I’m grateful for all the lovely, wonderful things I learned in church during my childhood. And I’m grateful for all the pictures of Jesus that my memory can call up from bygone days: the baby Jesus, Jesus as a boy in the temple, and Jesus the Good Shepherd. Especially, Jesus the Good Shepherd! These are such beautiful pictures, and I’m thankful for them.

            But sometimes I’m sorry that my memory has all of these pictures, because of the way they’ve conditioned my thinking. Take Jesus, the Good Shepherd, for example. Most of us visualize a strong yet gentle Jesus with a lamb nestled securely in his arms. It’s a correct picture, as far as it goes. But there’s far more to the picture than that.

            First-century shepherds were rough, robust men, not the kind you’d select for pictures for children. They could nurse a tiny lamb back to life, but they could also fight off any creature, animal or human, that threatened their flock. When the shepherd boy, David, insisted that he was ready to fight the giant Goliath, he argued his fitness by telling King Saul that “whenever a lion or a bear came, and took a lamb from the flock, I went after it and struck it down” (l Samuel l7:34-35). In the same fashion, shepherds sometimes had to defend their flocks against thieves and hoodlums, and even sometimes from small armies that sought meat for their troops. First-century shepherding was not a job for timid souls. I don’t think the

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