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Eternal Life, Now

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Eternal Life, Now

 
 
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Sermon — May 12, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

From time to time in every one of our lives, a certain question arises. It can be born of frustration or confusion, dread or despair. It’s a question that arises at the intersection the big issues of value and meaning with the realities of daily life. It’s a question you may have even asked yourself once or twice this week:

“What’s the point of this meeting?”

Now, the exact situation varies from time to time. If you’re in school, you may sometimes wonder why you even have classes the last few days before summer vacation, when exams are over and all you’re going to do is watch a movie anyway. If you’re sitting in a monthly committee meeting, you may wonder why it wasn’t just canceled, if there’s nothing actually on the agenda. You may find sometimes that having a meeting is serving as a replacement for doing something. And sometimes, it turns out that there really is a point, it just takes a while to get there; for the first ten or fifteen minutes of a conversation, you wonder why this person wanted to talk with you at all, until suddenly the penny drops, and the true purpose is revealed—and then the whole conversation that’s already happened begins to make sense.

There’s a little bit of this third situation in the writing style of John. Both the Gospel of John and the First Letter of John reveal their meaning in a certain roundabout way. And you might think to yourself, as you read them or hear them: “I know there’s a point to this… But what is it?”

And then, toward the very end, both the Gospel and the Letter just lay it right out. Each one of them, in the closing chapter, tells you the point of the meeting; they tell you why they’re writing. And there’s a difference between the two that’s part of why I love the First Letter of John so much.

The Gospel of John comes to an end just after the Doubting Thomas story, when Jesus has revealed himself in resurrected form to this questioning disciple. We don’t have the clean ending of the Ascension story that we get in the Gospel of Luke, when forty days after Easter—that was on Easter—the resurrected Jesus finally leaves the disciples behind and ascends into heaven. John leaves the story open: “Now,” he writes, “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:30-31) At the end of twenty chapters of elevated theology and difficult discourses, John finally tells us the point: He’s written all this “so that you may come to believe,” and that through believing, “you may have life.”

There’s a similar statement of purpose in the closing verses of the First Letter of John: “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life.” (1 John 5:13) And while this speaks the same language and shares the same vocabulary as the conclusion of the Gospel, it’s not quite the same thing. The Gospel is written “so that you may come to believe,” and through believing, have life; the Letter is written “to you who believe…so that you may know that you have eternal life.”

And this, to me, is a magnificent phrase: “so that you may know that you have eternal life.”

First, that verb: “Know.” The Letter isn’t written to convince or persuade you. It isn’t written to criticize or condemn you. It’s written to remind you, to help you know something. It’s there for what Christian theology traditionally calls “assurance,” the reminder that you don’t need to worry about salvation, or be afraid of judgment. John doesn’t want to teach you how to earn eternal life, he wants you to know that you already have it.

1 John reminds us to be honest about our failings, because “if we say we have no sin,” we deceive only ourselves. It invites us to be transformed and grow in the Spirit, because while “we are God’s children now… what we will be has not yet been revealed.” It reminds us that we ought to “love one another, for love is from God.” But in the end, what really matters is not what we do, but what God does. The power of our faith is not our love for God, or our love for one another, but God’s love for each one of us, for “God is love,” John writes, and “God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.” And this beautiful letter has been written to help that message of God’s grace and love sink in; John really wants you to know that you have eternal life.

And to know that you have it. And that’s a second important thing. The message of 1 John is not that you will “inherit eternal life,” which is a phrase common in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It’s not that one day, you’ll go to heaven and then you will have eternal life. It’s that you have eternal life, already now. “Whoever has the Son has life,” the letter says. And you have the Son. You have Jesus in your life. You have Jesus in your heart. You can have Jesus with you because, as the beautiful prayer for Ascension Day says, Jesus “ascended far above all heavens, that he might fill all things.” And because you have Jesus, you have life; already now eternal life is yours.

And this can only make sense if we clarify what “eternal” means. In Christian theology, “eternity” is not so much a quantity of time as a quality. In other words, the “eternal” in “eternal life” is not primarily a measurement of length, it’s a description of what that life is like. It is, as the Nicene Creed says, “the life of the world to come,” the life of the new creation God has in store for all of us. Now, we believe that in that world we do not get sick, or suffer, or die, and so eternal life does last forever; but that’s not its only quality. The life of the world to come, is a life in which we love, and are loved. It’s a life in which we will know one another, fully, and be fully known. It’s a life in which we will be reconciled to one another and to God, in which truth, and beauty, and peace are the organizing principles of life.

And the message of Easter is that that world isn’t only a future reality for which we wait. Christ is risen, and Christ is alive, and the process of renewing and restoring and recreating the world is already going on—even though it is not yet complete. Although the kingdom of God has not yet arrived in fullness, it is already present here, intersecting with our world in a thousand different ways. And so even now, we can begin to live the life of eternity; even now, while living in this world, we can live as if we were living in the world to come, and this is what John wants us to know: that even now, we have eternal life.

One of the great blessings of my life has been the presence of our brothers just up the river at the Society of St. John the Evangelist, in Cambridge. SSJE is an Episcopal community of monks, a dozen men who’ve devoted themselves to a life together shaped by service and prayer. The brothers are some of the most loving, authentic, and holy men I’ve ever met. And part of what makes them so loving and so authentic is their willingness to admit that being a monk is not all sweetness and light. Being a monk is, in large part, like being married forever to a bunch of people with whom you’re not in love; or being life-long roommates with a dozen guys with whom you have no bonds of family, or prior friendship; who are united only by the shared desire to abide in the love of God, and who sometimes get on your nerves. Monastic life is a constant practice of living the life of the world to come together, even amid the resentments and disappointments of the life of this world.

Because they are the Society of St. John the Evangelist, after all, the brothers have always had a special relationship with the Gospel and Letters of John, and so I’m going to let Brother David Vryhof have the last words in this sermon series on 1 John. Reflecting on the Gospel of John and on the life of the great mystic Brother Lawrence of the Cross, Brother David writes, “We, too, can learn to abide in God, to draw our strength from God’s life at work within us, to rely on God every moment of every day. We too can have this larger life, this eternal life, the very life of God as our daily fare… The larger life we are promised in Christ is not found by striving for success, social status or material gain; nor is it found in pursuing righteousness or holiness (witness the Pharisees). It is found by surrendering ourselves to God’s life within us and by trusting God’s strength to be made manifest in our weakness. This life is a gift – not to be earned, but received – the gift of living in union with God.”

The Disruptive Spirit

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The Disruptive Spirit

 
 
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Sermon — May 5, 2024

Pia Bertelli

“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child as well. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments.”

If there was any question over the last four weeks about what it means to be an “Easter People”, there should be no doubt now. The first time I heard this term “Easter People”, I was in a baptism class for my now 27 year old daughter. Someone asked a question and the priest, Dean Wolfe, who, by the way, is now the rector at St Bart’s in Manhattan, threw up his hands and exclaimed joyously, “We are an Easter People; a people of great hope!” It really made an impression on me and I began to say it to myself, to my churchy friends and, in turn, to embrace the idea. We are a people of great hope. Great hope for the victory of our faith in God’s love to conquer the world. How? How can that happen?

As I was trying to get an understanding of what was going on in this scripture passage, I had to draw a diagram. The words seemed to me to be going in a circle. It wasn’t linear and it didn’t stop at love. The writer of 1st John says that when we believe in Jesus we are born of God and if you love the parent, God, you love the child, not just his child Jesus, but we who are also born of God. Our love of God means we obey his commandments. We know from our reading of John 15, that commandment is to love one another, the other children of God. And in the middle, is the victory that conquers the world, our faith in this love. 

Herein lies the difficulty though. We learned from Greg’s sermon a couple of weeks ago we are called to an agape love, a selfless love. It is a love we would show to an adversary or someone with whom we are not necessarily familiar. This is as opposed to eros, a romantic love or filia, a brotherly, familial love. This Agape love calls us to action. As Michael pointed to in his Boondoggle sermon, when we are called as Children of God, we are set on a new path. Changed metaphysically, beyond what is perceptible to those around us. Obedience to God doesn’t mean our lives will avoid struggle. In fact, it may often mean we will choose a difficult path. It is a mindset. Julian of Norwich called it the via positiva, the positive way. It is an attitude. It doesn’t mean we make light of our struggles, but with the power of the Holy Spirit we can prevail through adversity.

The Holy Spirit…Ruach in Hebrew. In both our Old Testament and New Testament, Ruach is translated into several English words – wind, breath, wisdom. This is not to turn the Holy Spirit into a natural force, but to help our limited human minds to begin to grasp the power of God. The Holy Spirit is wind; it is movement. The Holy Spirit is breath; it is life. The Holy Spirit is wisdom; it is charism, a gift endowed by the Holy Spirit. 

Ruach was working overtime in Acts. This week we read about the third in a series of visions Peter has in addition to Cornelius’. Earlier in Chapter ten, Cornelius, a centurion, a man who lives worshipfully, was always helping people in need and had the habit of prayer, has a vision to go fetch Peter. He sends two men to Joppa to fetch Peter, who he knows from the vision is staying with Simon the Tanner. As the men are approaching, Peter is up on the balcony praying. It is lunch time. He’s hungry and thinking of food. He falls into a trance and has a vision of a blanket being lowered down by four ropes with every kind of animal, reptile and bird on it. Then he hears a voice saying, “Get up, Peter.  Kill and eat.” Peter exclaims that he has never eaten unclean food. The voice tells him that he should not call anything impure that God has made clean. This happens three times before the blanket is lifted back up to the sky. 

While Peter is puzzling out the meaning of this vision, Cornelius’ men knock on the door. The Spirit tells him to go downstairs. There are three men looking for him and he should not hesitate to go with them. Peter goes and opens the door. The men tell Peter that a holy angel commanded Cornelius to get him so they could hear what he had to say. He invites them in, makes them feel at home and the next day Peter, his Jewish friends and the travelers set off for Caesarea. When they arrive Cornelius is expecting them. Peter makes it clear that it is highly unusual for a Jew to visit a Gentile, but also acknowledges that God has led him here. Cornelius and his household are ready to listen and Peter explodes with the good news of Jesus and forgiveness! 

While Peter is still speaking, the holy spirit interrupts him, descends upon them and the gift of the Holy Spirit is poured out on them. It has proceeded from the Father and the Son and been poured out on them. Imagine yourself as an empty vessel being filled by Ruach. They are speaking in tongues and praising God. Peter finally realizes that the Gentiles, these unclean people, are like the unclean food being offered to him in his vision. Like the unclean food God has given him to satisfy his hunger, the uncircumcised Gentiles in the crowd who, having had the Holy Spirit working in their lives, are now clean and want to be baptized.    

In this scripture, we see the Holy Spirit interrupting Peter’s sermon. A point needs to be made. The gospel is proclaimed to and heard by everyone there, including those outside the Jewish circle, Peter says, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” And note, he is speaking to his brothers from Joppa; he is not alone on his mission. Peter’s rhetorical statement exclaims God’s acceptance. Peter embodies the gospel of inclusion. Love one another, Agape love. Here we learn about God’s character and his mission for the church. There is a new understanding of salvation. God does not discriminate.

Keeping people out, setting boundaries reinforces our identities – not God’s. I remember hearing a sermon on radical welcome by the Reverend Stephanie Spellers, who was previously in our diocese and is now Canon to the Presiding Bishop for Evangelism, Reconciliation, and Creation Care and is also, coincidentally, an Assisting Priest at St Bart’s in Manhattan. She spoke about how the church must change to be more inclusive. She spoke of a church in I think maybe Southern California, it might have been New York City. I think I had my hands up on my ears and was saying “nah nah nah” so I didn’t hear, because she was telling us about a church where they mamboed up the aisle as they lined up for communion. “Good God,” I said to myself. “This is the Episcopal Church. Have some dignity.” And then, in a tiny part of my ADHD brain, the Mambo scene from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story played and I wondered what that might be like to joyously dance my way up the aisle to take the Eucharist. I tried to convince Douglas to work in a Latin rhythm here, but he wouldn’t indulge me.

In all seriousness, whether or not to let uncircumcised men into the community of believers was a seminal question of the day. Changing the idea of who gets let in shapes the community of believers. Listening to God when God speaks to us through our prayer, visions or synchronistic moments, brings us closer to God’s vision for the church. The message you need to hear may come through the uncircumcised one challenging your prejudices and expectations. The Holy Spirit is disruptive. Be prepared; expect it.

I left copies of the poem, “Go to the Limits of Your Longing” by Rainer Maria Rilke in all of the pews. For me it is about listening to God, and the action we are called to undertake. The flame is terrifying, yet there is a shadow in which we can move where we can hear God saying, “Give me your hand.”  And when you are pushed to your limit of loving, with the communion of your brothers and sisters in Christ and with the power of the Holy Spirit, throw up your hands and exclaim joyously, “We are an Easter People; a people of great hope!”

Pentecost Pending

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I spent Monday and Tuesday this week at our annual Clergy Conference. Along with time to catch up with old colleagues in ministry and participate in important conversations with diocesan leaders, every year’s Clergy Conference includes a series of presentations by a guest speaker. Sometimes these are great. Sometimes they’re just fine. This year, I was really blown away.

Our speaker this year with Debie Thomas, an Episcopal layperson who serves as Minister for Lifelong Formation at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto. Debie was raised in the United States by Indian immigrant parents, who came from the southern Indian state of Kerala, where they were members of the community of Mar Thoma Christians, who date their history back two thousand years to the ministry of Saint Thomas in India. Her father was an evangelical pastor in the US. Debie herself is a writer and a mother, “a seeker, an explorer, a believer, and a doubter,” as she puts it.

Her presentations grappled with each of the readings appointed to Pentecost, asking how each one might point us to a way in which the Holy Spirit is leading the Church today. What are the “dry bones” in our lives and in our churches, the things that seem dead and gone that only God can restore to life? How does the Holy Spirit translate the language of our faith into the language of our own lives, so that we hear God speaking to each one of us in a way we can understand, as the disciples heard at Pentecost? How does the Spirit pray for us, when we do not know how to pray for ourselves, with “sighs too deep for words,” as Paul says? What is the truth toward which Jesus is leading us in this “post-truth” age?

It was a week of many questions, and few answers. But luckily, Pentecost is still a few weeks away. I wonder, between now and then, whether you might pick one of those questions, and explore it in your prayer between now and then.

Everyone who Loves

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Everyone who Loves

 
 
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Sermon — April 28, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God;
everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” (1 John 4:7)

Four months ago at the Christmas Stroll, we stood out on the sidewalk on a cold night and handed out little bags of cookies and candy with information about Saint John’s and a friendly smile. And in each bag was a card with my favorite verse from the Bible, and the church’s website and logo. And I pulled one out to show you, and I realized that the citation was printed wrong: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. — 1 John 4:12” It’s actually 1 John 4:7, but shockingly enough we didn’t get any phone calls to the office in mid-December, correcting our mistake. I’m not sure whether it’s good news or bad news that nobody bothered to pick up the Bible and check, but then again, at least for me: ignorance is bliss.

It’s an interesting exercise, to pick out the one verse of the Bible you’d want to put on a card to hand out on the street. Maybe that’s your homework today. What’s one sentence that expresses your faith that you’d want someone else to hear?

You might even find it in the passage from 1 John we just heard. It’s one of my favorite parts of the Bible. It’s like a compilation of greatest hits: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us… No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us… God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them… There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear…” and of course, there’s the verse that you’ll hear Michael paraphrase whenever he ends a sermon, “We love because he first loved us.”

As a person and as a Christian, I’ve always loved these words of love. I first read 1 John at a pivotal time in my life, on a Christmas Day long ago, when this reading is part of the service of Morning Prayer, and these words have been one of the touchstones of my faith ever since. Whenever I hear them, I’m comforted by the reminder of God’s love for me, which began long before I could begin to love myself or anyone else. I’m reassured by the reminder that although no one can see God, if we love, God lives in us, and so we can see God like we see the passing of the wind through the trees, in the ripples of love that flow between human beings. I’m challenged by the reminder that there is no fear in love—after all, what do I fear more than failing the people I love?—and then I’m freed from a little bit of fear by that promise that I can “stand with boldness on the day of judgment,” because in the end it’s not the perfection of my love that matters to God. In the end, my whole life is God’s love being perfected in me.

So as a person, I’ve always loved these words of love. But as a pastor, as a preacher—as a guy who occasionally stands out on the sidewalk with one chance to share something with the world—it’s this first verse that stands out to me, today. It’s this verse that I chose to have printed on a card: “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.”

Last week a colleague sent me a set of slides from a church event, which contained an alarming projection. You probably know that the Episcopal Church, like most other churches in America, is experiencing a long-term decline in attendance. Decade after decade, year after year, the total number of people attending an Episcopal church on a Sunday morning has simply continued to decline, in a more-or-less linear trend. It’s a linear-enough trend, in fact, that you can do a linear regression, if you are so inclined. You can extend the line down and calculate the year in which that attendance number would hit 0. In early 2020 you could see that if trends continued, by 2046 there wouldn’t be anyone in church. But trends did not continue. Instead, the pandemic came, and the bottom fell out, and now that number is more like 2039: Just 15 more years, and statistically, on average, if the trends continue, the pews of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts will be empty.

Of course, averages obscure variety. There are plenty of churches like ours, where attendance is growing, not shrinking. But all that means is that for every church that can hold off decline another decade until 2049, there’s one where attendance will be at zero in the next five years. And yes, it’s easy to lie with statistics, and yes, it’s probably an asymptotic curve, which basically means—if you haven’t taken a math class in a few years—there is probably some number of us who are crazy enough to be here no matter what. But still, it’s a drastic enough trend that we have to reckon with it.

When Bishop Alan visited us in December, he gave me a slightly-overdue certificate that institutes me as your Rector, and gives me a certain charge: “Do not forget the trust of those who have chosen you,” it says. “Care alike for young and old, strong and weak, rich and poor. By your words and in your life, proclaim the Gospel. Love and serve Christ’s people. Nourish them, and strengthen them to glorify God in this life and in the life to come.”

And this isn’t just for me, as a priest. It’s a beautiful description of any Christian life. These words are full of the spirit of love. Care for young and old, strong and weak, rich and poor. Proclaim the good news by your words and in your life. “Love and serve Christ’s people,” the letter says to me, and to you.

But what do we do when that line hits zero? What do we do when Christ’s people are all gone?

It’s a trick question, of course. It’s a question that comes from fear and anxiety about the future of the church, and that fear and anxiety come from how much we love the present of the church. But “what do we do when church attendance reaches zero?” is a very different question from “what do we do when all Christ’s people are gone?” If we take the vision laid out in this First Letter of John seriously, then our understanding of who God’s people are cannot be limited to our measurements of who shows up on Sundays: for “everyone who loves is born of God and knows God,” and I don’t believe for a minute that the decline of the Church has meant a decline in people’s ability to love. The Church doesn’t have a monopoly on love—in fact, to our discredit, sometimes it’s the other way around.

And that’s why I love these words. “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God” is a challenge to the Church’s traditional claim to know who’s in and who’s out. To say that “everyone who loves is born of God and knows God” is to say that no pastor or priest can ever tell you that you don’t belong in the Church, or that you’re not the beloved child of God, so long as your life is shaped by love.

But these words are not just a challenge to the Church. They’re a reminder and an invitation. They’re a reminder that there are more people who know God in the world than those you’ll find at prayer on a Sunday, and that God’s work is not confined to what we do together as part of the church. And they’re an invitation to go and be a part of that work, to “love one another, because love is from God.”

The Church may be shrinking, but the need for love is not, and the capacity to love is not. As 1 John reminded us last week, love is not about feeling something, or about saying something; in the Christian understanding, love is seeing your neighbor in need of help and doing something. And maybe that is the work of the Church in this new era, as our traditional structures and our traditional ways continue to fall apart. Maybe our work is to look for the people in our communities who are already acting out their love in the world. To recognize, whether they are Christian or not, that in our eyes, they are born of God and know God in that love. To find where Jesus is moving out there, in the world, and to follow him. To join our siblings, carrying out that work. Because we know that “if [we] do not love the brothers and sisters whom we have seen, [we] cannot love God whom we have not seen.”  (1 John 4:20)

So, “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (1 John 4:7-8) Amen.

The Good Shepherd

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The Fourth Sunday of Easter, just past, is always one of the most idyllic Sundays of the year. Every year, we read one of the portions of Jesus’ “Good Shepherd” discourse, hearing those tender words, “I am the Good Shepherd.” We read the beloved 23rd Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd,” and sing favorite hymns like “Shepherd of souls, refresh and bless” or “My Shepherd will supply my need.” And in a world in which many of us feel as though we “walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” it’s comforting to be reminded that we need “fear no evil, for thou art with me.”

Even in a society in which most of us couldn’t shear a sheep to save our souls, many of us find this pastoral imagery deeply moving. And falling as it often does in mid-April, with flowers beginning to bloom and greenery returning to a mud-brown world, Good Shepherd Sunday celebrates the joyful fulfillment of Easter’s promise of new and abundant life.

But all of that is assuming one of the two possible readings of Jesus’ words. The pastoral imagery is what we get from Jesus saying, “I am the Good Shepherd.” But what would it mean if we switched the emphasis around? What would it mean to say, “I am the Good Shepherd,” instead?

“Shepherd,” in the ancient Near East, was not just a pleasant pastoral image evoking rolling green hills, nor was it merely the less-romanticized daily occupation of a large portion of the population.

“Shepherd” was also one of the most common images for kings and earthly rulers. For thousands of years, kings of Sumeria, Assyria, and Babylonia described identified themselves as the shepherds of their people:

•Gudea (Sumerian ensi; 2144–2124 BC) was a “shepherd who leads the people with a good religious hand.”[38]
•Lipit-Ishtar (Isin; 1934–1924 BC): “Lipit-Ishtar, the wise shepherd, whose name has been pronounced by the god Nunamnir.”[39]
•Hammurabi (Babylonia, 1792–1750 BC): “I am Hammurabi, the shepherd, selected by the god Enlil, he who heaps high abundance and plenty . . . [the one] who gathers together the scattered peoples.”[40] “I provided perpetual water for the land . . . [and] gathered the scattered peoples. . . . In abundance and plenty I shepherded them.”[41]
•Amenhotep III (Egypt; 1411–1374 BC): “the good shepherd, vigilant for all people.”[42]
•Seti I (Egypt; 1313–1292 BC): “the good shepherd, who preserves his soldiers alive.”[43]
•Merneptah (Egypt; 1225–1215 BC): “I am the ruler who shepherds you.”[44]
•Merodach-baladan I (Babylonia; 1171–1159 BC): “[I am] the shepherd who collects the dispersed (people).”[45]
•Adadnirari III (Assyria; 810–783 BC): “unrivalled king, wonderful shepherd . . . whose shepherdship the great gods have made pleasing to the people of Assyria.”[46]
•Esarhaddon (Assyria; 680–669 BC): “the true shepherd, favorite of the great gods.”[47]
•Assurbanipal (Assyria; 668–627 BC): “those peoples which Ashur, Ishtar and the (other) great gods had given to me to be their shepherd and had entrusted into my hands.”[48]
•Nabopolassar (Babylonia; 625–605 BC): “the king of justice, the shepherd called by Marduk.”[49]
•Nebuchadnezzar II (Babylonia; 604–562 BC): “Marduk . . . gave me the shepherdship of the country and the people,” and “the loyal shepherd, the one permanently selected by Marduk.”[50]

The prophets condemn, again and again, the incompetent and unjust “shepherds” who have led their people:

“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.” (Jeremiah 23:1-2)

“Mortal, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel: prophesy, and say to them—to the shepherds: Thus says the Lord GOD: Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep?” (Ezekiel 34:2)

“The diviners see lies;
the dreamers tell false dreams,
and give empty consolation.
Therefore the people wander like sheep;
they suffer for lack of a shepherd.
My anger is hot against the shepherds,
and I will punish the leaders;
for the LORD of hosts cares for his flock.” (Zechariah 10:2-3)

And it’s easy enough to connect the dots: It would be odd to prophesy against the literal shepherds among the people of Israel, as if agricultural mismanagement were their concern. God is speaking to the self-proclaimed and metaphorical shepherds who lead the human flock.

The situation has gotten so bad that in the end, God gives up hope that human shepherds will take care of God’s sheep. Enough time has passed, and enough evidence has been gathered: God’s people have been led by too many shepherds who act like the hired hand, who runs away at the first sign of trouble. So God finally announces: “Thus says the Lord GOD: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out…I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord GOD.” (Ezekiel 34:11, 15)

And so it is that Jesus says, “I am the Good Shepherd.” I am the one who will lead you in a way your kings have not.

Two thousand years later, in a world still torn apart by war and violence, exploitation and mismanagement, it should be clear that there are still plenty of shepherds who “destroy and scatter the sheep.” We can follow them, if we’d like. We can set our hearts on anger and vengeance, we can follow the paths of destruction. Or we can wait, and search, and seek out the Good Shepherd who leads us beside stiller waters. We can look for God our Shepherd leading us in the paths of peace. We can wonder what it means to follow Jesus, and to let him seek us out, when the world is darkened by the shadow of death. And we can find comfort in the relief he brings. Because Jesus is not only the good shepherd who cares for each of our souls, and not only the good shepherd, unlike all our mighty kings. He’s both; and that is a good shepherd, indeed.