If you’ll turn with me in your Bibles, please. We will begin in Ezekiel chapter 34. The prophet writes, ‘The word of the Lord came to me, son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel. Prophesy and say to them, even to the shepherds, thus says the lords, the Lord, ah, shepherds of Israel, who have been feeding yourselves, should not shepherds feed the sheep. You eat the fat. You clothe yourselves with the wool. You slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep.
The weak, you have not strengthened. The sick, you have not healed. The injured you have not bound up. The strayed you have not brought back. The lost you have not sought. And with force and harshness, you have ruled them. So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and they became food for all the wild beasts. My sheep were scattered. They wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. My sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth with none to search or seek for them.
Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: as I live, declares the Lord God, surely because my sheep have become a prey and my sheep have become food for all the wild beasts since there was no shepherd. And because my shepherds have not searched for my sheep, but the shepherds have fed themselves and have not fed my sheep. Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I am against the shepherds, and I will require my sheep at their hand and put a stop to their feeding the sheep. No longer shall the shepherds feed themselves.
I will rescue my sheep from their mouths that they may not be food for them. For thus says the Lord God: behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock when he is among his sheep that have been scattered, so will I seek out my sheep. And I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness.
And I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries and will bring them into their own land. And I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the ravines and in all the inhabited places of the country. I will feed them with good pasture, and on the mountain heights of Israel shall be their grazing land. There they shall lie down in good grazing land, and on rich pasture they shall feed on the mountains of Israel.
I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep. And I myself will make them lie down, declares the Lord God. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the stray, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, and the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them in justice. As for you, my flock, thus says the Lord God: behold, I judge between sheep and sheep, between rams and male goats.
Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, that you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture? And to drink of clear water, that you must muddy the rest of the water with your feet? And must my sheep eat what you have trodden with your feet and drink what you have muddied with your feet? Therefore, thus says the Lord God to them: ‘Behold, I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep, because you push with side and shoulder and thrust all the weak with your horns till you’ve scattered them abroad.
I will rescue my flock. They shall no longer be a prey. And I will judge between sheep and sheep, and I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them. He shall feed them and be their shepherd, and I, the Lord, will be their God, and my servant David shall be prince among them. I am the Lord. I have spoken.
From there we turn to John chapter 10 beginning at verse 11. Jesus speaks: I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees. And the wolf snatches them and scatters them. He flees because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.
I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me. Just as the Father knows me, and I know the Father, and I lay down my life for the sheep. And I have other sheep that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice, so there will be one flock and one shepherd. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray. Heavenly Father, you speak to us in your word, and passages that you have given us which may seem unclear are made clear elsewhere in your scripture. You help us to understand what you say with what you have said before. Open our hearts to hear you speak. Open our minds to understand the meanings and teachings of your word. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So the Gospel of John, chapter 10, is one of the most well-known and well-beloved passages in the New Testament, and it often gets paired with Psalm 23, the shepherd’s psalm. When those two chapters are exposited together, we do receive a very comforting message of Christ’s providential care and his love for his chosen people.
And yet, although that psalm does have an appropriate connection to Jesus’s declaration of, “I am the good shepherd,” it was not the primary intention of this parable. Understanding Jesus as our God and shepherd may rightly be drawn from this passage, but it is just a secondary point within John’s narrative. That interpretation is more of a natural consequence of it than the intended purpose of the evangelist.
Meanwhile, there is a contextual unity between John 9 and the whole of John 10 that is rarely emphasized, which leads us to quickly forget that these three things—Jesus’s granting of sight to the blind man, and Jesus’s declaration of, “I am the door,” and Jesus’s declaration of, “I am the good shepherd”—are actually closely linked together as a single unit, not merely by literary proximity, but as a narrative whole.
And although each story does stand alone and teaches us something specific about Jesus as being the Son of God, together, when they’re considered, they better become supporting evidence for what Jesus claims. The initial miracle of giving the blind man sight confirms Jesus’s message and it confirms his status as the messenger of God.
We’ve already seen in John’s gospel that whenever Jesus proclaims a ‘go a me,’ he’s really making a dual claim. He is identifying himself with and as the Lord God through the invocation of the divine name of ‘I am.’ And he’s describing and proclaiming some aspect or element of the Lord’s character by way of analogy, such as when he said, ‘I am the bread of life,’ or ‘I am the light of the world.’
So, at the beginning of this chapter, when Jesus said, ‘I am the door,’ he was asserting his divinity and also claiming the role of mediator between God and his chosen people. But the particular type of mediator he’s claiming to be is subject to multiple correct interpretations. The simplest form of mediator is that of a teacher of God’s law, a rabbi like many of the wiser Pharisees and as someone who explains and proclaims God’s word to his people as a prophet.
The next type of mediator would be as an elder, like the members of the Sanhedrin that made judgments and decisions concerning justice, ruling with authority like that of a king. The third type of mediator would be that of a priest, offering atonement for sin and interceding with God for the benefit of God’s people.
But the fourth type of mediator, and final here, was exceptionally rare in redemptive history, and that is of covenant mediator. This role was only limited to a few other righteous individuals across Israel’s whole history; men like Adam and Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David.
But those mediators, they did not get to negotiate their respective covenants with the Lord as a vassal king might have been able to do with his new suzerain overlord. They simply and merely received these covenants on behalf of those whom they were representing. So Jesus as the door emphasized the gracious sovereignty of God through the imposition and establishment of his covenants with the elect.
But Jesus, as the God-man and covenant mediator, the logos who is Theos and Andros, he set the terms of the covenant as God and he received the covenant for us as a man, as the second and last Adam. So when Jesus continued to explain this parable, he built upon the metaphorical imagery of the door by declaring, ‘I am the good shepherd,’ asserting himself as both the door and the shepherd, because it was not a matter of either/or, but both/and.
Remember, the door of the sheepfold was the gatekeeper, one of the shepherds tending the flocks within the crowd. Whether or not that flock may have belonged to him and wealthy shepherds with large flocks, they were commonly known to employ undershepherds to help them care for their sheep. These undershepherds may have been their sons and daughters or their household servants or just simply hired hands for this particular purpose, but regardless, they each did the work of a shepherd.
And so Jesus’s audience, they naturally would have associated the shepherd with the Lord and the sheep with Israel and the Jewish people. So Jesus’s second ‘I am’ assertion would have been understood as being a reasonable clarification, talking about the quality of the gatekeeper. What they would have immediately understood was also that if Jesus is the good shepherd and the gatekeeper, then the others that he was talking about are bad shepherds and bad gatekeepers.
It’s important to note that of the seven commonly recognized ‘I am’ statements of Jesus, ‘I am the good shepherd’ is the only one that incorporates an obvious moral element. Each of the others includes an enhancing descriptor explaining something about the personal character of God and Jesus. But they are at base morally neutral.
For example, ‘I am the bread of life’ defines Jesus as being God the provider. ‘I am the light of the world’ defines Jesus as God the illuminator, the giver of wisdom, knowledge, and understanding. ‘I am the door’ defines Jesus as being the unique and sole means of access to God as God, the revealer.
‘I am the good shepherd’ defines how well Jesus cares for his people as God their shepherd by expressing his moral goodness and loving care for his whole flock. ‘I am the resurrection and the life’ will define Jesus as God as the original source of all life and the source of restored and renewed life.
‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’ will define Jesus as the sole means of access to God, as the source of life, and will assert that his teaching and himself are the inherent and infallible word of God. Lastly, ‘I am the true vine’ will define Jesus as the true Israel, expressing the union between Israel and the church with himself as Christ and God and describing the providential care of the Lord.
So together, these seven statements form a descriptive chiasm, with the last three mirroring the characteristics of the first three. And so the central statement of ‘I am the good shepherd’ is explicitly describing God as good and loving.
This narrative together, the narrative of these seven statements, implicitly applies that moral quality to all of God’s attributes, all those that are described by these statements. So Jesus is the good bread of life, the good light of the world, the good door, the good resurrection and life, the good way, and the good true vine.
But using the shepherd’s actions in this parable, Jesus highlights the single characteristic that distinguishes good shepherds from bad. The good shepherd, he lays down his life for the sheep. While bad shepherds, they see the wolf coming and leave the sheep and flee. The good shepherd says he owns and cares for the sheep. He protects and defends them at all costs, while a bad shepherd will flee because he is just a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.
So that quality and characteristic of God is love. The good shepherd loves, protects, and defends their sheep, while the bad shepherds, who do not care for or love their sheep, will abandon them at the first sign of danger or risk to themselves.
Now, when we interpret the gospels, and especially this passage, Christians, we are often, and we have been trained to immediately characterize the Pharisees as bad shepherds. We use this to justify and condemn them for their self-righteousness and their selfishness as failing at their spiritual obligation of being the spiritual teachers of Israel. And we use it as well to condemn all modern forms of what we commonly call pharisaicism, which is a strict legalist approach and application that’s more concerned with following the letter of the law as religious observation than preserving the spirit of the law, which is living righteously and faithfully.
And when we do this, we risk throwing out the good aspects of the Pharisees, especially their concern for personal holiness and godly living. We too easily forget that the Pharisees were commendable regarding their concern for personal righteousness and holiness, their fervent desire to please God, their inclination to show mercy in the exercise of judgment, their affirmation that God ordains everything that comes to pass while humanity still retains and exercises our own freedom of will so that God’s will naturally occurs.
They believed in the immortality of the soul. They expected judgment and punishment in the afterlife. And lastly, they believed in the resurrection of the righteous. Those beliefs are not and should not be considered strange by professing Christians.
So whenever Jesus or Paul or modern interpreters condemn the Pharisees, we are not condemning all of the Pharisees or everything that they believed. Instead, we are just condemning the particular individuals, practices, activities, and attitudes that are being specifically referenced at the moment in scripture.
So here in John’s narrative, to better understand the contrast that Jesus was making between himself as the good shepherd and the Jewish leaders as bad shepherds, we have to turn back to the prophet Ezekiel to find the more clear explanation.
Remember, Ezekiel was a Levitical priest who was taken by Nebuchadnezzar from Jerusalem to Babylon. And he received several prophetic visions from the Lord. His ministry among the Babylonian exiles happened at the same time as Daniel held authority in Babylon.
We know from scripture that a significant part of the exile’s cause was Judea’s idolatry: the pagan pluralism that was happening inside the Lord’s temple and which was being led by their religious leaders. And so, the word of the Lord came to Ezekiel telling him to prophesy against the shepherds of Israel, leading him to distinguish the bad shepherds from the one true good shepherd.
Ezekiel begins by accusing these bad spiritual shepherds by listing the Lord’s many charges against them. He accused them of feeding themselves, namely of exploiting the sheep instead of responsibly taking care of them. He accused them of eating the fatty portions, of clothing themselves with their wool, slaughtering them and eating them, and ruling over God’s people with harshness.
These spiritually bad shepherds did not strengthen the weak. They did not heal the sick, bind up the injured, bring back those who had strayed, or go out and seek the lost. And so, as a result of their mismanagement, God’s metaphorical sheep were scattered and became food for all the wild beasts. They wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill, scattered over all the face of the earth with none to search or seek for them.
This is why God declared, ‘Behold, I am against the shepherds, and I will require my sheep at their hand and put a stop to their feeding the sheep. No longer shall the shepherds feed themselves. I will rescue my sheep from their mouths that they may not be food for them.’
God set himself against the shepherds of Israel because they had made it necessary for him to need to rescue his sheep from their wicked predations. And so God here establishes himself as the good shepherd in contrast to them as bad.
For thus says the Lord God: ‘Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out. And I will rescue them from all the places where they’ve been scattered. And I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries and bring them into their own land. And I will feed them. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep. I myself will make them lie down. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the stray, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, and the fat and the strong I will destroy.’
God declared that he would do what every good shepherd should and would do. And all these things were what Jesus has been doing throughout his entire ministry. So when Jesus invoked the divine name and proclaimed, ‘I am the good shepherd,’ among the layers of meaning, he meant that the Lord is the good shepherd. Leaning here upon Ezekiel’s prophecy, he also meant it in the plain sense that he, Jesus, is the good shepherd because he was doing the godly work of a good shepherd.
But God didn’t stop there with Ezekiel. He continued and said, ‘I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them. He shall feed them and be their shepherd, and I, the Lord, will be their God, and my servant David shall be prince among them. I am the Lord. I have spoken.’
God promised the return of Davidic kingship to Israel. He was promising that this Davidic king would be the Lord’s appointed shepherd and that he would faithfully preserve God’s flock. So we observe here in the Lord’s prophetic establishment of that one shepherd, together with ‘I am, I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep,’ we find an early hint of him prophesying the necessary fact of the God-man as Messiah, Theos and Andros, that this son of David would be the Son of Man and Son of God.
So when Jesus declared, ‘I am the good shepherd,’ it was shocking and concerning to his audience. Certainly, from their spiritually dark perspective, it was very close to crossing the line into blasphemy, but it could still be interpreted as Jesus just merely saying that he was a teacher rivaling the Pharisees.
But what evidence had John recorded here so far supporting Jesus’s claim of being this divine good shepherd that was prophesied by Ezekiel? When the Lord declared through Ezekiel that ‘I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep,’ he listed out several things that he would do.
He said, ‘I will seek the lost.’ Remember Jesus, he sought the lost children of Israel when he went and spoke with the Samaritan woman and the other Samaritans of Sychar. God said, ‘I will bring back the stray.’ Remember Jesus, he corrected and rebuked those who were permitting the exploit of sale of sacrifices and money exchanges when he cleansed the temple during the Passover season.
God said, ‘I will bind up the injured.’ Remember Jesus, he healed a Jewish man at Bethesda, a man who had been an invalid for 38 years. God said, ‘I will strengthen the weak, while the fat and the strong I will destroy.’ Consider Jesus’s disciples; they were all simple ordinary people, people without much power or authority.
While the crowds of followers who followed him included people from every strata of society, those who opposed Jesus, because they were often being convicted and condemned by his teaching, were the powerful religious elite—the Pharisees and Sadducees. They often seemed to make themselves look foolish in comparison to Jesus, and they found their authority being ignored as they increasingly became irrelevant.
And God said, ‘I will feed them in justice.’ Remember, Jesus gave a woman that had been accused of adultery justice. He publicly vindicated her after her accusers had dropped the charge against her. So each of those examples demonstrated how Jesus was doing the work of a good shepherd, and together they were making the case that Jesus is the Lord’s chosen Davidic shepherd.
Together, they would have been building up and prompting an increase of hope that Jesus is the one who would restore Israel. But for many of the Jews, if not most, they remained blind to the truth because the temporal hope that was growing within them should have been an eschatological hope. They were missing God’s bigger picture.
I mean, they hoped in the promises that the Lord had made through Ezekiel that, as a shepherd seeks out his flock when he’s among his sheep that have been scattered, so will I seek out my sheep. And I will rescue them from all places where they’ve been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness.
And I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries and will bring them into their own land. And I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the ravines, and in all the inhabited places of the country. I will feed them with good pasture, and on the mountain heights of Israel shall be their grazing land. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down, declares the Lord God.
They believed the promises, but they misunderstood them. They hoped for a Davidic king that would restore Israel to national independence. They hoped for a Davidic king whose policies would generate prosperity and establish peace in the land. They hoped for a Davidic king that would encourage all the Jews who were scattered across the Roman Empire to return and come home to Israel.
But unfortunately, they failed to understand that God has a bigger and greater plan for them and us. But we as Christians, we have the benefit of hindsight. We have the benefit of having the whole New Testament. We’ve been told the end of the story clearly. We have been told and have had explained to us what Jesus came to achieve for us. We have the benefit of getting to look through the glass a little less darkly.
So we may better understand these ancient and past prophecies in light of their partial fulfillment and use them to better inform our hope and our expectations for Christ’s ultimate fulfillment. It is because Jesus is the good shepherd, the Lord’s appointed Davidic shepherd and the Lord himself, that we can believe that Christ will seek and find all of his sheep because of his great love for us.
We believe that he will rescue us from all the trials and troubles of this world, delivering us on the great and terrible day of his judgment, from the punishment that we each justly deserve for our own sinfulness. He will gather us all together from out of every nation and bring us to himself and place us in his promised land.
Then, after he has brought us into his kingdom in a restored Eden, he will provide for our every need. And we will finally be at peace and be able to enjoy our Sabbath rest in the Lord. See, these are promises that the Lord has given for his chosen people, his beloved children of adoption. These are the promises that we hope for as Christians. These are what we are trusting Jesus Christ to deliver for us.
Whenever we say, ‘I believe in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior,’ this is what we should be remembering and thinking about when we call Jesus our good shepherd. It is easy for us to forget that there is more to our salvation than just the forgiveness of our sins. Redeemed by Jesus Christ, we are gaining far more than we can imagine, certainly far more than our sin could ever have offered us.
And although we should never forget it, we should not dwell or meditate upon what God has saved us from. Rather, let us meditate upon his promises. And then thank him, praise him, and glorify his name for all that he gives us and for everything that we are receiving in love because of the finished work of Jesus our shepherd.
Let us each love him, thank him, and confess him, as our forebear in the faith, King David did in the 23rd Psalm. Amen.
Going to call a slight audible this morning. We’re going to ask that we stand as we normally do and say what we believe, but rather…