FINDINGS VI By Harry T. Cook
 
Easter IV-B April 26, 2015
John 10: 11-18
 

  

Harry T. Cook
By Harry T. Cook
4/20/15
 


The Good Shepherd gospel, referenced above and dealt with below, contains language and images that informed an early Christian's image of the Christ figure, which he -- whoever he was -- believed had been manifest in Jesus of Nazareth. That believer saw Jesus as the human representative of the imagined deity of his innovative religious tradition that was built in unequal parts upon the religion of Second Temple Judaism and Greek philosophical concepts.

If, as the saying goes, need is the mother of invention, then one can see how relatively small and unorganized communities of Jews seeking newer ideas and Gentiles trying to understand the ways and beliefs of the Jews who sat next to them at table desperately wanted the equivalent of a gentle shepherd to help them in the confusion.

Beset behind by adherents of synagogue Judaism trying to reconstitute their religion in the wake of the Temple's destruction (70 CE), and before by those who found in this new sect a threat to stability (even as the Romans had apparently found Jesus to be a threat), the communities out of which the Gospel according to John emerged evidently wanted and needed to hear and respond to the authentic voice of a leader who not only knew who he was but what he thought the community gathered to him should be and do.

Among the paraphernalia traditionally carted along by Orthodox, Roman and Anglican bishops are things known as a "crosiers," so named for their likeness to a "crutch" or walking stick. The crosier suggests that he or she who carries it may be old in the service of the church. But at the top, the stick has a crook in it, resembling the device used by shepherds to correct or rescue errant sheep. The base of the stick can be and is used to prod the same errant sheep.

Anybody can wield a crosier, even episcopal pretenders both ordained and unordained. But only he or she who speaks authentically and leads effectively can wield it very long before it is used against them. Who has ears to hear, let him hear.

The passage at hand is part of the parable of the sheepfold that begins at 10:1 in which the issues are 1) the proper entrance to the fold, 2) the voice of the shepherd and 3) the stranger (the Greek word there at verse 5 from αλλογενης (means, in our American patois, "not from this planet") That contrasts in the mind of the writer with Jesus who is depicted as the self-proclaimed caregiver of the flock. He's the real thing. He says so himself: "I am the good shepherd."

The "I am" sayings have long presented a problem to some New Testament scholars who cannot reconcile their first-person form with the sayings otherwise attributed to Jesus in the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) as well as Thomas.

The general conclusion is that the writers of the synoptic gospels presented a Jesus that was closer to the idea of a real person, even though, beginning with Mark, his sayings were augmented by a narrative that included so-called miracles (
εργα -- meaning "works"), a melodramatic death and an indication that death did not silence him.

The sayings variously attributed to Jesus by Mark, Matthew, Luke and Thomas resemble in form the kind of public utterances that were common to the itinerant wisdom teachers of the first century CE. The "I am" discourses that John puts on Jesus' lips would seem to be more at home in Gnostic and formal Greek oratory -- probably not the style of a son of what J. Dominic Crossan calls "landless laborers" from Galilee.

Notwithstanding, the "I am" sayings cannot be dismissed. They probably represent an early theologizing of the story or stories that had been developed around the historical Jesus or one (or more) of the images of such a person.

As the fourth gospel reveals here and there in its texts, the lines were pretty clearly drawn between Jesus Jews and synagogue Jews toward the end of the first century CE to the point that John (the Gospel) often simply refers to "the Jews" instead of to certain factions of Judaism, e.g. the scribes and Pharisees. With John there seems to be less effort to connect Jesus with a Jewish past and more to present him in terms of current Hellenistic thought. The gospel's prologue, John 1:1-18 is certainly evidence of that. My friend and mentor John Shelby Spong would not necessarily agree with this.

The "I am" sayings become a device by which John has the logos incarnate of the gospel's prologue account for himself.

Thus in the passage at hand, he is the model or ideal leader of the flock/community. He seeks to prove it by suggesting that he would lay down his life for the sheep. Such a concept would not have seemed alien to John's Gentile audience. The religious marketplace of the late first century CE was replete with dying and rising sons of the gods through participation in whose suffering salvation was believed to result.

Who is "the hireling" of 10:12? He is the one who does the job for money. When his shift is up, he goes home. When the going gets tough, he gets going. Only the "good shepherd" stays through everything and thus makes the difference for the sheep of the fold.

Through the maze of metaphors in this passage we may be seeing a situation in a late first century community that felt itself besieged from within by growing pains and without by detractors. What was wanted was steady and committed leadership that would not falter or be tempted to throw in the towel.

The portrayal of the logos incarnate as a "good shepherd" suggests that the leadership of such a community was thought to be a worthy successor of its putative founder -- a bit of ecclesiology that ends up in later times as "the apostolic succession," which is certainly a debatable proposition.

Who are the "other sheep ... not of this fold" of 10:16 who also must be brought? For the Johannine church, those might have included even "the Jews," but certainly others as well. As we have observed, the fourth gospel often seems to be speaking to the Hellenistic world, so John's vision must extend into its precincts as well. The criteria is that those who ultimately become part of the "flock," albeit in several different folds will "listen to" the good shepherd's voice because they trust it to be authentic and will be moved to act upon its mandates.

Here is where the going gets difficult for contemporary Christians. The unity of "one flock and one shepherd" does not work well in a religious world of competing denominations.

 

Inclusion is one thing; uniformity is another. And here is where the homilist must be careful with the text. Traditional church hierarchies have pretty much spent what's left of their capital. Their grip on the flock is lessening and is often resisted. More religiously inclined persons are thinking things out for themselves and could care less about some central teaching authority.

The issue of leadership bedevils human organizations all the way from the nuclear family to the family of nations. An era is often marked for good or ill by those who have risen to the leadership of entities that turn out to have made a difference.

Angelo Roncalli, Pope John XXIII, is seen with the perspective of history to have been a leader whose vision, had it been kept alive by his immediate successors (from Montini to Luciani to Wojtyla to Ratzinger), might have made the Roman Catholic Church a colossus of inspiration for the world instead of the ideologically cramped institution it is today. The current occupant of the Chair of St. Peter, Francis, bids fair to recover some of Roncalli's vision. Meanwhile, too many of its American bishops are obsessed with the need to deny women's reproductive rights and to protest gay marriage instead of with the real disasters of poverty, third-rate education, planetary pollution and the curse of economic oligarchies that threaten both this nation and, by extension, the rest of the world, as Pope Francis has said.

 

The good shepherd of the gospel passage treated above is one who speaks with authenticity and vision, one who is willing to lead the sheep of any fold. He or she does not demand uniformity of belief and practice. He or she does not treat the constituency en masse as a flock but as individuals who are centers of dignity to be respected and talked with, not at.     

 

 


Copyright 2015 Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.
 

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