“I am the good shepherd” (RSV, John 10:11)

We are familiar with the picture of Our Blessed Lord as the Good Shepherd, crook in hand, peacefully leading his flock on a gently sloping hillside. But the picture that Our Lord gives of himself is very different. It is that of a shepherd locked in mortal combat with a ravenous wolf, while his sheep huddle helplessly together behind him.

“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (RSV, John 10:11).

And there is the whole meaning of Good Friday, of that fearful conflict between Our Lord and the powers of evil for our salvation.

The sheep, helpless in the face of the wolf’s attack, have their parallel in ourselves, incapable through the weakness of our human nature of resisting and overcoming the evil that is at work around us and within our own hearts.

And the wolf, hungry and pitiless, is a fitting symbol of the power of evil, and in particular of the Devil, the Lord of Darkness, of whose presence and activity Our Lord was so acutely aware during his ministry and not least on Maundy Thursday night and Good Friday.

For as soon as Our Saviour Jesus Christ came into this world to save us from the power of evil and to enable us to be the true and faithful sons and daughters of God that God means us to be, then from that moment the Crucifixion was a certainty: simply because the nature of evil is essentially to destroy, and the nature of love is essentially to save.

And Jesus in his love for us did not flinch from seeing his mission of salvation through to the end, whatever the cost. In the Garden of Gethsemane he had the opportunity to evade that cost by abandoning his mission and fleeing for his life. But to do so would have been to play his Father false and to leave us to fend for ourselves without him. It would have been to act like “…a hireling and not a shepherd, whose own the sheep are not”, who “sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf snatches them and scatters them” (RSV, John 10:12).

But Our Lord was not God’s hireling but God’s Son who, in his twofold love for his Father and for us, did not flinch from carrying out to death itself what he knew to be his Father’s will. "I am the good shepherd;” he said, “I know my own and my own know me, as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep” (RSV, John 10:14,15).

For because his victory over evil was to be a victory for us to share, so it had to be won on our level in our flesh.

Yet that conflict, though fought out in our world of space and time, was also the culmination of an eternal conflict in the spiritual world. So the onslaught was not merely physical: besides the flogging, the nailing, the hanging and the thirst, there was also the agony of soul which Christ endured. It began in the Garden of Gethsemane when the enveloping mass of evil gathered round him; it reached its climax in that hour of desolation on the Cross when all alone he was plunged deep down into the black darkness of the pit of evil. Until that hour he had always been able to rely on the consciousness of his Father’s presence; but now the sense, though not the reality, of that presence was withdrawn and he found himself in the lonely horror of Hell itself.

“The hour is coming, indeed it has come,” he had declared to his Apostles the night before, ”when you will be scattered, every man to his home, and will leave me alone; yet” he had added, ”I am not alone, for the Father is with me” (RSV, John 16:32).

But now he was filled with a sense of utter desolation; now it was “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (RSV, Matthew 27:46) – a question, not of doubt nor of lack of faith, but of wondering acceptance of his seeming abandonment, as he fulfilled the prophecy of Psalm 22, the first words of which he thus quoted.

So he bore the whole weight of the forces of evil with his own unaided strength, and throughout the struggle he remained at one with God; and when he died he died with his love and trust in his Father robust and unimpaired and serene.

So his last words were, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit…” (King James Bible, 23:46) – the same prayer with which Jesus, like every Jew, had ended each day as he settled down to sleep. “Father”, it was still “Father”. He never committed the spiritual treason of doubting his Father’s goodness and love, but in his own twofold love for his Father and for us, he accepted the Crucifixion as being the cost he had to pay in order to accomplish the overthrow of evil.

As he said, “No one takes…(my life) from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again; this charge I have received from my Father” (RSV, John 10:18).

He laid his life down on the Cross, he took it again at the Resurrection and thus he vanquished both evil and death: for only one who has conquered evil is unconquerable, only one who has passed through death unscathed is deathless.

Thus Our Lord’s parable of the strong man armed became a reality. “When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own palace, his goods are in peace; but when one stronger than he assails him and overcomes him, he takes away his armour in which he trusted, and divides his spoil” (RSV, Luke 11:21,22). And the spoils are the souls of human beings.

As Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me; and I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand” (RSV, John 10:27,28).

Nothing can evoke our love and humility so powerfully as does the Crucifixion. When we consider the kind of people we are for whom Christ suffered, we see how it was something we could never, never deserve. It was something which proceeded from God’s love alone, and so we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us (1 John 4:10,19; Galatians 2:20).

And when we consider who are Saviour is, our love passes into adoration, uncomprehending adoration. For he is the all-holy God who inhabits eternity and yet, of his own free will, brought himself down to our level, giving up all, even life itself, for our sake.

When faced with such love and generosity we can only kneel before him in adoration and humble gratitude, and give ourselves to him to be completely his for ever.

“Were the whole realm of nature mine,
that were an offering far too small;
love so amazing, so divine,
demands my soul, my life, my all”. (1)

Reference

1. Watts, I. (1707) When I survey the wondrous Cross. Available from: http://www.oremus.org/hymnal/w/w299.html (Accessed 17 February 2014) (Internet).