*April 29, 2007*

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*Sheep, Shepherds and Messianic Inquiries*

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*By Harry T. Cook*

/*John 10: 22-30*/

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/[Note: Here is an edited passage of my 2003 work, *FINDINGS: Lectionary Research & Analysis*, New York, Church Publishing Group.]/

The lectionary puts it in reverse by directing that the John 10 passage be read on the Fourth Sunday of Easter – Year C. It returns us to a scene in John’s narrative that is depicted as taking place on the enclosed, eastern-most portico of the Jerusalem Temple at or near the Feast of Dedication, better known to us as Hanukkah. Jesus has been depicted already in the fourth gospel as being observant on Shabbat, and at Passover and Sukkoth.

As to the historicity of what John describes, it is suggested by some who work with these texts that the passage is surely a report of an actual event in that Hanukkah is such a minor observance that it would be unlikely that anyone would go to the trouble of fabricating a story around it.

In any event, it was on that occasion that “Jews” (the earlier gospels would have referred to them as ‘scribes and Pharisees’) are said to have come to Jesus with the question, /How long do we go on holding our breath? If you are the anointed one /[christos] /tell us directly. /(My translation) See if you think the answer is “direct:”

/I have been showing it all along. What I’ve been doing should tell you who I am/ (10: 25,26). Here the author of the gospel is referring to events depicted in 2: 1-11; 4: 46-54; 5: 1-15; 6: 1-15 – all so-called signs and wonders.

As it turns out, the answer is not direct enough. John depicts Jesus as knowing that his questioners did not grasp the significance of what Jesus had done (turning water into wine, healing the son of a royal official by remote control, making a paralytic well by /fiat/ and causing five barley loaves and two fish to become food sufficient for 5000 people). But there is an explanation, and John places it on the lips of Jesus: /You do not /[cannot?] /believe because you do not belong to my sheep. /It’s not stubbornness, then, but natural ignorance. They are not his sheep. For /not my sheep/ read “synagogue Jews” who were in John’s time near the end of the First Century C.E. giving Jesus Jews a very hard time and whom John had demonized in shorthand as /the Jews/. One can infer the curl of the lips.

In John’s schema what the sheep know that not-the-sheep do not is that Jesus is the/ christos/, the anointed one or messiah. The reward of knowing that, John says, is /eternal life/, by which is not meant individual lives running on into infinity, but, rather, the individual life lived for its three-score-and-ten on the belief that “now” matters because that’s all there is. Here /eternal life /is a higher-stakes, present-tense proposition with every choice, every action intentionally connected to the belief that this life ultimately matters in and for itself.

In that analysis, it is really unnecessary to elevate Jesus to the status of a god-come-slumming. The inherent Neo-Platonism of incarnational theology is a waste of time. Humankind – Jesus perhaps more obviously – is the end-product (at least so far) in the evolutionary process (at least on this planet). The imagined deity “off in eternity” is, in fact, the concrete human being dealing with the problems of life – as in their solution in the signs and wonders. The water-into-wine business is an unfortunate inclusion among them. The stories of the recovery of the sick child and the return to wholeness of the paralytic are much more interesting phenomena to probe.

Most of us are not-my-sheep because we cannot buy the impossible idea that an unseen deity was somehow morphed into a seen human being. But what we can see are the marvels that human love and concern can accomplish as persons are made whole, if not in one way, then another: by acceptance, inclusion and love.

*A footnote:* This is only considered speculation on the outer edges of my research, but perhaps it is possible to ask if by setting the scene of this passage in an identifiable place at Judaism’s then-central shrine, and, moreover, on the feast of its Dedication, John was subtly saying that synagogue Judaism was not the legitimate heir to the tradition, but that Jesus was. John wrote at least 20 years after the destruction of the Temple and no doubt realized it was a thing of the past. But not just any old thing of any old past. For John, the Temple, even in its ruination, was a sign:

/The Jews said to Jesus, ‘What sign can you show us for doing this?’ /[upsetting the sacrificial apparatus in the Temple – 2: 13-22] The answer: /Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up./—The edifice or the body, it doesn’t matter. In John’s eyes, Jesus and his sheep inherited the legitimacy of what the Temple had once represented. And in Jesus and his Way, John would say, it all was raised up. [6: 37-40]

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.