of the relations between the sheep and the shepherd in the opening parable from which all this passage depends, that the shepherd knows his sheep and calls them by name, and they know his voice.
The present passage, therefore, is an expansion of the former, only that here the characteristic of the shepherd is applied to our Lord. He knows His sheep with a knowledge far surpassing that which any ordinary shepherd can possess of the sheep of his flock, even though it is not impossible for this ordinary knowledge in certain cases to be far more intimate than we might suppose it to be.
Shepherds ordinarily know their sheep by some external sign, but it is probable that great familiarity and loving care of their flock may give them a peculiar and individual knowledge which others would hardly believe to be possible. But in any case our Lord knows His sheep, and especially those who are in an especial manner His own by the love of predilection with which He regards those who are to be nearest to Him in Heaven, with a penetration and intimacy which far surpass any human knowledge.
His knowledge of them is a knowledge most fruitful in its results and effects, because He knows them for the purpose of the most special and tender and intelligent protection and guidance over each individual soul, and for the purpose of bestowing upon them, in the largest possible measure, gifts of grace and light in proportion to their capacity and faithfulness, His bounty being guided by His knowledge as well as prompted by His intense love for them.
And His knowledge of them is not limited to this or that time or moment in their history. It includes the most compassionate foreknowledge of all their failings or trials or sufferings, the indulgence He will have to show them, the pardon He will have to bestow upon them, and the final blessing of their perseverance and their crowns and glory with Him in Heaven. And He knows them before they come to Him and while they are yet unborn—there is no time at which they are or have been strangers to the everlasting love of their Creator and the Shepherd of their souls.
Such is that knowledge of the sheep on the part of our Lord which corresponds to that first characteristic of the Good Shepherd which He has mentioned.
Their knowledge of him
He goes on to say His sheep know Him. Their knowledge of Him corresponds to the capacities of the intelligent nature which He has given them, which is made for the possession of God in ways of its own, and to the gifts of grace with which He increases the resources of that nature, and also to their experience and knowledge of Him in His dealings with their souls.
This knowledge of Himself on their part is His great delight, for it repays Him, in the manner in which it is possible that creatures can repay their God, for all that He has done for them in the order of nature and in the order of grace. Their knowledge of Him leads them to trust themselves to Him, to believe His truth, to give Him the perpetual homage of their service and honour and reverence and worship, and also that perpetual intercourse with Him in prayer and supplication and contemplation which is most dear to His Sacred Heart.
This is what answers, in the relations between our Lord and His own, to that knowledge of the shepherd by the sheep of which He had spoken in the parable at the beginning. He adds to these words a comparison between this knowledge and that wherewith His Father knows Him and He knows His Father.
‘As the Father knoweth Me and I know the Father.’
It is not that there can be complete resemblance between these knowledges, for on the one side there is the mutual knowledge of two Divine Persons, and the other the knowledge between our Lord, a Divine Person, and that which His sheep have of Him.
But there is a resemblance which is not one of equality. The Father knows the Son as God, and communicates to Him by His knowledge all His own substance and essence. He knows Him also as Man, and endows His Sacred Humanity with gifts and blessings, and powers of every kind. As God, the Son knows the Father, His essence and substance and Person, and all that He has Himself received from Him. He loves Him in return, but does not communicate anything to Him, for the Father receives from no other Divine Person. As Man our Lord knows the Father by intelligence and the fulfilment of His will, by working for His honour and making His Name known and glorious.
Thus our Lord is known by His elect, who receive all gifts from Him, and who in return glorify His Name and imitate His example, and the like. Moreover, the immense knowledge and love that exist between the Father and the Son are the fountain and cause of the knowledge and love with which our Lord regards His faithful, and they regard Him. The Divine and increate love is the fountain of all love human and created. So also the Father desires and wills that our Lord should love men with immense love, as such love exists between the Father and the Son.
The Father desires through His Son to adopt men as His sons, to give them a share of that filiation which properly belongs by right to the Son alone, but the imparting of which to men who receive Him is the great object of the Mission of the Son in Human Nature. This love of the Father for men is communicated to and shared by the Sacred Humanity.
In the next part, Fr Coleridge explains why Christ foretold that he would die, and what this shows about him as the Good Shepherd.
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The Good Shepherd
Why does Christ call the Chief Priests 'thieves and robbers'?
Why Christ is 'the door' through which every good shepherd must come
Why the Good Shepherd told the wolves they had no power over him
Effect of 'The Good Shepherd' on the different classes of the Jews
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