Fourth Sunday of Easter; 21 April 2024; Easter 4B (RCL); Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18.
A guiding metaphor of the Johannine literature is the metaphor of laying down one’s life. The Greek idiom is not straightforward. A literal translation would be “to place one’s soul over” one’s friends. When 1 John says, “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us,” it is using this same metaphor: “he placed his soul over us.” The Greek is τίθειν τἠν ψυχἠν ὑπέρ – tithein ten psychen hyper, to place the soul over, or above, or on behalf of.
In the fundamentalist tradition in which I grew up, I never questioned that this meant that Jesus died in our place. What concerned me however, was the extension of Jesus’ command to us, that we ought also to lay down our lives for one another — did that mean I must be willing to die in someone else’s place? That was never a concept I could get my head around.
In seminary, I asked a scholar of classical Greek what the idiom meant. He said that one found it in military poetry. To place one’s soul over one’s friend meant to hand one’s sword to one’s friend, with the understanding that he could kill you with it while you were disarmed. If he didn’t kill you, you could trust him. So, I think a better translation of this idiom is “to entrust one’s life to one’s friends.”
That helps the second sentence in the 1 John reading make more sense. If the idiom means to die for a brother or sister, it seems like a real comedown to say that whoever sees a brother or sister in need, and has access to the world’s good, and refuses help cannot abide in God. But if the metaphor means to entrust one’s life, it makes much more sense that helping a brother or sister is a demonstration of that. That becomes particularly clear when we see that the phrase “the world’s goods,” in Greek is τὀν βἰον τοῦ κὀσμου, ton bion tou cosmou, the life (or livelihood) of the world.
When Jesus says the Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, he uses exactly the same idiom, so I think a better translation would be, “The Good Shepherd entrusts his life to the sheep.” When one recalls that the shepherd and sheep is a common metaphor in the Old Testament for the king and people, the idiom becomes even more shocking. It is expected that the people will entrust their lives to the king, and the king or ruler is excoriated by the prophets for their failure to protect the sheep (see eg Ezekiel 34). Here, the relationship runs in the opposite direction.
Beginning in the 1830s, a huge shift in ecclesiology took place in Europe, from an understanding that the validity of orders guaranteed the security of the church and its sacraments (a top-down ecclesiology) to the understanding that the orders emerged from the gathered community, called “communion ecclesiology” (a bottom-up ecclesiology). It took over a century for Vatican II to embed this shift in the official understanding of the church (and it is still in contest today among reactionary elements of the Roman Catholic Church), but it seems that John had such an understanding at the very beginnings of Christianity. Where does one find Jesus, the Good Shepherd? In the gathered flock, the Christian community.
So, when Jesus goes on to say that he has other sheep who are not of this fold, who will recognize his voice, and be gathered into the fold so there will be one flock, on shepherd, it seems to me that the flock must do the calling. It is up to us to invite and welcome those other sheep. This also seems to imply to me that our understanding of who Jesus is will be always changing as the flock to which Jesus has entrusted his life will be always changing. What matters is the relationships within the flock — it is those relationships which reveal Christ to the world.