Good Shepherd – A Preacher’s Ponderings

To lay down one’s life

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 or out?

Fourth Sunday of Easter; 30 April 2023; Easter 4A (RCL); Acts 2:42-47; Psalm 23; a Peter 2:19-25; John 10:1-10.

The image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd is one of our favorites (we’ve all seen stained-glass windows depicting the shepherd carrying home the lost lamb on his shoulders), and the Fourth Sunday of Easter is always Good Shepherd Sunday. The collect evokes that image, and we always have a reading for the tenth chapter of John’s Gospel — the Good Shepherd discourse.

Trust

Fourth Sunday of Easter (Good Shepherd Sunday); 25 April 2021; Easter 4B (RCL); Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18.

Good Shepherd Sunday conjures images of Jesus with a lamb across his shoulders (this was in fact one of the earliest known depictions of Jesus in the Roman Catacombs). The trouble with this image is that we, the sheep, remain passive. The language in today’s readings suggests that we should be anything but passive.