As much as I love technology, I haven’t always been a gadget geek. This part of me really began to develop in my late high school and early college years. It was during these times that I took an interest in running the soundboard at church.
It was during my time at Vennard College that my home church switched from using PowerPoint to a church media presentation software called MediaShout. In this software, the limits set by PowerPoint were shattered. We were now able to add new songs at a moment’s notice. We were able to use motion backgrounds and run in a dual screen setup. However, one of the features I was most excited about was the ability to overlay text across any slide.
While I spent much of my time dealing with tech stuff at the church, my wife typically spent her time in the nursery. I therefore was privy to many of the problems and frustrations felt by nursery works. This was why I was so excited about being able to overlay text across slides. The common usage being discussed for this feature was the ability to place a small number on the screen that would allow parents to know that their child in the nursery needed them. In my mind, this feature would stop nursery workers from needing to disrupt the service in order to find a child’s parent.
However, we never really utilized this feature quite like I thought we would. As we began to toy around with the idea of placing a number on the screen to alert parents, we ran into a few roadblocks. First, This meant that we would have to number each child. Parents would then have to keep track of their number so that they knew when their number appeared on the screen.
Second, we didn’t have a great way to communicate between the nursery and the soundbooth. A nursery worker could come into the sanctuary, but that still left the nursery workers one person short during that time. Also, if they were already coming into the sanctuary, they might as well tell the parents themselves rather than getting the soundbooth involved.
But the biggest issue was one that I hadn’t even thought of until I became a parent myself. Being a young man, I took it upon myself to tackle this problem for the parents and nursery workers only to discover that it wasn’t as big of an issue as I had thought. Maybe it is for bigger churches, but in that church the nursery was right next to the sanctuary. The walls were made of brick, but what I found during the course of a normal service was that most of the time parents didn’t need anyone to inform them that their kid was crying.
Call it maternal instincts, but mothers, and to a certain extent fathers, know when their child is crying. I’ve seen mothers and grandmothers get up and leave during the middle of a service because they could hear a faint cry from the nursery and knew that it was their child. As parents we’re so in tune with our children that we know them. A mother can be in a room full of children and immediately be able to determine if hers is the one that is crying.
It all comes down to that level of intimacy between a mother and her child, and it goes both ways. In many cases a crying child will stop crying upon hearing its mother’s voice. It’s much like what Jesus says about sheep knowing their master’s voice. There’s a special kind of relationship there.
Continuing in that line of logic, we come to a passage in John 10. As we look at the person of Jesus and try to determine who he says he is, we come to the passage in which Jesus declares, “I am the good shepherd,” (John 10:11) but in order to understand what Jesus is saying we need to look at the whole passage in context.
In John 9 it’s recorded that Jesus heals a man who has been born blind. This causes great controversy since he happened to heal him on the Sabbath. This caused a huge investigation by the Pharisees. Some argued that nobody could have healed this blind man unless he had been from God while others argued that he could not be from God because he had healed on the Sabbath. This investigation leads to the healed man being thrown out of the synagogue.
Jesus then finds this man and begins to speak to him and teach him. Not far off, some Pharisees are listening and begin to object to Jesus’ teachings. This brings us to John 10:1-5. Again, he’s addressing the issue of the Pharisees and this blind man and using an analogy in which the Pharisees are depicted as thieves and robbers whom the sheep will not follow. Being a shepherding community, people would understand the scenario of which Jesus is speaking.
The sheep pen was a place in which the shepherds would keep their sheep at night. They typically consisted of a high stone wall in either a square or circular shape. The walls were often covered in vines and getting over them was no easy task. The only break in the wall was at the gate. It’s called the gate, but truthfully it’s not as much of a gate as it is just an opening in the wall. Once all the sheep were inside, the watchman or shepherd would lie down across the opening. This ensured that the sheep remained inside the pen and anybody going in or out would have to directly confront the one at the gate.
However, this whole idea of a shepherd is a foreign concept in our modern society. The closest thing most Americans get to caring for sheep is the viral videos in which a group herds their sheep in formations to make pictures or play pong. In fact, our typical image of shepherding is drastically different from the shepherding that Jesus is speaking about.
Most modern shepherding is done with dogs. The shepherds will train the dogs to follow whistle commands and the dogs will run and bark to get the sheep wherever they need them to go. We see videos of sheep shearing contests in which the shearers manhandle the sheep in order to see who can clear the wool as quickly as possible. In modern society, the sheep are seen as animals, which they are, and they are treated as such and with little regard. We may talk about shepherds in Sunday School or the kids might color a picture of a shepherd with a shepherd’s crook, but for the most part the shepherding that Jesus speaks of is lost and foreign to us.
The shepherding that Jesus is speaking of when he says that he is the good shepherd is much different from any shepherding we know today. To see the kind of shepherding that Jesus speaks of we must look across the ocean back to Israel. Two pictures accurately capture this idea of shepherding.
The first is of a shepherd walking down the side of the road leading his sheep. Cars go flying by as the shepherd walks along. He does not bark, yell, or blow a whistle at them. Instead he sings a song and gently whistles as the sheep follow him dutifully down the road. Despite the traffic and the commotion going on around them, the sheep stay trained to their shepherd’s voice and follow him wherever he leads.
The second picture comes in early morning. As the shepherds gather their sheep from the sheep pen. Flocks of sheep from a number of shepherds are all gathered together, but as the shepherd begins to sing and call to his sheep the large flock begins to dissipate at each sheep follows their shepherd’s voice. The sheep trust their shepherd and the shepherd is willing to fight for his sheep.
This is the picture that Jesus gives to the people when he relates himself as the shepherd. He contrasts this with that of the hired hand. As he says, the hired hand cares nothing for the sheep and when a predator comes is quick to run away. A shepherd, however, fights for his sheep. As David states in 1 Samuel 17:34-35, “Your servant has been keeping his father’s sheep. When a lion or a bear came and carried off a sheep from the flock, I went after it, struck it and rescued the sheep from its mouth. When it turned on me, I seized it by its hair, struck it and killed it.”
Let’s not get confused now and think that these shepherds were careless and reckless. They cared for their sheep, and they would certainly fight to protect them. However, this is not to say that the shepherd would trade his life and the lives of the rest of his flock for a single sheep. As David did, he would attempt to save his sheep, but he was not going to sacrifice his own life for that of a sheep. They were good, but they weren’t that good.
But Jesus is different. He isn’t just any shepherd. He is the good shepherd, as he says, “I lay down my life for the sheep.” This is what distinguishes a good shepherd from a normal shepherd. Any shepherd has that deep relationship with his sheep. Any shepherd is willing to fight for and protect his sheep, but the good shepherd will lay down his life for his sheep. The good shepherd is the only one that freely lays down his life only to take it up again.
Jesus is the good shepherd. He cares for and protects the sheep in his flock. We’ve heard all of this before. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. But to see the beauty of this, we must look past the actions of the shepherd and look at his heart.
Yes, the shepherd cares for his sheep. Yes, the sheep follow the shepherd. Yes, the sheep know his voice, but it goes beyond that. The shepherd not only takes care of the sheep, he knows them. This goes beyond simply being able to identify them. The shepherd knows his sheep on a deep and personal level.
This is who Jesus is. As the good shepherd, he protects and cares for his sheep. He knows and cares about the sheep in his flock. Not only does he have a deep love for them, but they know him as well. This relationship that Christ is describing is the same relationship that he wants to have with each one of us. Just like the mother who can hear her baby’s cry from the nursery, Christ knows us, but he wants us to know him and trust him as well.
As a shepherd with his sheep, Christ wants that deep relationship with each one of us. He wants to know us and for us to know him. He wants to be our shield and protector. He wants to walk us beside still waters. This is the relationship he desires with us, but our sin kept him from doing that. Our sin kept us from him, so he did the only thing he could do. He did the thing that only he could do. He laid down his life for us that we might be his sheep.
He laid down his life that we might have that relationship with him. As the shepherd leads his sheep, no matter whether it’s by quiet streams or by a busy highway, the sheep know his voice. As he sings them a song and calls for them to follow him, no matter what chaos is going on around us, we follow him because we know he is the good shepherd.