This Week: Easter 4B
Gospel: John 10:11-18
For this fourth week of Easter, our attention shifts to a teaching from Jesus about the good shepherd—the one who lays his life down for the sheep.
As Easter gospels go, it clearly offers atonement vibes. A way of saying This is why we did that whole late unpleasantness. I gave myself up for you because I’m awesome. Unlike those people.
It also serves as an image of authority, comfort, generosity, and commitment. All things we like to laud but probably ought to consider just how much we make it into a thing for other people to do.
The image itself
Aside from the couple of people I know who actually raise sheep, the image of the good shepherd doesn’t have the same resonance with us that it would have with them. Because we don’t really remember who shepherds were to the normal hearer of Jesus’s teachings.
They were day laborers. Sometimes even criminals or wage slaves. It was work people were forced into. Shepherds could never be ritually pure. And never given respect.
For the messiah to compare himself positively to a shepherd is more than counterintuitive. It is radical and subversive.
So to translate the image of the good shepherd for us today, we ought to make him into the burger-flipper we insult at the bottom of the wage pyramid, a share cropper, or migrant laborer.
So perhaps we should consider the nature of the image we put in our stained-glass imaginations.
The Good/Hired Hand Contrast
The other thing we must pay attention to this week is the deceptive contrast between the “good shepherd” and the “hired hand”.
Just as much as we put our attention on the shepherd part of the phrase, I think “good” does a lot of work behind the scenes. The underlying assumptions we make about “good” influence how we use this image. This essentially sets up a Good Shepherd vs. the Bad Hired Hands scenario. Which isn’t the exact contrast Jesus is going for.
The focus may better be placed on what makes the good shepherd actually good and why the hired hands fall short of that. The hired hand isn’t bad; he is just not up to the challenge.
His motivation isn’t to do bad things. But it is necessarily selfish.
The shepherd’s relationship to the sheep is to protect and nurture. It is what we generally think of when we think of a relationship.
By contrast, the hired hand’s relationship is economic. It isn’t merely that he is paid to do the work (being a babysitter, a caregiver, or health practitioner is good!) but that the first motivation is always financially individual. Which makes love and support second at best by definition.
The point is not to demonize the hired hands as bad people. It is first contrast the difference with Jesus. And then to name the problem with financial motivation.
Economics as problematic
Here we get to the part of the gospel that is closest to the sacred cow we dare not criticize. Money is a problem. We know that. Exploitation is Jesus’s biggest anger-inducing concept. And the fact that people order their society in ways that exploit people—particularly the poor, the weak, the ill, and the outcast—gets Jesus’s goat more than anything.
We hear critiques about the evil of wealth creation, of taking advantage of one another, and of not changing unjust systems we might benefit from.
And we hear teachings about sharing with others, committing to common principles and resources, and living as the children of God in the here and now.
We hear all of this pretty much every Sunday and then go, let’s not talk about money. Or we paint the suggestion that we take Jesus seriously on these things like partisan politics.
The problem isn’t that being a hired hand is bad, that hiring people to do the work is bad, or that any of the people themselves are doing bad. It is that the incentive structure of the system itself goes against the priorities of God’s dream for creation.
And there are actually a bunch of options beyond pretend there’s nothing we can do, tear it all down, and being a hired hand who actually cares. But it starts with assuming modern economics isn’t actually a fundamental force in the cosmos, that it isn’t itself based in the goodness of creation, or exists outside the watch of human intervention.
Economics is entirely human. We made this up. And therefore, we can change the way we do things. And if we listened to Jesus on this, we’d start by putting the profit motive below goodness.