May 11, Easter 4C (Psalm 23; John 10:22-30)

Do you remember those pictures in church hallways and Sunday school rooms, the ones with the fluffy, white, gentle sheep surrounding Jesus? This is the image I’ve always associated with Psalm 23 and its assurances of God’s tender, joyful, shepherdly care. The psalm and the image alike paint a bucolic scene of pleasingly rocky ground, with patches of green pastures and clear running streams. The sunlight is golden and soft. Serene birds fly around the horizon. A freshly laundered Jesus stands in the center of the scene with a kind look on his face.

The psalm adds a sumptuous holiday dinner, with crystalline sparkles all around, as a kind of second act to the scene. Of course, the psalm also adds the whole valley of the shadow of death thing and the enemies who lurk around the edges. But these seem like the vignette filter on the soothing word images of the psalm. Whether we connect the shepherd in the psalm with Jesus or not depends on our orientation as Bible readers. It’s not hard to imagine, though, that the shepherd in the psalm looks a lot like Jesus in the image: casually leaning on what looks like a hook-topped walking stick, maybe even cradling a lamb in his other arm. All the other sheep are politely spaced out. Everyone is clean and fluffy, ready for eternal life.

That is, until someone harpazō-s them. Harpazo is the Greek word that John uses in verses 28 and 29 to describe the action of “snatching” the sheep from the Father’s hand. It’s a nasty word in Greek. Usually associated with violent possession of a person or a thing, sometimes connected with sexual violence and war. It’s not at all a word that one wants to confront in the course of a clean, fluffy, bucolic kind of life.