The King of Love My Shepherd Is represents perhaps the most Christologically richly layered paraphrase of Psalm 23 in the English hymn tradition, a work in which Henry Williams Baker took the Hebrew shepherd psalm and read it entirely through the lens of the New Testament, transforming its images of divine care into an explicit meditation on Jesus as the Good Shepherd of John 10.
Baker, as principal editor of Hymns Ancient and Modern, had access to all the paraphrases of Psalm 23 available in the English tradition, from versions by Isaac Watts to Scottish metrical psalters. He chose to write his own because he wanted to produce something that the Anglo-Catholic tradition could sing - a paraphrase that honored the psalm's Hebrew origins while completing them with the New Testament's identification of God the Shepherd with Christ.
The first stanza establishes the Christological key: where Psalm 23:1 says 'The LORD is my shepherd,' Baker sings 'The King of Love my Shepherd is, whose goodness faileth never.' 'King of Love' is not in the psalm; it is Baker's christological addition, drawing John 10:11 - 'I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep' - into the psalm's opening breath. Every subsequent image in the psalm is then read through this double lens.
The fourth stanza, which is the most theologically distinctive, alludes not to Psalm 23 at all but to Luke 15's parable of the lost sheep: 'Perverse and foolish, oft I strayed, but yet in love he sought me, and on his shoulder gently laid, and home rejoicing brought me.' This is the ninety-ninth sheep who went missing - the wandering soul who discovers that the shepherd has come searching, has lifted the lost one onto his shoulders, and has carried him home. Baker weaves the parable seamlessly into the psalm, creating a composite image of divine care that spans both Testaments.
The fifth stanza returns to Psalm 23:5 - 'You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows' - and reads it eucharistically: 'Thou spread'st a table in my sight; thy unction grace bestoweth; and O what transport of delight from thy pure chalice floweth!' The Eucharist, in Baker's reading, is the fulfilment of the banquet image, the cup of blessing that overflows with divine love.
The final stanza anticipates John 14:2 - 'In my Father's house are many rooms' - completing the movement from earthly care through sacramental grace to eschatological dwelling: 'And so through all the length of days, thy goodness faileth never; Good Shepherd, may I sing thy praise within thy house for ever.' The psalm that began in the fields ends in the Father's house, the shepherd's care resolved into the eternal residence.
The tune 'St. Columba,' an ancient Irish melody, gives the hymn a dignity and antiquity that suits its layered biblical content. Baker reportedly died in 1877 with the words of the fifth stanza on his lips - 'Yea, though I walk in death's dark vale, yet will I fear no ill' - making his own death an enactment of the psalm he had so lovingly paraphrased. Few hymns in the English tradition carry such a weight of personal testimony in their very composition.