The Good Shepherd: A Claim to Be King (22 of 26)

The shepherd image reads as gentle to a modern ear and that is not what it meant.

In the Hebrew Scriptures the shepherd is the king. So a man standing in Jerusalem describing himself as the true shepherd, in contrast to thieves and brigands, is not offering pastoral comfort. He is making a claim to the throne and naming the competition.

What Question Is This Answering?

The one that ran through the previous chapter.

John 9 is the healing of the man born blind and the interrogation that follows, and the question underneath all of it is whether Jesus is from God. Is he a prophet. Is he the Messiah.

Chapter divisions were added centuries later, so the shepherd material follows directly on that dispute. John introduces it as a parable, and says plainly that the hearers did not understand it.

Jesus then adds three separate layers of explanation, which is worth noticing. The gate, the good shepherd, and a further clarification later in the chapter. He does not repeat himself; he approaches it three times.

Why Is Shepherd Royal Language?

Because Ezek 34 makes it so, and David stands behind the image.

That chapter condemns the shepherds of Israel for feeding themselves rather than the flock, and ends with God promising to set up one shepherd over them, his servant David.^[1]

Bailey’s book on the good shepherd traces the image across a thousand years, and three stops matter here. Ps 23 is where it starts, and the rod in that psalm is not a walking stick; Bailey identifies it with the mace on the Narmer palette, a weapon for killing a lion at close range, so the shepherd of the psalm is armed. Jer 23:1-4 turns the word against the kings who reversed Josiah’s reforms, the shepherds “who destroy and scatter.” Then Ezekiel, in a slave labour camp outside Babylon, blames his own leadership rather than the Babylonians; in Bailey’s phrase God fires the shepherds and announces, “I, I myself will search for my sheep.” Ezekiel leaves a puzzle, because the same chapter says God will be the shepherd and David will be the shepherd. Wright’s point is that the puzzle stays open until this chapter of John. God is the shepherd; the king is the shepherd. It makes sense in Jesus, he says, and nowhere else.

Bailey and Snodgrass both add that shepherding was a despised trade in the rabbinic texts, so that Jesus takes a low occupation and the royal title in one breath. Levine calls that nonsense, since the passages cited are Philo on rich Egyptians, one rabbi’s snobbery and a late midrash, and the shepherd image stayed honourable from Moses to the prophets. Nothing here rests on the low-trade point.

The ideal king in that literature is a shepherd, probably modelled on the shepherd boy who became king. In a world that understood the trust between a shepherd and his animals, that was the preferred way to talk about kingship.

Which is why the passage is doing something other than describing a caring personality.

Who Are the Thieves and Brigands?

The other claimants, and there were several in living memory.

Wright identifies two kinds. The revolutionary leaders and warlords who wanted to drive Israel into confrontation with Rome. And the house of Herod, willing to submit to Rome for as long as that preserved their own wealth and position.

Bailey gives an older answer. The text has three grades of rival: the thief who climbs the wall, the brigand, whose Greek word means an armed gang arriving at night with a ladder and a plan, and the stranger of v. 5, who uses no force and simply has the wrong voice. For the thieves and robbers Bailey follows Ibn al-Tayyib, an eleventh-century Baghdad commentator citing Chrysostom: not the Old Testament prophets, but the men who came before Jesus claiming to be the Messiah, Judas the Galilean and Theudas of Acts 5:36-37. The ESV notes take the same line. Bailey admits the referent cannot be fixed and calls this “perhaps the best option.” It is not far from Wright’s warlords, and it leaves the Herods to the last section of this post.

Notice that in the opening five verses Jesus does not mention himself at all. He speaks in the abstract about the difference between true shepherds and false ones, and lets the comparison stand before applying it.^[2]

The question he is posing is practical. How will you recognise God’s appointed king when he arrives? Anyone can turn up in Jerusalem and give himself airs.

How Do You Tell the Real One?

By whether the sheep know his voice, which is a strange test until you have seen it.

A shepherd in that region walks into a crowded fold and calls his own animals by name, and they come. Someone else can use the same names and get nothing. The animals are listening for one voice.

Bailey has watched it and adds the detail that makes it work. The shepherd calls the gatekeeper by name first, because a knock without a voice is what a stranger does. Then he calls the flock, with a short chant, a flute tune, or just “Haa, haa, ta’o, ta’o,” and what the sheep know is the timbre of the voice, not the tune. “I could learn the same tune and sing it in the hearing of the flock,” Bailey writes, “and the sheep would pay no attention to me.” One of his students, from a farming village in Syria or Lebanon, described a newly bought sheep hearing the wrong voice on its first morning: it has a nervous breakdown, runs at the walls, and needs days to learn the new shepherd.

And he does not drive them from behind. He walks ahead and they follow.

That is the sign Jesus points to. Not a credential, not a genealogy, not a demonstration of force. The response that comes from people who hear him, which in the immediate context means the man born blind, who has just been thrown out of the synagogue for saying so.

What Does It Mean That He Is the Gate?

That the shepherd’s body is the door.

In many eastern sheepfolds the shepherd slept in the gateway, so that nothing got out and nothing got in without going over him.

Bailey sharpens this into two places rather than two metaphors. The fold in vv. 1-6 is the village one: a walled yard by the house, thorns worked into the plaster on top, a barred door opened from inside by a gatekeeper, so a thief’s only way in is over the wall. The fold in vv. 7-10 is the wilderness one, used in late summer when the grass near home is gone: a roofless ring of field stones with no door at all. The shepherd lights a fire at the gap, puts his dog beside it, and lies down across the opening. “In such a scene,” Bailey writes, “the shepherd literally becomes the door.” So “I am the door” describes a night in open country, with no conflict with the village picture before it. The thief’s verbs in v. 10 are in order too: steal, then kill, which is the word for slaughter, then destroy utterly, which means butcher and leave no trace.

Read that way, being the gate is not a separate metaphor bolted on. It is the same claim from a different angle, and it describes a king whose protection consists of his own position rather than his walls.

The emphasis in that section falls on the safety and the fullness of life of the sheep, and on the shepherd having no business attending to his own interests. That is the test again. Find a ruler like that and you have found the Lord’s anointed.

Does the Image Stay Comfortable?

No, and the next verses are where it turns.

The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. That is the sentence the whole chapter has been building toward, and it converts a claim about kingship into a claim about how this king will exercise it. Bailey notes that across the whole tradition the shepherd had been called many good things but never, until here, the good shepherd, and that from Psalm 23 to Zechariah the divine shepherd fights for the flock with no hint of harm to himself. John 10 is where the shepherd dies.

A hired hand runs when the wolf comes because the sheep are not his. The difference between the true shepherd and the false one turns out not to be competence or lineage. It is what each of them does when the cost arrives.

Bailey reads the hireling as a coded and gentle way of talking about the high-priestly establishment. Ezekiel’s bad shepherds eat the sheep; John’s hireling only runs, so the old charge is kept but softened. The wolf is death, and every reader knew Rome was the agent of death at the cross; John is the Gospel that tells us only Rome could execute. Hireling and wolf are co-conspirators. Then Bailey points out what is missing. There is no fight scene. The shepherd is dead and nobody saw the wolf kill him, and that silence matches the Gospels, which say “they crucified him” in two words and refuse what Bailey calls the pornography of suffering.

Why Does No One Take His Life From Him?

Because vv. 14-18 are where the king explains the terms of his own death, and the first version of this post stopped short of them.

Verse 11 said the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. Verse 15 says it again, and Bailey reads the repetition as a sandwich with new material in the middle: I know my own, my own know me, as the Father knows me and I know the Father. Three links in a chain, sheep to shepherd to Father, and the knowing is the word Genesis uses for Adam and Eve. Bailey’s summary is that the relationship between the Father and the Son is the model for the relationship between the shepherd and the sheep, “because of the cross.” The third person of v. 11 has become first person as well: “I lay down my life.” Ibrahim Sa’id, the Egyptian pastor Bailey leans on, says the interpreter must put aside his pen here and sit in amazement.

Verse 16 brings in other sheep, not of this fold, who will hear the same voice; Wright reads them as the Gentiles, sheep not yet brought in, with Pilate himself a potential one. Then vv. 17-18, the hinge. No one takes his life from him; he lays it down of his own accord, and he has authority to lay it down and to take it up again. The word is exousia, and Bailey insists it means legitimate authority as well as raw power: a lion has the power to eat your steak, and nobody would say it has the right to. Pilate will later tell Jesus he has exousia over him, and be told he has none except from above. Jesus moves through John’s passion, Bailey says, as the director of the drama rather than its victim.^[3]

Why Does It Matter That This Was Hanukkah?

Because Hanukkah is the festival about how a family became kings, and the chapter ends with people picking up stones.

John 10:22-23 places the scene at the Feast of Dedication, in winter, with Jesus walking in Solomon’s colonnade, the covered walk on the eastern side of the Temple Mount. The feast marked the rededication of the Temple in December 164 BC, three years after Antiochus Epiphanes had desecrated it. Wright draws the line that matters. Judas Maccabaeus liberated and reconsecrated the Temple, as near as anyone could come to doing again what David and Solomon had done, and so Judas and his family became kings, a dynasty of a hundred years though he was no descendant of David. When it ended, Rome made Herod the Great king, and Herod married a Hasmonean princess to show he meant to continue the line. Every Hanukkah, Wright says, people thought about kings and how they became kings. Into that week walks Jesus, in the Temple, talking about the real shepherd and calling all the others thieves and brigands.

The crowd hears it that way. The demand in John 10:24 that he say plainly whether he is the Messiah comes next, and the answer runs back through the sheep who hear his voice to John 10:30, “I and the Father are one,” at which point they reach for stones. Wright says it in one sentence: never forget that the good shepherd chapter ends with people trying to stone Jesus to death. The pictures of a man with flowers in his hair and a few sheep for a pastoral touch, which Wright remembers from his own childhood, are what happens when a claim to the throne is remembered as a mood.^[4]

Part of a series working through the parables. See also the lost sheep and the lost coin, which uses the same imagery to different effect.

Footnotes4

1. Ezekiel 34 is the passage to read alongside this chapter, as it is alongside Luke 15. Both times Jesus uses shepherd imagery in front of religious leaders, and both times the background text is a denunciation of Israel's shepherds for failing to seek the lost.
2. That Jesus does not mention himself in the opening five verses is easy to miss because readers arrive already knowing the punchline. He describes true and false shepherds in general terms first, which means the audience is invited to agree with the criterion before discovering who it convicts.
3. Bailey draws one modern consequence from v. 18. If no one takes Jesus' life and he lays it down of his own accord, then Christians have no right to blame the Jews for the cross; the high priests, Judas and Pilate are guilty as individuals, and the crowd in Pilate's hall was the high-priestly party, not a nation. He adds that the Greek hoi Ioudaioi means the Judeans as well as the Jews, and that Jesus and all his followers were Jews. His quarrel was with the Judean establishment.
4. The ESV notes point out that the Greek of "I and the Father are one" is neuter, one entity, and that the sentence echoes the Shema, so that the claim in 10:30 is a claim to deity and the stones follow from it. The chapter's claim escalates, then, from king to God, and the crowd's reaction tracks the escalation.

Sources

N. T. Wright, John for Everyone, Part One: Chapters 1-10 (SPCK, 2002), on John 10:1-18 and John 10:19-30. Supports the connection to the question running through chapter 9, the identification of shepherd language as royal language, the identification of the thieves and brigands with revolutionary leaders and the Herodian house, the account of how a shepherd calls his own animals, the reading of the gate as the shepherd sleeping in the gateway, Ezekiel's open question answered only in Jesus, the other sheep as Gentiles with Pilate a potential sheep, and the Hanukkah setting (Judas Maccabaeus and his family becoming kings, Herod's Hasmonean marriage, the chapter ending in an attempted stoning). Supplied in full.

Kenneth E. Bailey, The Good Shepherd: A Thousand-Year Journey from Psalm 23 to the New Testament (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2014), chapters 1, 2, 3 and 8. Supports the rod of Psalm 23 as a mace, Jeremiah 23 against the kings who reversed Josiah's reforms, Ezekiel blaming his own leadership and God firing the shepherds; and for John 10, the three threats and two folds, the shepherd becoming the door in the wilderness, the order of the verbs in v. 10, the three grades of rival, Ibn al-Tayyib and Chrysostom on Judas the Galilean and Theudas, calling the gatekeeper by name, voice as timbre, the new sheep's nervous breakdown, kalos as new to the tradition, the cost factor, the vv. 11 and 14-15 sandwich, the hireling as the high-priestly establishment, the wolf as death and Rome, the missing fight scene, exousia as legitimate authority, and the director-not-victim line. In print, and in Logos.

Klyne R. Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), "The Lost Sheep," cultural information. Supports the statement that shepherding was a despised trade in rabbinic texts. In print, and in Logos.

Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (New York: HarperOne, 2014), chapter 1. Supports her dissent from the despised-shepherd reading. In print, and in Logos.

ESV Study Bible (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), notes on John 10:8, 10:11, 10:22, 10:23 and 10:30. Supports the messianic-pretender reading of "all who came before me," the dates of the desecration and rededication, the location of Solomon's colonnade, and the reading of 10:30 as a Shema echo and a claim to deity. In print, and in Logos.

The biblical texts cited: John 9:1-41, John 10:1-30, Ezek 34, Jer 23:1-4, Ps 23, Ps 121:8, and Acts 5:36-37.

Where the sourcing stops: the identification of the false shepherds with specific first-century movements is inference from the setting rather than something the text names; Wright reads warlords and Herods, Bailey follows Ibn al-Tayyib and Chrysostom to Judas the Galilean and Theudas, and Bailey himself says the referent cannot be fixed with precision. The practice of shepherds sleeping in the gateway is standard background about the region rather than a detail John states; Bailey's village-fold and wilderness-fold distinction is drawn from his own years in Lebanon and from nineteenth-century travellers' accounts. The hireling as the high priests and the wolf as Rome are Bailey's suggestions, offered by him as suggestions. Whether shepherds were a despised trade is disputed between Snodgrass and Bailey on one side and Levine on the other, and nothing in the post depends on it.