Trevor Laurence
In John 10–11, Jesus teaches who he is and shows who he is. He proclaims his identity as the good shepherd of Israel and demonstrates his identity as the resurrection and the life who raises the dead.
One need not dig very deep to grasp that this is good news. The Son of God declares himself a shepherd who knows his sheep and lays his life down on their behalf, reveals himself as the one sent from the Father who is compassionate enough to weep with the weepers, powerful enough to turn death backwards, loving enough to actually do it.
But just beneath the surface of the text, there is a subterranean quaking—a concentrated series of echoes resonating with such significance that the words very nearly tremble off the page. These interconnected overtures to the Old Testament do not take away from the beautiful truths apparent in John 10–11. They take them up and invest them with even more meaning. They illuminate the place of the resurrecting shepherd with reference to the wider story of Israel and the restorative promises of Israel’s God.
“I Am the Good Shepherd”
When Jesus announces in John 10, “I am the good shepherd” (vv. 11, 14), the point is not merely to conjure up pastoral imagery of flocks and fields and caretakers but to conjure up the Scriptures of Israel.
In Ezekiel 34:1–6, Yahweh condemns the shepherds of his flock—the leaders of his people—for feasting on and profiting off of God’s sheep rather than feeding them. Without a true shepherd, the flock was scattered and became food for the wild beasts. This is a metaphorical description of exile. Leaders called to guide Israel in covenant faithfulness instead multiplied injustice and idolatry, and just as he said he would, the holy God drove an unholy people out of his land and into exile among the nations.
According to Ezekiel, however, the judgment of exile will not last forever. God assures his sheep that he himself will be the shepherd they need. He will seek them (v. 11), rescue them (v. 12), and gather them back to the land (v. 13): “I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down, declares the Lord God” (v. 15).1
As Ezekiel’s oracle continues, Yahweh the shepherd promises that when he restores his flock to the land of his presence, he will give Israel another shepherd, a human shepherd, a royal shepherd: “And I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd. And I, the Lord, will be their God, and my servant David shall be prince among them. I am the Lord; I have spoken.” (vv. 23–24).
The Lord expands upon his purposes in Ezekiel 37:
Behold, I will take the people of Israel from the nations among which they have gone, and will gather them from all around, and bring them to their own land. And I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel. And one king shall be king over them all, and they shall be no longer two nations, and no longer divided into two kingdoms. They shall not defile themselves anymore with their idols and their detestable things, or with any of their transgressions. But I will save them from all the backslidings in which they have sinned, and will cleanse them; and they shall be my people, and I will be their God.
My servant David shall be king over them, and they shall all have one shepherd. They shall walk in my rules and be careful to obey my statutes. They shall dwell in the land that I gave to my servant Jacob, where your fathers lived. They and their children and their children’s children shall dwell there forever, and David my servant shall be their prince forever. I will make a covenant of peace with them. It shall be an everlasting covenant with them. And I will set them in their land and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary in their midst forevermore. My dwelling place shall be with them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. (37:21–27)
Amid the tragedy of exile, the shepherd God will effect a new exodus out of slavery to restore his flock to the land. He will reestablish the Davidic line when he coronates the messianic shepherd-king of Israel. He will heal the fractures of a people divided between north and south: no longer will there be competing thrones and competing kingdoms but one king over one nation. He will put his sanctuary in their midst and make his dwelling among the people who are called by his name. Israel will be a holy temple-kingdom living in Yahweh’s presence, before the glorious face of God.
For Israelite ears trained by the Old Testament, for Israelite hearts longing for Ezekiel’s vision to become a reality, Jesus’ declaration that he is the good shepherd is a condensed yet unmistakable announcement that this entire complex of exile-ending promises is coming to fruition in him. Israel remains fragmented, under foreign rule, without a Davidic king or the glory of a truly renewed house of the Lord. But here stands the God-man—the shepherd who is at once Yahweh and David—the answer to exile for which Israel has been waiting.
Jesus further teaches who he is by clarifying who he is not, again appealing to Ezekiel 34: “He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them” (John 10:12). Jesus is not like the indicted leaders of old, who left the flock shepherdless, exposed them as food for wild beasts, and permitted them to be scattered (cf. Ezek 34:1–6)—whose unholy self-service instigated Israel’s exile. He is a faithful shepherd who knows his own and lays down his life on their behalf (vv. 14–15).
The implications of this contrast would not have been lost on the Jewish leaders among the crowd. For Jesus to declare himself the good shepherd over against hired hands is a not-too-subtle challenge to the current religious establishment. Israel still needs a true shepherd to arise because she is inundated in false shepherds. And just as Israel’s prior shepherds made Yahweh’s house a den of robbers and saw it destroyed in the judgment of exile (Jer 7:11–15), so Israel’s current shepherds have turned the temple into a robbers’ den and will see it decimated all over again (Matt 21:13).
The claim of v. 16 builds on these accumulating allusions: “And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.” Jesus will create one flock and serve as its one shepherd, echoing Ezekiel’s promise of “one nation” (37:22) under “one shepherd” (34:23; 37:24). Jesus will reunite divided Israel, ascend the throne as her Davidic king, and gather the scattered people back for life in the presence of God.
Yet there is a twist in Jesus’ pronouncement, a departure from the scripted expectations of Ezekiel 34–37. Jesus will not merely bind Israel back together under his messianic reign: “I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also.”2
In Isaiah 56, the prophet declares that as part of Yahweh’s new exodus deliverance of Israel from exile, he will bring foreigners to his holy mountain, accept their sacrifices on his altar, and secure their joy in a temple that is a house of prayer for all peoples. Isaiah’s oracle rises to a crescendo in v. 8:
The Lord God,
who gathers the outcasts of Israel, declares,
“I will gather yet others to him
besides those already gathered.”
Jesus grafts together the prophetic hopes of Isaiah 56 and Ezekiel 37 to communicate that Gentiles will be grafted into Israel’s exodus out of exile. When the Son of God who is the Son of David restores the fortunes of Israel, he will gather in the nations with them to forge a single flock under a single shepherd in the sanctuarial presence of God.
“Lazarus, Come Out”
With the thematic matrix of John 10 firmly in place, Jesus shifts from allusively teaching about his identity as the reverser of Israel’s exile to evocatively enacting it. And his actions in John 11 are precisely what one would expect from a man who claimed to be the shepherd of Ezekiel 34–37.
Nestled in the middle of Ezekiel’s shepherd promises is the account of Ezekiel 37:1–14. Yahweh brings Ezekiel in the Spirit to a valley full of dry bones and commands him to prophesy over them. When Ezekiel obeys, the fragmented remains come together; they are covered in flesh and filled with breath; they live and stand on their feet. The Lord explains what this vision means:
“Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are indeed cut off.’ Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will bring you into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I am the Lord; I have spoken, and I will do it, declares the Lord.” (vv. 11–14)
Israel is dead in exile, scattered from the land of God’s life-giving presence like broken corpses in a valley. But the Lord will raise his covenant people up from their exilic grave, place his Spirit within them—constructing them into a temple of flesh and bone—and usher them back into the land where he dwells in holiness. The unwinding of exile is the resurrection of Israel.
Having just announced himself in John 10 as the divine and Davidic shepherd of Ezekiel 34–37, Jesus in John 11 performs his climactic, seventh sign in John’s Gospel—a Sabbath sign that communicates his purpose and power to deliver his people out of exile and into Sabbath rest in the presence of the Lord. He opens up the grave.
But before Jesus ever gets to Lazarus, even seemingly innocuous details conspire together to fill out John’s portrait of Jesus as the shepherd of a new exodus from exile. When Jesus hears that Lazarus is ill, he stays “two days longer in the place where he was” (11:6). He does not leave until the third day, when he knows that Lazarus sleeps in death and needs to be awakened (v. 11), recalling Hosea’s Ezekiel-esque promise of Israel’s resurrection from the grave of exile:
After two days he will revive us;
on the third day he will raise us up,
that we may live before him. (6:2)
Intriguingly, Jesus’ journey toward Bethany begins in the wilderness. He had previously departed to the far side of the Jordan, to the place “where John had been baptizing at first” (10:40). In order to get to Lazarus, he must cross the Jordan into Judea. Like a former Ίησοῦς (Joshua/Jesus) who led Israel a first time from the wilderness through water into Canaan, Jesus traverses the same typologically rich geography in an exodus movement into Israel. Jesus enacts an exodus from the wilderness to the land on his way to perform an exodus from death to life that will prefigure Israel’s exodus from exile to the presence of God, which this greater Joshua has come to accomplish.
Jesus’ intention to return to Judea is met with the disciples’ hesitation. Is Jesus really to go back to the place where the people just sought to stone him (11:8; cf. 10:31)? Jesus’ response is admittedly cryptic: “Are there not twelve hours in the day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world. But if anyone walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him” (vv. 9–10). The Lord assures his apprehensive followers that, like travelers who trek in the daytime, those who walk by faith in the light of the world (8:12) do not stumble to their ultimate harm, even when the path of following Jesus leads into the jaws of suffering and opposition.3
Rather, only those who love the darkness (cf. 3:19), reject the Messiah’s light, and walk in night shall stumble. This language recalls Jeremiah 13:16, where the prophet likened Israel’s impending exile to a coming darkness that induces stumbling. Jesus’ description of his refusers connotes the condition of exile: those who do not receive him remain in the night that swept over Israel when she was swept away from God’s presence. The light of God’s glory-presence has dawned into the darkness in Jesus, and those who walk in his light are secure. Not so the wicked—they who cling to the shadows shall stumble and fall to their destruction as Israel did centuries before.
Like a piece of music resolving back into its primary theme, once Jesus arrives in Bethany, these complementary exile-related echoes give way to the recurring melody of Ezekiel’s restoration vision. Before the mouth of the tomb, Jesus cries, “Lazarus, come out,” and raises the dead man with a word. Like Ezekiel prophesying over the dry bones of the house of Israel, Jesus speaks and brings up a corpse from the grave. If Ezekiel’s vision is a prophetic metaphor for Israel’s resurrection from the death of exile, Lazarus’ raising is a figural announcement that Jesus is the resurrection and the life come to bring that vision to fruition, come to make dry bones alive and set them in God’s presence again.
That John intends us to read this Sabbath sign through the lens of Ezekiel 34–37—which he foregrounded in chapter 10—is evidenced in the ensuing dialogue between Caiaphas the high priest and the chief priests and Pharisees:
“If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.” But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all. Nor do you understand that it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.” He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad. So from that day on they made plans to put him to death. (John 11:48–53)
One man will die for the people so that the whole nation should not perish, and John clarifies for us that, in dying for the nation, Jesus will not only bless the nation of Israel but will gather God’s scattered children into one people that includes the nations. John interprets Caiaphas’ unintentional prophecy as a confirmation of Jesus’ claim about himself in 10:16.
The one man Jesus is Ezekiel’s one shepherd (Ezek 34:23; 37:24) who will create one nation (Ezek 37:22) when he restores his flock to the mountains of Israel. He will initiate the long-awaited exodus from exile, and in so doing, he will gather yet others to be holy sheep in the pasture of God’s presence (Isa 56:8). Caiaphas’ prophecy echoes Jesus’ echoes of Ezekiel and Isaiah: “I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.” If we were not already interpreting the events of John 11 through the lens of Ezekiel 34–37, the end of the chapter invites us to go back and start again.
The ironies of the leaders’ response are thick and numerous, almost dizzyingly so. The council worries that widespread belief in Jesus will cause the Romans to shatter the temple (their “place”) and decimate the nation, fearing a fate like exile when God’s Messiah has already declared that they are still in exile. They plot to kill Jesus to prevent exile, and yet it is precisely in his death and ensuing resurrection that Jesus will effect Israel’s exodus from exile. They scheme to protect the temple by destroying the Temple. They work to preserve God’s children by slaying God’s Son. Their murderous efforts to preserve God’s house and nation will in fact only bring God’s judgment upon both. But in their judgment upon Jesus, scattered Israel and the nations will receive a mercy that unites them as a single kingdom, restores them to Yahweh’s presence, and indeed makes them into the glorious temple where God dwells in holiness.
“From that day on, the leaders made plans to put him to death” (11:53), but no one can really take Jesus’ life from him. The good shepherd of Ezekiel 34–37 will lay down his life for the sheep of his own accord, and he has authority to take it up again (10:11, 18). Israel’s divine, Davidic shepherd will descend into the exile of the grave to rescue Israel from the grave of exile, and he will rise in an exodus out of death to lead a valley of dry bones to life in the presence of God—life that commences for us in the exodus of regeneration (cf. 5:24) and is consummated in the exodus of resurrection.
“I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25–26)
Trevor Laurence is the Executive Director of the Cateclesia Institute and the author of Cursing with God: The Imprecatory Psalms and the Ethics of Christian Prayer (Baylor University Press, 2022).
Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, The Raising of Lazarus
- Cf. Isa 40:11[↩]
- Cf. Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 340–2.[↩]
- Thomas’ response in 11:16 is instructive in two ways. First, his commitment to go and die with Jesus shows that the hesitance in v. 8 likely includes a concerned awareness that the disciples, too, will face harm if Jesus leads them back to Judea. Second, his readiness to die demonstrates that Jesus’ assurance does not eliminate the possibility of the disciples’ persecution and death but presses through and beyond death into a hope that renders death impotent.[↩]