Feature Article

The Shepherd
By Dwight Liles

The image of the Shepherd may actually be the most important image in all of Scripture. It is certainly one of the most common images of the Bible. There is good reason for this. The land of Judea, where so much of the Bible drama unfolds, has for thousands of years been used for the pasturing of sheep. Wandering shepherds have walked every inch of this rough terrain for countless generations.

In the Middle East, sheep are not killed for food primarily. They are valued for their wool, which is used for making clothes, blankets, and other such products. Because of this, the Middle Eastern shepherd knows his sheep, names his sheep, takes care of them for years at a time, literally develops a relationship with these animals, a bond not unlike that which many of us develop for a well-loved pet cat or dog.

The tools of the ancient shepherd (as stated in the 23rd Psalm which many of us know so well), are the staff and the rod. The staff is a wooden club, often studded with nails at the end. It is used to defend the flock from dangers such as wolves or robbers. The rod is the long stick, curved at the end, which we see so often in Christmas plays. With the rod, the shepherd gently hooks a stray sheep around the neck if it has drifted too far away from the flock or found itself at a narrow cliff or some other dangerous area.

The people of Israel always saw the shepherd as a symbol of leadership and protection. It is quite significant that Israel’s greatest prophet, Moses, and Israel’s greatest king, David, were both shepherds by trade. Although Jesus Christ was a carpenter, when he spoke of his loving care for his people he chose to portray himself to us as "the good shepherd", the "door of the sheepfold", through whom his sheep can "safely go in and out", can find pasture, can be protected and cared for. These are all images we find in the 10th chapter of John’s gospel.

In this chapter as well, Jesus speaks of the fact that a shepherd’s own sheep know their shepherd’s voice, and will not follow the voice of another. Again, Jesus is speaking of how shepherds actually worked in Bible times and Bible lands. The shepherd would create a unique language of animal-like sounds with which to call his sheep. It was a language so unique and personal, that his sheep would follow that sound only, and no other human being could lead them.

One noted theologian has written that there was the story of a man who was studying the lives of shepherds in Israel sometime in the past century. He observed two shepherds once, sheltering their flocks in a cave at night. The flocks, of course, got all mingled together into one large group. Now, how would they be separated into two flocks again? Easy. One of the shepherds simply walked some distance from the cave and began calling his own sheep, using his own distinct language of animal sounds, the language only his sheep would respond to and follow. It worked. The sheep knew their shepherd’s voice.

Perhaps in our post-modern, computer driven age, it is not quite so clear to us as it was in the past, just what it means to think of God as a Shepherd. We may need to use our imaginations a little more than the ancient people of Israel needed to do. For them, the image of the Shepherd was an image of their real, contemporary world, immediately accessible, full of rich color and capable of revealing deep and meaningful truths. Still, for many of us, there is something about those biblical images of the Shepherd, such as we find in the 23rd Psalm and the 10th chapter of John’s gospel. It is something that takes us home, to a place we’ve never actually been—or maybe we have been there, in some deep level of our spirit, the place where all human experience is shared and understood.

In that place of the spirit, people from all lands and cultures, from the metropolis to the jungle, somehow find that they can say passionately and with joyful assurance, "The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want…"