4th Sunday of Easter

I am the good shepherd. For the Jewish teachers who spent their lives praying the Psalms, much like our priests do today, these words would have carried an impact like that which caused the Jews who came to seize Him in the garden to fall back when He pronounced I AM. They knew well the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. No one of His audience would have misunderstood His claim. He then explains further, what makes Him the good shepherd is that He lays His life down for His sheep. He identifies His flock, not as a hired hand, but as one who possesses the flock. Only the Lord can claim such ownership.

He reveals the meaning behind what the Psalmist penned so very many years before. There is no better treatment than the words of Christ Himself, so I will simply lay them out and let Him speak for Himself.

The Lord is my shepherd.

I am the good shepherd.

He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul.

A good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me;

A hired man, who is not a shepherd and whose sheep are not his own, sees a wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away.

Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

I am the good shepherd, and I know mine and mine know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I will lay down my life for my sheep.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;

This is why the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.

My cup overflows.

[This is the chalice of My Blood, the Blood of the new and eternal Covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.]

Christ’s ministry is, in a sense, a thesis for His fulfillment of the covenant. He provides us with citation and argument both in His life and teachings which call back perfectly to the anticipations of the prophets. It should not surprise us, though, when we see the nous of our Lord so deeply woven into historic Israel. After all, He was there all along. St. John instructs in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Through Him all things were made, and without Him was nothing made that was made. His humanity was taken from Mary, but His body is united in the hypostatic union to His Divinity, and possesses the fullness of His eternal nature. When He ascended, He ascended to the Father, who is outside of time.  As I consider the good shepherd, who leads His sheep through the valley of the shadow of death, allow me a moment of speculation.

When Adam fell, which valley was more shadowed by that great death than Eden? God walked in that garden—but the Father has no body and does not walk, and no one has seen Him. But our Lord has an eternal body. Christ tells us that He seeks His sheep when they stray, and will leave the many to pursue the one. When God walked into the shadowed garden to find His stray sheep, did He walk on feet that had already stumbled on Calvary’s hill? When He called out to Adam and pronounced the curse of sin, did He speak with the voice that had already pronounced Father forgive them, they know not what they do? When He crafted clothes of skins to shelter them from their shame, did the hands that clothed that first lost man already bear the scars of his redemption?