“I am the Good Shepherd”

Hearing these words exactly as the disciples heard them is impossible for us, not least because they were almost certainly spoken in Aramaic. We all have some sense of what the word shepherd means, but we need to do a bit of digging to understand what Jesus meant when he identified himself as the Good Shepherd.

It turns out that there are three Aramaic words which can be translated as “good”. One of them means pleasurable or beautiful, the second means good in a moral sense and the third is all about having good relationships. Several centuries after St John’s Gospel was written, it was translated from the original Greek into Aramaic, and when the translator tackled the passage we heard just now, the third of those words was chosen. In that version of the Gospel, still used by Syriac Christians in the Middle East, Jesus is the shepherd who has good relationships.

The shepherd who has good relationships. One reason that this version of the saying makes sense is that it was customary in Biblical times for the job of shepherding to be done by one or more of the sons of the owner of the flock. You’ll recall that when Samuel asked to see all the sons of Jesse, the youngest of them, David, was absent looking after the sheep and had to be summoned to meet the prophet. If the owner of the flock had no sons, then it was necessary to hire a shepherd, but the hireling shepherds were, as Jesus suggests in today’s Gospel, less reliable. A good shepherd is, therefore, the son of the owner of the flock, and when Jesus says “I am the Good Shepherd” he is painting a word picture which conveys the truth that he is the Son of God. 

It’s likely that he had in mind a passage from the book of Ezekiel in which God tells the prophet:

“I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down…I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak…”

And the prophet, in his turn, clearly drew inspiration from the 23rd Psalm, a source of comfort for many generations of Jews and for Christians of all denominations. 

The word “comfort” can be misleading. We apply it to things which soothe us and which are restful - comfort blankets, comfort food - and there’s nothing wrong with that, but the word is derived from a Latin verb, confortare, which meant “to make strong”. And that’s an important reminder that as Christians, as members of the flock of Jesus Christ the Good Shepherd, we are called, we are made strong, in order to be shepherds ourselves. We are called to the active striving for the welfare of others of which today’s Epistle speaks:

“…let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” 

Active seeking for the welfare of others is, of course, central to the mission of Christian Aid, whose work and whose 80th anniversary we celebrate today. The charity was originally founded to help the many millions of refugees displaced during the Second World War and that’s a reminder that Thursday of last week saw the 80th anniversary of VE Day - the end of that conflict in Europe and the defeat of a regime characterised by racism, by a perverted version of national pride and by a lust for territorial expansion. While we rightly celebrate that anniversary, no victory is ever complete, for racism, perverted national pride and the lust for territorial expansion continue to fuel conflicts and to threaten peace and democratic values. Remember, for example, the conflict in Ukraine and the savage cuts to overseas aid made by the Trump administration.

We rightly commemorate the service and sacrifice of that wartime generation who enabled those us to live in peace. We also rightly commemorate the work of those who, perhaps in small ways, worked for reconciliation between former enemies.

If you go to the archives of the Imperial War Museum in London you will find there some correspondence between former German officers, recently repatriated prisoners of war, and a young woman then living in Lancashire. The officers express their gratitude for parcels of clothing sent by the young woman and other members of the Women’s Fellowship of the church to which she belonged. The museum has the letters because I deposited them there. They were written by my aunt Edith.

That initiative of reconciliation arose out of the fact that my father, a Methodist minister, was asked by the commandant of a prisoner-of-war camp in Northumberland to offer pastoral support to a badly-wounded German infantry colonel who belonged to the small Methodist Church in Germany. After VE Day, the prisoners were allowed out into the local community and my aunt met some of them at my father’s home, as did her father and her sister, who was then my father’s fiancée. When my parents got married, the wedding presents included a number of items crafted by the prisoners of war my father had befriended. I have one of them here. It’s a beautifully carved bread plate and in the centre of it, in old-fashioned German script, are words which, when translated, will be familiar to you all and which we will use later in this service.

”Unser täglich brot gib uns heute”

“Give us this day our daily bread”

The story serves as a reminder both that we belong to a Christian flock that is world-wide, a reminder of the value of the ecumenical partnership that is Murrayfield Churches Together. And it reminds us also that Christ calls us to be be shepherds, shepherds who have good relationships, including good relationships with that wider flock which we call humanity, all made in the image and likeness of God. That is what Christian Aid seeks to do.

To return to those words from today’s Epistle:

“…let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”