A Picture of a Shepherd (part 1)

Shepherds were not how we might picture them today. We often think of shepherds as being somewhat soft or effeminate, but they were hardly that. Shepherds are much closer to our modern myth of the cowboy than to the gentle pictures of a smiling, clean man holding a luxuriously soft sheep in his arms. In both pictures, the weak and the strong, are wrong in certain respects, yet speak the truth in others. How are we to think of Jesus as our Good Shepherd? Today, as Jesus furthers his instruction from the metaphor of 10:1-6, we can see how a Good Shepherd loves his sheep.