This one - John 10 - is the Good Shepherd chapter, Christ being the Good Shepherd, and we being the sheep.
So, anybody with a little Bible knowledge is aware of this metaphor that Christ is the Good Shepherd, and those who make up His Church are His sheep.
Now at the time, tending sheep was very common in Palestine. The natural geography of the land made sheep herding very easy and it was something that had been done there for generations. Those hilly pasturelands in the Judean Hills and the Hills of Ephraim were very good for that sort of thing.
So, raising sheep was a prime industry.
Now, the people who were listening to Jesus, here in John 10, may not have understood Jesus' spiritual intent to what he was saying, but they certainly knew his description of the shepherding life to be true. And had they thought about these things to any great extent they would begin to understand the things that He was bringing out. With the Holy Spirit these things become really vivid metaphors of Christ and the church.
Now, even outside of religion the sheep metaphor has become almost a cliché in our society. People are like sheep. People tend to follow the crowd. They unthinkingly, like a sheep, do what everybody else is doing. People become downcast, which is a sheep term. I do not know how many of you are aware of that. But, shepherds call that being cast down - when people become downcast - dejected or depressed. They do not feel like doing anything.
Well, when something is wrong with sheep or with their environment - maybe they are not getting the right kind of water, or feed; or maybe they are diseased in some way - they become cast down. They will lie down and cannot or will not get up! And they will die unless the shepherd comes by, picks them up, figures out what the problem is, and corrects it.
There are other sheep metaphors that we all know:
In most of the world, though, unlike in the Bible, shepherds are not alone in their tending of the sheep. In most of the world, shepherds use dogs to assist them in their herding of sheep. In fact, if you will remember my Dad's offertory a year or two ago at the Feast, you know that the Bible takes a very dim view of dogs. Dogs are rather contemptible in the Bible.
If someone called you a dog in Bible times, you were either a pervert, or you were the lowest of the low. Dogs were considered scavengers, skulky, sly, and contemptible in every regard. They were good only for the scraps and scavenging the bones. In fact in the story of Jezebel, dogs ate her flesh and bones and dogs licked Ahab's chariot out; they licked out the blood. It is the Bible's way of showing great contempt for something like Jezebel and Ahab.
However, believe it or not (I found this yesterday - I did not think I could, but I actually did find it), there is one mention of dogs tending sheep in the Bible. I did not know this until last night. I was going to say that the Bible does not mention them at all, but I found one in Job 30. Job mentions it in just an offhand way. He is not even talking about sheep or dogs at all, but he uses it as a put down to those people who were mocking him:
That is how far a good shepherd is willing to go. And that is certainly the opposite of a false shepherd who just wants everything for himself, and would not really lay down his life for them. That would be counter-productive, would it not? What good would come of giving one's life, if you are really 'in it' to get as much for oneself as possible?
That may have two possible applications to it: Give His life literally in fighting the attacker which might be a lion or a bear, or whatever. David said he had to fight off both. Or it could also mean give His life in continuous service, spent in behalf of the sheep.