This as you know is a line from today’s responsorial psalm, universally known as The Lord is my Shepherd. It is probably one of the best-known lines of all scripture and the psalm itself is frequently used at funerals because of its reassuring sentiment and consoling imagery. Jesus, as a Jew would have understood and appreciated this imagery and every time he prayed this psalm, we can easily imagine that he himself found reassurance and consolation from expressing and reciting those words. The Gospels frequently relate how Jesus would rise early in the morning and go off to a silent place in order to pray and there can be little doubt that the psalms were an integral part of his prayer. It is therefore reasonable to assume that when he began to speak to the Pharisees, as he does in today’s gospel about the role of the shepherd, he must have had this psalm in his mind and would have assumed the Pharisees would have made the connection too.
His words are spoken to the Pharisees immediately after he had given the man born blind his sight, and a rather heated exchange ensues with them about who Jesus is claiming to be, and it centres on their “blindness” as they fail to understand who he is. To help them to understand who he is, Jesus offers them another pathway of coming to faith in him. He takes the imagery of the psalm which they would have known and applies it to himself. He begins to express the sentiments of the psalm and uses them to open up how he himself is personified in the role of the shepherd who guides people along the right path, so that all who enter the pastures through Jesus, need have no fear as they freely come and go, assured of the goodness and kindness that accompanies them. It is only those whose motives are contrived or who come as “thieves and brigands” who will not be listened to. Jesus goes on three times to use the phrase “I am”, clearly expressing that he himself is the gatefold, the gate, and the good shepherd. Sadly, the blindness of the Pharisees is only entrenched further by his words.
In offering us this beautiful image, Jesus says that through him we have the pathway to life and have it to the full. The psalm evokes this fulness by describing the richness of a banquet set in the sight of those who dissent or disagree. All though are offered this bountiful food with its abundant overflowing love. In the eucharist, we receive the foretaste of the banquet knowing that goodness and kindness will surely follow, all the days of our lives, for of his fulness we have received grace in return for grace.
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