Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord. Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord. Then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall no longer fear longer or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the Lord.
The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: “The Lord is our righteousness.”
Jeremiah 23:1-6
“The Lord is my shepherd.” Thus begins one of the most famous chapters of the Christian Bible. It’s so often recited that it seems all too easy to forget what that image really entails. Because here’s the truth that I think gets buried by the first-person singular pronoun “my” in the first line of Psalm 23: shepherds don’t care for sheep one-by-one. They’re not personal sheep trainers, they’re not some kind of sheep sherpa. Shepherds care for herds. And so, while it’s true that the Lord is my shepherd, it’s also true that the Lord is your shepherd, and yours, and yours, too. And if he is a shepherd to all of us, then that means that we must be part of the same flock. In fact, this morning I’d like us to spend some time thinking about that line from Psalm 23, and reflect on what it might mean if we were to confess not only, as the Psalmist says, that “the Lord is my Shepherd,” but also that “the Lord is our shepherd.” Indeed, the Lord is our shepherd; we are his flock.
That’s exactly what God says we are in the passage offered to us this morning in Jeremiah 23. He calls us his flock, the sheep of his own pasture. We’re a part of his flock, you and I. All of us. Together.
Now I don’t know if any of you know anything about sheep. I’ve got to admit that I have absolutely zero knowledge about anything about anything agricultural. (I’ve just recently killed a number of succulents in my house. Succulents!) But I have learned, as I have been studying this week’s texts, that sheep really need shepherds. This is for at least two reasons.
First, they tend to absentmindedly follow whoever is serving as their leader. Just consider this true news story from Reuters from a few years back:
Over a thousand sheep followed one of their flock off a 50-foot cliff in eastern Turkey while shepherds looked on in dismay. Four hundred sheep fell to their deaths in a ravine but broke the fall of another 1,100 animals who survived, newspaper reports said on Friday … The loss to local farmers was estimated at $74,000.
Just imagine that: one sheep wandered off a cliff and 1,499 others just did the exact same thing. Just walked right over the edge. Sheep are followers.
But here’s the second thing: as much as they are fond of following others, sheep also love to wander away from the flock. Without someone leading the herd and guiding them, sheep tend to stray and disperse themselves. And there’s hardly a more appealing sight to a wolf or lion than a sheep wandering on her own.
Both of these details about sheep make it quite clear that sheep need a shepherd. They need a shepherd to make sure that they’re headed to a good place—like to green pastures, where they can eat, or beside still waters, where they can drink—instead of leading them over a 50-foot-deep ravine. And they need that shepherd to keep them all together. That can be quite a task, since sheep have the attention span of, well, sheep. But otherwise, the flock is sure to turn into someone’s dinner.
In the Old Testament text today, from the prophet Jeremiah, God says this is exactly what’s happened. Those who were supposed to be shepherds for God’s flock—that is, the leaders of the kingdoms of Northern and Southern Israel—had shirked on their duties, and as a result, all of God’s sheep had been scattered. Kings like Jehoiakim and Zedekiah, who let the nation of Judah fall apart for their own benefit, are denounced by God. “Woe to the shepherds,” God says, “who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings.”
God is concerned and angry that, without a good shepherd, his people will either unthinkingly follow a frontrunner into the abyss, like those sheep in eastern Turkey a few years ago, or will wander astray, among the wolves. And all of that in a passage penned almost three thousand years ago, on the other side of the world.
But it seems to me that God might be saying the very same thing this morning, concerning his flock here in our nation in 2018.
Do you sense that, too? I can’t help but feel like this text is just as appropriate today as it was three thousand years ago. Some of us have become prone to being thoughtless followers. We know that we might risk running right over a cliff, but we are just so unsure as to who to trust that we simply replicate what those around us are doing. Others of us are just so ready to break off on our own. We can’t stand the daily barrageof chaos and catastrophe that’s broadcast on our TVs every evening and so we’re just inclined to forsake the whole flock and do our own thing. And then some of us—perhaps most of us—have fallen into some awful combination of the two, eager to splinter off from the flock, but only to create new factions with fools leading the way.
Woe to the shepherds, yes. Woe to those who take advantage of our inclination to thoughtlessly follow others, on the one hand, and our inclination to wander astray, on the other. But woe to us, too, for we are the ones who find ourselves scattered, in heart and in body, in word and in deed. I know I feel scattered. Perhaps you do, too. And we can barely help but make it worse.
We desperately need a shepherd, a good shepherd. Not just for you, or for me, but for all of us in God’s flock, who would feed us, and guide us in the right paths, and hold us together, that we might not be exposed to the wolves in the shadows.
But here’s the good news. Back in the days of Jeremiah, God promised to his flock that he would indeed raise up a new shepherd, one who would undo the wrongs of kings like Jehoiakim and Zedekiah, and reign with justice and righteousness. This promised one, a descendant of King David, would fix the evils that plagued God’s people since the reign of Saul. He wouldn’t be like so many dreadful leaders that the Israelites knew well—like the dreadful leaders we know all too well. Instead of gathering power, the promised shepherd would gather up all of God’s scattered sheep, and save them from fear and hunger.
This morning, we, too, receive that promise. Those days are surely coming, God says through Jeremiah to us this morning, yes!: Those days are surely coming when we will have a shepherd who will lead us in right paths and keep us in the fold. This is the promise to which we cling.
And not only do we also receive that promise along with the Israelites, but we also receive a glimpse of what that looks like in the gospel stories of Jesus’ life on earth. For in the New Testament text from this morning, from the Gospel of Mark, we see Jesus welcoming the crowds as they flock to him, and he has compassion on them. For, the text says, he saw that they were like sheep who needed a shepherd. And he decided to be a shepherd to them. And in that scene in Mark 6, he feeds them and heals them, and guides them, and binds them together.
Today, too, we might also confess that Jesus, the Lord, is our shepherd. Not just mine and not just yours, but our shepherd. At this table he feeds us, and in his word he guides us, and in this place he binds us together. May we recognize our good shepherd in the Christ who has compassion on us, and put our trust in him, and join our hearts and minds with all of those in God’s great flock. Amen.