A Search for a Good Shepherd

(Lectionary for November 26, 2017)

When reading the prophet Ezekiel, an interpreter is often more inclined to diagnose an acute mental illness than exegete the prophet’s words. This man was wild! His imagery is amazing, often pornographically bizarre. His eyes apparently see things no one else sees—whirling wheels and creepy crawly creatures in the Jerusalem temple and valleys filled with dried out bones. But in reality we know very little about the man himself and can only surmise anything of his personality from the strangeness of his words alone. This is a very dangerous game to play, since psychological guesswork can never lead to any sort of certainty and usually leads us away from the reason we are reading the words in the first place. Ezekiel is a prophet of YHWH, not a subject of Jungian analysis, however much we moderns enjoy a good session on the couch.

Chapter 34 is a fine example of the vivid imagination that Ezekiel surely had, and we should focus on that and not on some assumed personality disorders. We are led here to a very common scene in Israel. It should be noted that many scholars assume that Ezekiel was taken to Babylonian exile in the first Judean deportation in 597BCE. Hence, he is imagining and remembering his former homeland rather than seeing it firsthand. It is quite clear that the prophet is writing from exile as he refers to “the whole world” in 34:6, suggesting that the exile itself was in fact the result of bad shepherding. Among the supposed shepherds of Judah one could only find ravening beasts that devour the flock of the people rather than feed them. Consequently, YHWH will now devour the shepherds (i.e. the kings and leaders of the land) and will feed the flocks as the shepherds should have been doing.

Whenever the metaphor of sheep arises in an ancient land where sheep were a central element of the economy, it must always be remembered that sheep are dumb as a box of rocks, among nature’s most foolish and slow-minded creatures. Those who are moved to romantic tears by recitations of the beloved Ps.23 have not witnessed a flock of sheep in slow-witted action. They gambol about on too-tiny legs, bumping and bobbing into the nearest pasture, looking for one thing only—the next blade of grass. And when their snouts are not unconsciously thrust into the hinder parts of one of their colleagues, they are head down in the field, munching away, oblivious of any possible dangers. Sheep often eat and eat their way through a field, completely unaware of a nearby stream or a rocky ledge. Too often, they plunge into the former or become trapped on the latter, bleating piteously, demanding rescue from the shepherd whose eye must be ever vigilant for the next bovine disaster. In short, if God is shepherd, then we are God’s ridiculous sheep, courting a shocking and imminent demise due to our absurd behaviors.

Ezekiel pushes the metaphor by suggesting that the human shepherds of Judah, by which he means the kings and their privileged courtiers, have abnegated their responsibility, and have in effect become the wolves who would devour the flock for their own satisfaction. Surely, the prophet must be thinking of Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, a Babylonian puppet ruler, who was merely a sycophant of the mighty Nebuchadnezzar. Ezekiel may have gained some sense of satisfaction when he heard that Zedekiah had in the end rebelled against his Babylonian masters, but that satisfaction must have been very short lived once the Babylonians destroyed Judah, murdered all of Zedekiah’s family, and then blinded the Judean monarch, and dragged him off to exile. One can picture the prophet, living in Babylon, and witnessing the pathetic king and his bedraggled fellow exiles entering the vast Ishtar gates of the world’s greatest city, a living symbol of Babylon’s control of the known world.

Yet, Ezekiel is not a simple observer of world events; he is much more than a political pundit. He is a prophet, and thus sees the world against a broad canvas, painted by the great YHWH. Though Judah has been destroyed, in the main because of the false shepherds who have deceived them and have refused to represent their God to them, Ezekiel still sees a future for these pathetic sheep. “I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land. I will feed them with good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel shall be their pasture; there they shall lie down in good grazing land, and they shall feed on rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make then lie down, says YHWH God” (Ez.34:13-15). The current human shepherds have failed miserably to act the part of shepherds, so YHWH will step in to provide a future for the chosen people.

And YHWH will tend carefully to the flock. “I will seek the lost (the constant work of a good shepherd), and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice” (Ez.34:16). It is this portrait of YHWH’s action as shepherd that informs the hope of Judah’s future with YHWH, and, I would add, should inform our hope as well.

We Christians, of course, have Jesus of Nazareth fixed in our hearts as the good shepherd. That picture comes into focus from the words of Ezekiel some six hundred years before the birth of the one we call Lord. Note the actions of Ezekiel’s good shepherd YHWH. The shepherd seeks the lost and strayed, binds up the wounded, strengthens the weak. But, he/she also “destroys the fat and strong.” In other words, the abused and downtrodden sheep are helped in the various ways that they need help, but those who have abused and used them for their own gain are not to be allowed to continue their rampaging. The reason that must be is because of the food that YHWH will offer these sheep, namely, justice. In a world where YHWH’s justice is in play, the weak receive strength, but those who abused them with their power are brought low. The abusive strong cannot be allowed to act out their abuse forever; they must and will be confronted for their crimes.

And so it must be for those of us who claim Jesus as our model and guide. Like Ezekiel’s portrait of YHWH, the good shepherd, Jesus sought to bind up the wounds of the sick and abused, but he also confronted directly those who sought their own success and gain at the expense of the weak. That confrontation led directly to his terrible death, a death that has become the sign of God’s final unwillingness to allow God’s people to divide the world into haves and have-nots, into the comfortable powerful and the uncomfortable weak. YHWH God says enough is enough, and so should we.

As always, we face a world of increasing disparity of goods and services. So few have so much, and at the expense of the many, they ride the roads of vast luxury, surrounded by objects of wealth and power unimagined in the history of the world, while the great majority of God’s people live with little, over two billion attempting to survive on the equivalent of two dollars per day. YHWH’s promise to Judah through the words of Ezekiel remains our modern promise and challenge. YHWH God will heal and bind up and seek the lost, and at the same time will confront those who have caused those wounds and forced the sheep to stray. It is our calling to become good shepherds of God’s sheep, just as YHWH and Jesus have modeled for us, and to join our God in actions for the lost and straying sheep, and against those wolves who would devour them.