Ezekiel 34:11-16; 1 Peter 2:21-25; St John 10:11-16
In the Name + of JESUS. Amen.
I don’t know why, defensiveness I suppose, but single mothers almost always say that the father, or fathers, of their children are “good dads,” when, in fact, we know that they are dirtbags. What the mothers mean is that the fathers enjoy playing with their kids when it is convenient. They are good, for a few moments at least, at making their kids giggle. They enjoy the cuteness of their kids. They mainly like their children, even if they find them largely inconvenient and easy to forget.
Such dads tend to be terrible, if not completely worthless, providers. They rarely, if ever pay for their children’s food. They don’t change diapers or help around the house. They certainly don’t teach their kids the Ten Commandments, Apostles’ Creed, or the Lord’s Prayer. They don’t bring them to Church to hear of their true Father’s love for them. How could they? They’re not around.
But since they enjoy their children and their children desperately enjoy the fleeting moments of their attention, the moms judge them to be “good dads.” I suppose, depending on your definition of “good” maybe they are. If nothing else they seem to be good at impregnating girls they have no intention of marrying.
That little tirade is meant to introduce you to the difficulty we have in understanding our Lord’s proclamation that He is the Good Shepherd. Dictionary.com lists about forty ways that “good” can be used as an adjective in English. Not all of them can be applied to our Good Shepherd. By my count, about twenty of them can. But, of course, our Lord didn’t say in English, “I am the Good Shepherd.”
He probably spoke in Aramaic, though, it is very possible He spoke in Hebrew, and it is remotely possible that He spoke in Greek. In one sense it doesn’t matter what language He spoke. The Holy Spirit has given it to us in Greek. And what the Holy Spirit gives is authoritative. So, you may as well learn a Greek word today. The word translated as “good,” in the word kalos. Jesus is the Kalos Shepherd.
Those dirtbag dads might be good dads depending on what we mean by the word “good.” But they would never be considered kalos dads. And that is the distinction we need to keep in mind. There is a romantic notion of the Good Shepherd that thinks of the Good Shepherd the way single moms think of the dirtbags. It thinks that the goodness of the Shepherd resides in His affection for the sheep. So a good dad is a dad who like the fun parts of being a dad, and a good shepherd is one who like to pet and cuddle sheep for his own amusement. He is good at deriving pleasure from others.
Now, in fairness, that idea about God is not completely out of place in the New Testament. The Lord does, in fact, hold you in deep affection. He does love you as a father loves his children. He also loves you as a husband loves his wife. He loves you as a colleague and a friend. His bond and love for you embraces all the ways humans love one another, but more purely, without self-interest or jealousy or fear, and devoid of all the appropriate and inappropriate sexual connotations we ascribe to love. That’s a whole other linguistic problem not for today.
So there is nothing wrong with thinking of Jesus as the strong, yet gentle love of sheep. Fine. But as correct as that sentiment might be, it just isn’t what these passages are about. Jesus isn’t saying, “I am the gentle love of sheep.” He says, I am the Kalos Shepherd.
And that word has a tremendous amount of linguistic and interpretive freight. Everything from when God saw all that He had made in the beginning and it was kalos, through the good sacrifices of Abel, the shepherd, to the appearance and speaking of the Second Person of the Trinity in the burning bush to Moses, the Passover and Exodus, Psalm 23, Ezekiel 34, and a host of other passages.
What He is saying is that He is the right Shepherd, the perfect Shepherd, even the noble Shepherd. He is the most fitting, uniquely qualified and best Shepherd for sinners. He is, in fact, the only Shepherd who can actually bear this title. Not Abel or Moses. Not David nor all his sons. They were only types, shadows of the gracious rule of the Kalos Shepherd. Even our pastors, are but echoes of the true Shepherd.
That is what kalos means. It means good, right, fitting. It means true, beautiful, and perfect. It means competent, good for you, and noble.
Our Lord’s primary purpose in the proclamation is to deny the claims of all other shepherds. He denies the claim of the many shepherd gods and kings of the Greek and other pagans. And, at the same time, He denies the claims of the Pharisees, Priests, and Essenes. If you are a shepherd, whether King David or Pastor Jones, you must be an undershepherd. A shepherd who shepherds not his own sheep, but is himself a sheep of the Kalos Shepherd and whose office is to proclaim the Kalos Shepherd as the receiver, savior, and anointing sacrifice of sinners.
The Lord alone can make this claim. He is the Kalos Shepherd. He is the One who morally and ontologically good. He is wholly perfect, without blemish or stain or sin.
But His claim does not come from being morally or even essentially good. Jesus’ claim that He is the Good Shepherd comes from His faithful obedience and perfect sacrifice. The Good Shepherd, the Kalos Shepherd, is the true and only Shepherd because He gives His life for the sheep. He silently lays down, like a Lamb at slaughter, and allows that wolf named death to devour Him whole. And in so doing, He destroys death! He stuffs death’s mouth with His own perfect Body and saving Blood. And He bursts a hole right in death’s stomach to big and wide that He walks out in triumph.
This is how He ransoms and redeems you. He is One with His Father and now, but His Incarnation, Cross and Passion, Death and Resurrection, He is One with you. You are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand, bought with His own Blood, become one with the Father, having one flock, one Good Shepherd. He is King Messiah.
The great hope and expectation of the rabbis who taught before Christ was that the Messiah would unite all the Jews of Palestine, all the Jews of the diaspora, and all the Gentiles into one flock. They taught that King Messiah would destroy the Temple and usher in a new age, a new law and covenant, and there would be no separation of Jew and Gentile. This, in large part, is why the rulers of the Jews fear Jesus. They weren’t so afraid that He was a fraud. They were afraid that He was the Messiah, and they didn’t want a Messiah. They didn’t want the Gentiles or the end of the Temple. It meant the end of their power and prestige and payment.
Our Lord Christ, then, is claiming that by sacrifice, He, the Kalos Shepherd, will reconcile sinners to the Father and make one flock. He will be the true Passover Lamb and lead His people out of bondage to sin and death. This is the character of the true and noble Shepherd, beautifully fit for His purpose, competent, good, worthy of praise - all that is confessed in the term Kalos.
Sadly much of the artwork inspired by this passage tends to concentrate too much on the previous idea and not the manly notion. Our Good Shepherd window, as lovely and beautiful as it is, conveys the idea of Jesus as the gentle lover of sheep. The new Cranach painting we have in the back, yet to be dedicated, concentrates more on the key passage here: I lay down My life for the sheep. The goodness of the Shepherd is not in His affection, but in His sacrifice. Perhaps the best image of the Good Shepherd is, in fact, the crucifix. Because if His affection is the cause of His sacrifice, then note this, it is not His affection for us, but His affection for His Father.
This is a tough lesson when we’ve been raised on corn syrup theology, but it has its rewards. In the first place, it is Biblical. It comes out of our Lord’s own description of His mission and motives and not from some mewling attempt to be winsome or nice. Secondly, it takes the focus off of us and places it where it belongs: on Jesus. He lays down His life. He takes it up again. His Father loves Him because of it. We are the spoils of war, the plunder rendered to the Son by a grateful and affectionate Father. We are the sheep of a different fold, brought in without pedigree or works, spared from the hired hands and set free from the terror of the big, bad wolf.
Come, dear little lambs. Even though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, fear no evil. For your Kalos Shepherd is with you, His rod and staff, His Word and Spirit, they comfort you. Behold, He has prepared a Table before you, a feast of rich food, given to you in justice, in the Righteousness of His atoning death, even His Body and Blood, swallowed by death, alive from the grave, given you to here as the Food of Immortality. The wolf may howl, he may snarl and rage, but death cannot have you, its sting is lost, its power is done. The Lamb the sheep has ransomed. You belong to Christ, the Great Good Shepherd and Bishop of your body and your soul, who gathers you together as one flock. His mercy and goodness follow you always. You shall dwell in His house forever.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia! Amen.
In the Name + of JESUS. Amen.
I don’t know why, defensiveness I suppose, but single mothers almost always say that the father, or fathers, of their children are “good dads,” when, in fact, we know that they are dirtbags. What the mothers mean is that the fathers enjoy playing with their kids when it is convenient. They are good, for a few moments at least, at making their kids giggle. They enjoy the cuteness of their kids. They mainly like their children, even if they find them largely inconvenient and easy to forget.
Such dads tend to be terrible, if not completely worthless, providers. They rarely, if ever pay for their children’s food. They don’t change diapers or help around the house. They certainly don’t teach their kids the Ten Commandments, Apostles’ Creed, or the Lord’s Prayer. They don’t bring them to Church to hear of their true Father’s love for them. How could they? They’re not around.
But since they enjoy their children and their children desperately enjoy the fleeting moments of their attention, the moms judge them to be “good dads.” I suppose, depending on your definition of “good” maybe they are. If nothing else they seem to be good at impregnating girls they have no intention of marrying.
That little tirade is meant to introduce you to the difficulty we have in understanding our Lord’s proclamation that He is the Good Shepherd. Dictionary.com lists about forty ways that “good” can be used as an adjective in English. Not all of them can be applied to our Good Shepherd. By my count, about twenty of them can. But, of course, our Lord didn’t say in English, “I am the Good Shepherd.”
He probably spoke in Aramaic, though, it is very possible He spoke in Hebrew, and it is remotely possible that He spoke in Greek. In one sense it doesn’t matter what language He spoke. The Holy Spirit has given it to us in Greek. And what the Holy Spirit gives is authoritative. So, you may as well learn a Greek word today. The word translated as “good,” in the word kalos. Jesus is the Kalos Shepherd.
Those dirtbag dads might be good dads depending on what we mean by the word “good.” But they would never be considered kalos dads. And that is the distinction we need to keep in mind. There is a romantic notion of the Good Shepherd that thinks of the Good Shepherd the way single moms think of the dirtbags. It thinks that the goodness of the Shepherd resides in His affection for the sheep. So a good dad is a dad who like the fun parts of being a dad, and a good shepherd is one who like to pet and cuddle sheep for his own amusement. He is good at deriving pleasure from others.
Now, in fairness, that idea about God is not completely out of place in the New Testament. The Lord does, in fact, hold you in deep affection. He does love you as a father loves his children. He also loves you as a husband loves his wife. He loves you as a colleague and a friend. His bond and love for you embraces all the ways humans love one another, but more purely, without self-interest or jealousy or fear, and devoid of all the appropriate and inappropriate sexual connotations we ascribe to love. That’s a whole other linguistic problem not for today.
So there is nothing wrong with thinking of Jesus as the strong, yet gentle love of sheep. Fine. But as correct as that sentiment might be, it just isn’t what these passages are about. Jesus isn’t saying, “I am the gentle love of sheep.” He says, I am the Kalos Shepherd.
And that word has a tremendous amount of linguistic and interpretive freight. Everything from when God saw all that He had made in the beginning and it was kalos, through the good sacrifices of Abel, the shepherd, to the appearance and speaking of the Second Person of the Trinity in the burning bush to Moses, the Passover and Exodus, Psalm 23, Ezekiel 34, and a host of other passages.
What He is saying is that He is the right Shepherd, the perfect Shepherd, even the noble Shepherd. He is the most fitting, uniquely qualified and best Shepherd for sinners. He is, in fact, the only Shepherd who can actually bear this title. Not Abel or Moses. Not David nor all his sons. They were only types, shadows of the gracious rule of the Kalos Shepherd. Even our pastors, are but echoes of the true Shepherd.
That is what kalos means. It means good, right, fitting. It means true, beautiful, and perfect. It means competent, good for you, and noble.
Our Lord’s primary purpose in the proclamation is to deny the claims of all other shepherds. He denies the claim of the many shepherd gods and kings of the Greek and other pagans. And, at the same time, He denies the claims of the Pharisees, Priests, and Essenes. If you are a shepherd, whether King David or Pastor Jones, you must be an undershepherd. A shepherd who shepherds not his own sheep, but is himself a sheep of the Kalos Shepherd and whose office is to proclaim the Kalos Shepherd as the receiver, savior, and anointing sacrifice of sinners.
The Lord alone can make this claim. He is the Kalos Shepherd. He is the One who morally and ontologically good. He is wholly perfect, without blemish or stain or sin.
But His claim does not come from being morally or even essentially good. Jesus’ claim that He is the Good Shepherd comes from His faithful obedience and perfect sacrifice. The Good Shepherd, the Kalos Shepherd, is the true and only Shepherd because He gives His life for the sheep. He silently lays down, like a Lamb at slaughter, and allows that wolf named death to devour Him whole. And in so doing, He destroys death! He stuffs death’s mouth with His own perfect Body and saving Blood. And He bursts a hole right in death’s stomach to big and wide that He walks out in triumph.
This is how He ransoms and redeems you. He is One with His Father and now, but His Incarnation, Cross and Passion, Death and Resurrection, He is One with you. You are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand, bought with His own Blood, become one with the Father, having one flock, one Good Shepherd. He is King Messiah.
The great hope and expectation of the rabbis who taught before Christ was that the Messiah would unite all the Jews of Palestine, all the Jews of the diaspora, and all the Gentiles into one flock. They taught that King Messiah would destroy the Temple and usher in a new age, a new law and covenant, and there would be no separation of Jew and Gentile. This, in large part, is why the rulers of the Jews fear Jesus. They weren’t so afraid that He was a fraud. They were afraid that He was the Messiah, and they didn’t want a Messiah. They didn’t want the Gentiles or the end of the Temple. It meant the end of their power and prestige and payment.
Our Lord Christ, then, is claiming that by sacrifice, He, the Kalos Shepherd, will reconcile sinners to the Father and make one flock. He will be the true Passover Lamb and lead His people out of bondage to sin and death. This is the character of the true and noble Shepherd, beautifully fit for His purpose, competent, good, worthy of praise - all that is confessed in the term Kalos.
Sadly much of the artwork inspired by this passage tends to concentrate too much on the previous idea and not the manly notion. Our Good Shepherd window, as lovely and beautiful as it is, conveys the idea of Jesus as the gentle lover of sheep. The new Cranach painting we have in the back, yet to be dedicated, concentrates more on the key passage here: I lay down My life for the sheep. The goodness of the Shepherd is not in His affection, but in His sacrifice. Perhaps the best image of the Good Shepherd is, in fact, the crucifix. Because if His affection is the cause of His sacrifice, then note this, it is not His affection for us, but His affection for His Father.
This is a tough lesson when we’ve been raised on corn syrup theology, but it has its rewards. In the first place, it is Biblical. It comes out of our Lord’s own description of His mission and motives and not from some mewling attempt to be winsome or nice. Secondly, it takes the focus off of us and places it where it belongs: on Jesus. He lays down His life. He takes it up again. His Father loves Him because of it. We are the spoils of war, the plunder rendered to the Son by a grateful and affectionate Father. We are the sheep of a different fold, brought in without pedigree or works, spared from the hired hands and set free from the terror of the big, bad wolf.
Come, dear little lambs. Even though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, fear no evil. For your Kalos Shepherd is with you, His rod and staff, His Word and Spirit, they comfort you. Behold, He has prepared a Table before you, a feast of rich food, given to you in justice, in the Righteousness of His atoning death, even His Body and Blood, swallowed by death, alive from the grave, given you to here as the Food of Immortality. The wolf may howl, he may snarl and rage, but death cannot have you, its sting is lost, its power is done. The Lamb the sheep has ransomed. You belong to Christ, the Great Good Shepherd and Bishop of your body and your soul, who gathers you together as one flock. His mercy and goodness follow you always. You shall dwell in His house forever.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia! Amen.
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