Meherrin Presbyterian Church
November 23, 2014, Christ the King/Reign of Christ
Ezekiel 34:11-24, Matthew 25:31-46
The Shepherd King
You may have
noticed by now that I’m not much of a hell-fire and brimstone preacher. I hope it is clear that I will, when
needed, call out those things that are wrong in the world or especially the
church (things I recognize usually because I see them in myself), but I’m not
especially prone to going on and on about the wrath of God and eternal
damnation and that kind of thing.
You probably know
people who do get into that kind of
preaching, though. I’m highly
aware that there is a portion of the Christian church that seems to exult
particularly strongly in such denunciations and prophecies of doom. For those people, the book of Ezekiel
might be a favorite.
Ezekiel is not shy
about bringing the hell-fire.
Stretches of this book are so couched as to make his fellow prophets
blush with horror. Ezekiel
is also the prophet of record for some of the more unusual bits to be found in
scripture – not quite on the level of the apocalyptic writings found in Daniel,
but pretty strange in a couple of places.
You might remember the “valley of the dry bones” to which God commanded
Ezekiel to prophecy in chapter 37 of the book; the dry bones rise up and
connect to each other, eventually coming to life as a valley full of
people. The very first chapter of
the book launches into a dramatic and fantastic vision of a great chariot and
fiery wheels within wheels, one that makes Ezekiel a favorite among UFO
conspiracy theorists today. So strident and sometimes overwhelming is the tenor
of Ezekiel’s prophecy that some modern observers speculate that the prophet
suffered from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, possibly related to the
circumstances of the Babylonian Exile in which he lived and prophesied.[i]
Still, even the
most fantastical of prophets needs to “bring it home” at some point, to deliver
a message that something good is
possible, that some kind of redemption is possible no matter how badly the
people have fouled up their lives and failed to follow God. Chapter 34 contains one of those
moments for Ezekiel, one in which the prophet stresses that no matter how bad
things look now, Yahweh will intercede on behalf of the exiled and desperate
people of Israel.
The first part of
the chapter, before the portion included in our reading, takes aim at the kings
of Israel, those who are judged as “bad kings” for their failure to lead as God
intended. It might be a surprise
to us to see kings portrayed as “shepherds,” but in fact the metaphor of king
as shepherd was actually pretty common in ancient Middle Eastern thought. Egyptian writings often stressed the
role of kings or even deities as shepherds of the people. The Babylonian god Marduk was
interestingly described as the “shepherd of all the gods.”[ii] In more mundane terms, the famous Law
Code of Hammurabi stresses the role of the king (namely, himself) as being “to promote the welfare of the
people, to cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked and the
evil that the strong might not oppress the weak” –exactly
the kind of language describing a shepherd’s responsibility towards the sheep
under his care.
Given
this context, Ezekiel’s discourse here comes as a relief and fits into a
familiar political as well as theological framework. The kings of Israel are indicted for their failure to be
true shepherds to the people, as in verse 3 and following: “You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter
the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the week, you have not healed the
sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed,
you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have scattered
them.” In turn God promises
through Ezekiel to take such leaders away; beginning with our passage in verse
10, the “right” shepherd is revealed to be none other than God.
God
promises to re-gather the sheep who have been scattered or driven away by the
bad shepherds, to seek them out and to restore the flock. God promises to feed them and to
restore their health. There are
times the language here sounds an awful lot like the ever-familiar Psalm 23,
with its promises of good pasture and good water.
Still,
though, God has a bit more for Ezekiel to say about not just bad shepherds, but
bad sheep. The gentle pastoral
nature of the passage is badly disrupted at verse 16, in which God promises
that “I will strengthen the weak, but
the fat and the strong I will destroy.
I will feed them with justice.”
What seems like a jarring interruption turns out to be a major
interjection, in verse 17 and following:
As
for you, my flock, thus says the Lord God: I will judge between sheep and
sheep, between rams and goats: Is it not enough for you to feed on the good
pasture, but must you tread down with your feet the rest of the pasture? When you drink of clear water, must you
foul the rest with your feet? And
must my sheep eat what you have trodden with your feet, and drink what you have
fouled with your feet?
Therefore,
thus says the Lord God to them: I myself will judge between the fat sheep and
the lean sheep. Because you pushed
with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns
until you scattered them far and wide, I will save my flock, and they will no
longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep. (17-22)
Between sheep and sheep (lean or fat)
It
isn’t just bad leaders God condemns through Ezekiel; the grabbers, the greedy,
the hoarders among the sheep themselves also come under condemnation. Those who greedily consume the good
grass and water, and even go so far as to foul the grass and water they aren’t
consuming, are judged by God.
There are probably three different sermons to be preached just on this
passage alone. For today, let it
be enough to note that the flock, the community of God’s people, are disrupted
both by bad shepherds who scatter the flock and exploit their rule to enrich
themselves, but also by members of the flock itself who crowd out fellow sheep
from access to good grass and water, the good gifts of God given for all the
people of God, not just a select, privileged few.
Ezekiel
promises that God will intervene for the sheep, both casting aside the bad
shepherds and promising, where the fat sheep are concerned, to “feed them with justice” (v. 16). It’s hard to resist the urge to read
that phrase as suggest that God is going to shove justice down the throats of
the fat, greedy sheep, but in any case their grasping, wasteful ways are under
the judgment of God.
Ezekiel
goes on to suggest that another shepherd, out of the house of “my servant
David,” will be appointed to feed the flock and be their shepherd, and to “be prince among them” (v. 24). It’s quite likely that Ezekiel had in
mind a new king of Israel, who might serve as a truly just shepherd of the
people under the guidance and leadership of God. Still, it’s not hard to see why early Christians would read
this passage as a presaging of the coming of the Messiah, Jesus, reckoned as a
descendent of the earthly line of David.
Whether
one sees this passage as prophetic of Jesus or not, one thing that it does make
clear is that we humans are in need of this divine intercession. As much as we might see ourselves us as
among the innocent sheep scattered or starved by the bad shepherds or fat
sheep, it’s never too far a trip from lean sheep to fat sheep. Humans, particularly humans placed in
power or even merely more advantaged than another, fail. Don’t doubt that each one of us has at
one time been the sheep treading down the grass or fouling the water with our
feet.
The
theologian Reinhold Niebuhr probably expressed this best in his Moral Man and Immoral Society:
…the limitations of the human imagination, the easy subservience of
reason to prejudice and passion, and the consequent persistence of irrational
egoism, particularly in group behavior, make social conflict an inevitability
in human history, probably to its very end. (xx)
We are,
particularly in large numbers, prone to wrongdoing and exploitation. We need deliverance. And the Shepherd King is promised to
deliver us from the exploitation of bad shepherds and fat sheep, and even –
maybe most of all – from ourselves.
It’s hard not to
make the leap from this Old Testament prophecy to today’s Gospel lesson, the
familiar “parable of the sheep and goats,” particularly as the parable as Jesus
tells it uses the same kind of metaphor as Ezekiel attributes to God, sorting “sheep from sheep … rams from goats.” Jesus’s point in the parable is
also pretty similar; those who feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty,
welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, cared for the sick, and visitied the
imprisoned are the blessed ones, while those who did not do those things are
not, because whether you did or did not do those for “the least of these,” you
did or did not do them for Jesus himself.
The sheep from the goats
Jesus’s teaching
directs us to care for “the least of these,” but I suspect Ezekiel would be in
the background reminding us not to forget about why those people need feeding
and clothing and visiting and so on.
The good Shepherd King in Ezekiel’s narrative cares for the sheep by
“feeding them with justice,” or maybe shoving justice down their throats in
some cases. Those who are given to
the exploitation of the sheep, whether as bad shepherds or self-fattening
sheep, are held to account in Ezekiel’s vision; the Shepherd King restores the
flock by strengthening the weak, but by destroying
the fat and strong sheep who keep butting the weaker sheep out of the
way.
That’s harsh
language to us, but crazy old Ezekiel with his dancing dry bones and fiery
wheels within wheels is not going to concern himself overmuch about our
delicate sensibilities.
I know I’m
relatively young compared to some of you, but I am hard-pressed to come up with
many examples of the kind of kingship (or leadership, to ease into more modern
models) described by Ezekiel here.
It’s hard to imagine a true shepherd leader getting out of the primary
stage in a contest for any political office, but even the church is at times
lacking for the pastoral touch, the restorative and rehabilitating justice
practiced by Ezekiel’s model king.
At the very least,
it might suggest that our idea of Christ the King, that idea being celebrated
on this final Sunday of the liturgical year, needs to be held in check
constantly. Even the hymns we sing
– yes, even a couple of the hymns in today’s service – put all sorts of other
images of kingship in our heads.
It’s easy to sing about a king’s power or might, or gloriousness, or any
number of attributes that sound … well, kingly.
It isn’t that we
have no concept of God as shepherd – between Psalm 23 and the “I am the good
shepherd” teaching from John 10, it’s a very pervasive image in our
teaching. We don’t often put the
two together, though. A king who
reigns restoratively – without regard to taking gain from the subjects of the
realm, but strictly for the welfare of the people; restoring the scattered back
into the community, healing those who have been wounded, giving comfort to those
in need … how many kings (or queens, for that matter) can we recall who have
ruled that way?
But that is the
Reign of Christ. That is what it
is to be ruled by a king who is also a shepherd. That is what it is to part of the flock shepherded by our Lord
Jesus Christ. And our task is to
take up the work of that Shepherd King, feeding, caring, restoring.
For the Shepherd
King, Thanks be to God.
Hymns: "O Worship the King" (PH 476), "Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us" (387), "I Love Thy Kingdom, Lord" (441)
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