When the first Christians want to tell us about Jesus, they often reach for the image of shepherd. This, they say, this is Jesus: Jesus is a shepherd. They know about shepherds themselves, living as they do in a pre-industrial agrarian world where city streets are designed for beasts of burden, not automobiles or trains. But they also cherish older stories of the faith, stories already as ancient to them as their stories are ancient to us. And in those older stories, shepherds reliably appear.
Moses is tending sheep when God appears in the flaming thornbush and sends Moses on his vocation to liberate the Israelites. David is tending sheep when Samuel proclaims that he is the new sovereign of the Israelite nation. God comes near to shepherds. And so it’s not surprising to encounter the shepherds of Bethlehem, knocked off their feet by angels. God in Jesus has come near, so… here come the shepherds. Jesus is divine, his followers say, so… he’s a Shepherd.
But none of this shepherd imagery is necessarily going to pull us in, persuade us, move us, change us. What do we know about shepherds? Let’s take a deeper look. John the evangelist can help us with this.
First, John tells us that Jesus the Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. That was a powerful teaching for John’s community, because they were badly hurt, painfully rejected, cast out of their communities because they held so firmly to Mary Magdalene’s strange Good News that she had seen the risen Lord. Jesus lays down his life for a rejected community.
And then, later in the Gospel, when the John community tells us their version of the arrest of Jesus, they say he leaves the garden to meet the soldiers alone: he comes forward, standing at the gate between the dangerous army and his beloved companions. He places his body between his followers and a mortal threat. Shepherds do that kind of thing.
But John also gives us at least one more key insight about Jesus the Good Shepherd. Today we hear a portion of John’s “Good Shepherd discourse,” a moving speech, a love song, really, sung passionately by Jesus, that powerfully explores the shepherd metaphor.
And here’s the point, the essential thing to know about the “Good Shepherd discourse” in John: this “Good Shepherd” speech, or song, is how Jesus explains his healing of the man born blind, the disruptive event that happened just before the speech, a wondrous action that led to great controversy. The man born blind was rejected, another outcast, living at a time when to be born with a birth defect didn’t just make you a target in an ableist culture, it made you a pariah. “Someone sinned!” people would say, when they came upon the man born blind. Someone is being punished. There could be no kinder interpretation of his condition.
And so Jesus the Good Shepherd is Good News for the man born blind, and anyone who can identify with him. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for his friends, of course, but among those friends are those who the respectable, privileged people consider beneath contempt, reprehensible, even disgusting.
But maybe Jesus as Good Shepherd is still not hitting home for us. We live in a hard, angular city, not on a natural, pastoral hillside. So I’d like to introduce you to a contemporary shepherd. Two shepherds, really: a man and his dog. The man is Jon Katz, a novelist who decided to buy a farm in upstate New York. Jon Katz quickly learned that his suburban New Jersey lifestyle had not remotely prepared him for the brutality of farm life, and one of his best early teachers was his dog Rose, a border-collie/shepherd mix.
I’ve read, and recommend, Jon Katz’s books about his farm, and about his many dogs. If you’re a dog person, get his guide book for dog owners called “Katz on Dogs,” a play on his name, k-a-t-z. If you read his books, though, fair warning: you may fall in love with Rose, in my opinion his most intriguing dog.
Rose the dog, even more than Jon Katz, her owner, opens up for me what we Christians might mean when we proclaim Jesus the Good Shepherd. I want to share with you a portion of The Story of Rose: A Man and His Dog, by Jon Katz. In this portion, Katz writes about a dreadful night in February. I will be quoting him at some length, but I hope you’ll agree that he’s worth our generous attention. And I hope you’ll let Rose guide your reflections on our Savior, Jesus the Good Shepherd, who is our guide and our helper; our defender and our leader; our companion and our chaplain, in life and in death.
The story begins like this:
“I remember sleeping in bed… in the farmhouse and being awoken suddenly by a cold dog nose against my arm. Rose had hopped up into bed and was whining. She only did that when something was wrong.”
Jon follows Rose into the snowstorm until she leads him to a newborn lamb and her distressed mother. He continues:
“I was frozen for a brief moment by the awful beauty of the scene. Rose moved quickly to head off the lamb, who was going uphill. I knew — [Rose] also did, clearly — that a newborn lamb out in a storm meant almost certain death. I had heard stories of farmers finding lambs frozen to the ground.
I also knew that if she were separated from her mother for too long, the ewe would reject her and refuse to give her milk. The lamb would either die or have to be bottle-fed, a difficult and laborious process. The lamb stood braying at Rose, perhaps thinking she was her mother. Rose seemed to understand that this creature was frail. She did not bark, charge, or nip at her. Rose stood her ground gently in front of the lamb. She held the lamb in position until I could scramble up the hill, get my arms around the little creature, and then start to make my way back to the barn. Rose did not need any commands. She stayed behind with the ewe, who was still lying on her side, struggling.”
Jon then takes the lamb into the barn and warms her up, feeds her, and gets her settled. He then trudges back up to Rose and the troubled ewe. Their next task was to get the mother sheep into the barn. He continues:
“Rose had an inch or two of snow across her head and back. I had not seen Rose like this — close, intense, still. She seemed to know what she could do and what she could not do. And right then there was nothing she could do. She seemed protective of the ewe. She did not look around or try to leave. Rose seemed to have the sense that this was her responsibility…
“I realized that I knew how to get the ewe into the barn. I stumbled back into the barn, grabbed a sling, slipped it under the lamb, picked her up, and brought her out into the storm. Keep her there, Rosie, [I thought], keep her there. And she did. I knew she would. When we got close, the lamb began crying out, and the ewe recognized her voice, then her smell. Frantic, she forgot about Rose and began moving toward me, toward her baby. I saw her bond with her baby and was shown again what a powerful instinct mothering is.”
Jon, the lamb, Rose, and the mother sheep struggle back toward the barn, and then, Katz writes, “the ewe balked, refusing to come in, and ran right over Rosie and began to climb up the hill to the pole barn, her safe place.
Rose turned into a wolf right there, barking and circling. She seemed larger to me, so determined, and then the ewe turned and ran toward me, deciding a man and a barn were much safer.” Katz finally reunited mother and baby, and got them settled and safe in the barn.
“There was no sweeter, deeper feeling,” he wrote, “than seeing that mother and child in their pen, dry and warm in a storm. We did it, Rosie, we did it. And then I saw Rosie turn her head toward the barn door. She ran to it, and then I saw her swivel and tense, her ears up, fully alert. Something was wrong, something had happened, and I heard the cry that she had just heard, piercing and sharp. Another lamb. There was another lamb up there. She had twins, I thought; she must have had twins, and both of them had been searching for her in the storm as she lay on her side.”
Jon and Rose went back into the storm, and Rose led her owner to the other lamb, but this time it was too late. He continues: “I was surprised, shaken, and numb, feeling so many things out there in that snowy pasture. Rose and I sat quietly over the dead body, this lamb that was our responsibility. Just a few minutes ago I had been asleep in bed. It was hard to get my bearings in that field, on that night.
“Rose, too, I think, was uncharacteristically thrown off balance. She was not so sure about the world now. She had never seen a dead sheep before, never seen something in her charge die, nor had I. It was an awful feeling, not so much of grief, but of failure and sadness. I should have known, should have been better prepared, should have avoided this…
“I left Rose alone to sit up on the hill with the lamb for as long as she wished. Even then, I had this instinct to let Rose work things out, to see her amazing ability to process things and move forward, something I have struggled almost all of my life to learn how to do.
“I came down to the barn to make sure my first lamb was healthy, which thankfully it was. A little later, I went to the rear of the barn, surprised that Rose had not come down yet to check on things.
“The barn floodlight was on, and I turned the flashlight on the dark hill. There was Rose lying down next to the dead lamb, and looking down at the barn, at me.”
