Psalms of Christ. Daniel H. Fletcher

protect it from being scattered and devoured. In short, they have not reflected the shepherd heart of God. As a result, Ezekiel prophecies a time when God himself will tend his flock, bind its wounds, and care for it in a way reminiscent of the divine shepherd of Ps 23 (Ezek 34:11–31). In John, Jesus, like Ezekiel, pronounces judgment on the Jewish leaders for duplicating the failed shepherding of Ezek 34.

While Ezek 34 is likely the most immediate scriptural background to Jesus’s discourse, there are also obvious echoes of Ps 23, the paradigmatic passage describing God as the shepherd of his people. John echoes the relationship between the divine shepherd and his sheep in Ps 23 when Jesus declares that his sheep know his voice and follow him rather than a stranger (John 10:3–5). In short, they “know” him. He, too, knows them and calls them by name (10:3). He is also the entry point through which they must pass to find pasture (10:9). John summarizes this closeness of relationship between the shepherd and his sheep when Jesus affirms: “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me” (10:15). Finally, the good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep (10:11, 15, 17), undoubtedly a reference to his vicarious sacrifice in John’s Gospel.137 The life of the psalmist that is nourished by green pastures, refreshed by waters, and protected from life-threatening dangers reaches its full end-times invigoration when the good shepherd provides “eternal life” to his sheep (10:28).138 He renders powerless the ever-present dangers of the darkest valley in Ps 23 so that his sheep “will never perish” (John 10:28).

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss all the comparisons of the “Good Shepherd discourse” in John 10:1–30 with the divine shepherd of Ps 23. The associations are so numerous that it is not a stretch to refer to the twenty-third psalm as the “Good Shepherd Psalm.”139 In fact, Beauford Bryant and Mark Krause note, “The early church remembered Jesus as its shepherd (Matt 9:36; 26:31; 1 Pet 2:25) and applied OT passages to him that pictured God as shepherd (particularly Psalm 23).”140 Similarly, given that the Good Shepherd discourse culminates by proclaiming the unity between the Father and Son (“I am the Father are one,” John 10:30), Christians should be quite comfortable paraphrasing Ps 23:1 like Augustine of Hippo: “Since my shepherd is the Lord Jesus Christ, I shall not lack anything.”141 Jacobson, too, aptly summarizes the incarnate shepherd: “When the New Testament names the one who lays down his life for the sheep as the Good Shepherd, the New Testament is faithfully confessing the incarnation in Jesus of the same divine shepherd whom the ancient psalmist trusted.”142

As Ps 23 evokes the NT image of Jesus as the good shepherd, it also evokes the image of Christ as the host of a banquet, the so-called “messianic banquet.”143 Given the emphasis on table fellowship in the early church, especially the Lord’s Supper, it is not difficult to hear echoes of this sacrament in the words of the psalm when interpreted christologically: “You prepare a table before me” (Ps 23:5). As in Ps 23, where the images of shepherd and host relate to each other as metaphors of God, they come together again in Mark 14. The context is Jesus’s last Passover meal, which prefigures the Lord’s Supper. It is at this meal where he is the host who prepares a table for the twelve apostles (14:22–25). We can fairly speak of Jesus as the “host” of this meal because he is the one who blesses the bread, breaks it, and distributes it to his guests, along with the cup (vv. 22–23). He also offers the words of institution about the new covenant and the role that this reconstituted meal would have in the kingdom of God (v. 24). Further, the pericope that immediately follows this host scene speaks of a shepherd: “I will strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered” (14:27; cf. Zech 13:7).144 What is more, an earlier pericope shows Mary of Bethany anointing Jesus’s head with oil (Mark 14:3–9), which was a common sign of hospitality in the ancient world, calling to mind Ps 23:5b, “You anoint my head with oil.” To be sure, Mary does more than she realizes: what for her was a sign of hospitality was for Jesus a prophetic action, preparing him, as the God’s Messiah, for his burial (Mark 14:8). The psalm, then, is the testimony of the Lord’s Anointed One when read in a Christian context.

Mark 6 also brings the two images of shepherd and host together in the person and ministry of Christ. All four Gospels recount the story of Jesus feeding the crowd of 5,000 (Matt 14:13–21; Mark 6:30–44; Luke 9:10–17; John 6:1–15). McCann notes that the story has “obvious eucharistic overtones,” evidenced in Mark’s use of eucharistic verbs to describe how Jesus “took” the bread, “blessed,” “broke,” and “gave” it to the disciples (Mark 6:41; cf. 14:22).145 Here is another meal that prefigures the Lord’s Supper, yet also looks back to the shepherd’s provisions in Ps 23. While each of the four Gospels records the same story, only Mark notes that Jesus had the crowd sit on the “green grass” (Mark 6:39), a detail that recalls the twenty-third psalm’s “green pastures” (Ps 23:2).146 Similarly, only Mark gives Jesus’s motivation as pastoral compassion and care: “He had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd” (Mark 6:34; cf. Ezek 34:4–5).147 Both Mark 6 and 14 share the images of shepherd and host with Ps 23, and early Christians perceived these images as integrally linked in Jesus Christ.

Psalm 23:4 affirms the presence of God in the life of the believer (“You are with me”). Further, God’s presence may lie behind the reference to the temple in verse 6—that is, the temple is the symbol of God’s presence. McCann observes that the final line in the psalm is another way of affirming that “you are with me” (v. 4).148 The metaphors of shepherd and host serve this larger affirmation that God’s protective and sustaining presence is a constant companion to the psalmist, whether in the calm countryside, the darkest valley, or at table. The NT reaffirms God’s presence among his people not in terms of mere metaphors, but in the man, Jesus of Nazareth. Matthew 1:23 calls Jesus “Immanuel” (“God with us”) at the beginning of his Gospel and affirms the same at the end (“I am with you always, to the end of the age,” 28:20).149 This emphasis on Jesus Christ as the divine presence in the world serves as the bookends for Matthew’s Gospel. Given the connection between God as shepherd and host in Ps 23 and Jesus as the good shepherd and host in the NT, it seems obvious to add to these the divine presence. As McCann concludes, “In New Testament terms, Jesus is shepherd, host, and Emmanuel.”150 When thinking of Jesus as shepherd, host, and “God with us,” Christians read Ps 23 as pointing to God’s end-times Messiah who ultimately fulfills the manifold imagery of the psalm.

We can add yet another angle to the traditional identification of Jesus as the shepherd of Ps 23. In light of the NT conviction mentioned previously that the Scriptures are ultimately about the Messiah’s suffering and resurrection (Luke 24:46), Jesus fulfills the role of the psalmist, the sheep under God’s guidance and care. Additionally, I noted earlier that the Psalter was shaped during the postexilic period so that the “David” of the Psalter became the highly anticipated king, the Messiah, the end-times expectation of the Psalter. With this in mind, Doug Green proposes a fresh reading of Ps 23 in an article whose title captures the essence of this alternative christological interpretation: “The LORD is Christ’s Shepherd.”151 Given the end-times shaping of the Psalter, “David” (see superscript for Ps 23) is no longer the historical King David, but rather “eschatological David”—the Messiah.