Image: Christ as Good Shepherd, 3rd century, Rome.
May 11, 2025: Easter 4C
Few images of Jesus are as striking or lasting as the Good Shepherd. In nearly every Sunday school classroom in America (though not in ours, curiously enough), there is a picture of Jesus as the good shepherd, holding a sweet little lamb in his arms. This painting by Warner Sallman, who also painted the famous head of Christ, is a common choice, but the image has been popular for millennia. Early Christians were carving it in the catacombs, back when overt Christian symbols would have been repressed.
And why not? When you’re a member of a little sect of believers, as John’s community may have been, the world will undoubtedly feel threatening. They were on the fringe of society, excommunicated from the synagogues for their faith in Jesus as Messiah. They had no one else to turn to. There was no one else to trust in but Jesus. For them, the Good Shepherd wasn’t about saccharine sentimentality, but about life and death.
For us, though, we have choices. In his Large Catechism, Martin Luther wrote, “Anything on which your heart relies and depends, I say, that is really your God.[1]” As traditional religious faith has declined in America, plenty of idols have sprung up. Pop culture icons and political leaders are prominent, but there are others out there too. Families, spouses, children, country, and especially money and possessions are perennial idols our hearts rely upon. Paraphrasing Matthew’s gospel, we sheep are often in search of a shepherd to our liking.
But Jesus is the Good Shepherd. And this is at the heart of the conflict today between Jesus and the religious leaders. Earlier in chapters 9 and 10, Jesus healed a man born blind. Before healing him, Jesus refuted the idea that either he or his parents had to have done something to deserve that condition. Yet, the religious leaders, stuck on control, could not accept that Jesus had been able to heal him. After interrogating him and his parents, they ask him to repeat his testimony. His response is a lot like Jesus’s in our reading: “I told you, but you didn’t listen.” Jesus is not the shepherd they would have preferred.
Why? Because Jesus’s power is radically different from what the world expects. Any proper messianic king would use force or the threat of it to accomplish his goals. That’s been the case throughout history, up to the present day. Rather, Jesus pours himself out for us. Earlier in John’s Gospel, John the Baptist twice acclaims Jesus as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”. Revelation consistently uses the image of the slaughtered Lamb for Jesus. Jesus is the Good Shepherd who is also the Lamb who was slain for our sake. He is not a leader who compels or forces. He is not the messianic king whose realm can be identified on a map. He has none of the usual trappings of secular power—in fact, he tells Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world.” Rather, Jesus is the lamb-shepherd-king who knows us more intimately than we know ourselves. He says so in verse 27: “I know them and they follow me.”
People of God, especially you, Aiden and Emily, Jesus knows us. Jesus knows you. Jesus knows our restlessness, our fears, and our distraction sickness. Jesus knows our longing for safety and security, particularly in this anxious age. And Jesus knows our wandering hearts that searches for a shepherd to our liking. Jesus, in contrast, is not the shepherd that meets our every whim. He is the Good Shepherd and the Lamb of God who meets our deepest needs. And he meets them not through control, but through the cross. As he says on the eve of his arrest, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.”
Aiden and Emily, you both shared powerful faith statements that speak to the power of Christ to draw all people to himself. You both have experienced that power. For you, Aiden, it was in a Youth for Christ event where you experienced reconciliation with someone. For you, Emily, it was during a Christ Hike. You’ve gotten just a taste of that. Confirmation is not the end of learning about Jesus and his love for all. It’s just the beginning. And as you continue to follow Jesus Christ, my prayer for you is that you would continue to know that Jesus knows you better than you know yourself. Jesus knows your sin, your fears, and your failings, just as he knows mine and that of everyone here. Yet Jesus still chose to love us—to love you—to be our Good Shepherd who laid down his life for his sheep of every time and place. Jesus laid down his life so we could have life.
As you continue to follow Jesus throughout your life, you will get to know him even better. But you won’t get to know him perfectly. This whole Christian life, as Martin Luther once put it, is “…not godliness but the process of becoming godly, not health but getting well, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not now what we shall be, but we are on the way. The process is not yet finished, but it is actively going on. This is not the goal but it is the right road. At present, everything does not gleam and sparkle, but everything is being cleansed.[2]”
Know always that Jesus is your Good Shepherd, just as he is mine and that of the whole church. And when he says he will lead us into life, know that he will do it. He always keeps his word. Thanks be to God. Amen.
© 2025, David M. Fleener. Permission granted to copy and adapt original material herein for non-commercial purposes with appropriate credit given.
[1] Robert Kolb, Timothy J. Wengert, and Charles P. Arand, The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 386.
[2] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 32: Career of the Reformer II, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 32 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 24.