Jeremiah 23: 1-6 (New Jerusalem Bible)
Mark 6: 30-34, 53-56 (Common English Bible)
The events from this message of Mark’s gospel occurred just after Jesus learned that his cousin, John the Baptizer had been executed by King Herod. The people of God have become exactly what Moses and the prophets predicted. With John the Baptizer gone, they became sheep without shepherds, weakened, scattered and vulnerable. They were looking for another shepherd who would usher in God’s kingdom.
The people saw Jesus first as a healer and not the Messiah. Now Jesus must have been disappointed to think they missed the substance of his true identity. However, he chose to be known as a servant before they realized he was the Christ. Jesus was pleased to know his mission on earth was being accomplished.
Compassion arose with Jesus as he saw signs in the crowd like a flock of sheep without its shepherd. They had no protection from being exploited by greedy elites. Jesus reached out to the crowd by teaching and feeding them. Jesus left them free to decide whether they believed he was the Messiah, or just another miracle worker who served a good meal.
Jesus continues to teach us many things today. He wants us to learn about eternal love and life. He wants to teach us about faith, trust and the power and goodness of God. Jesus also wants to teach us about the dangers of following demagogues, who claim they are Christians, but advocate the opposite of everything Jesus taught about compassion to the poor.
For Jesus, compassion is not just a feeling, but a doing. He had to show his followers that compassion is a part of discipleship. How can we rest when people are homeless, families are starving and children are suffering due to injustice? How can anyone rest in the midst of pain and suffering that exists in the world today. Until the 20th century people had little knowledge of what was going on in the world, but now we have 24/7 news so there is no excuse to ignore the suffering. Just look at the genocide being done against the people in Gaza.
Jesus doesn’t discriminate when it comes to healing. He doesn’t sort out the easy illnesses to cure, but rather the difficult diseases that are hard to cure, like leprosy which mainly afflicted the poor. Jesus doesn’t force healing on anyone nor does he reward those who are skeptical of his healing. In the story of the ten lepers in Luke 17: 11-19, Jesus healed all of them, but only one returned to give thanks to Jesus. Jesus set the example for caring and all churches need to follow his example. The universal church needs to address both the physical needs of the people along with their spiritual needs. The Church needs to be a servant church.
Jesus is compassionate. He knows what we need. Jesus is the ultimate shepherd who will get us through the storms of life. His presence is among us and his strength is positive as the good shepherd.
While the term “shepherd” is mainly an agricultural term, we might also view it as a relationship term to religious leaders. Jeremiah 23: 1-6, is an intense theo-political discourse in which God calls out the political leaders of Judah and Israel, who were kings then, to account for their injustice and betrayal of the common people.
The previous chapter 22 in Jeremiah is focused on denouncing the acts of the wicked kings who have ruled Judah and Israel. But what made them wicked in God’s eyes? These monarchs had forsaken justice, have committed oppression and had abandoned those most likely to be ignored in society, foreigners, widows and orphans (22: 3). And workers were denied a fair wage for their labor. So most of the wealth trickled upward into the coffers of the kings, leaving the poor with little. Amid these negative images, there are also positive images of what God expects from a ruler, namely doing what is right, caring for the poor and uplifting the forgotten (22: 15-16).
Biblical and contemporary work around the categories of foreign people, widows and orphans is also necessary to understand God's condemnation of false prophets who praise the evil kings by turning a blind eye to injustice (23:16). While foreign migrants would be those who were not dominant in Israel and Judah, it is necessary to bring up the issue of race, which in our own contemporary world is interwoven with the same issues of exclusion. In the Bible those categories often speak to people who have been rendered vulnerable because they have been severed from the dominant social order. We might speak to the status of those whom society isolates due to gender, age, color and ability.
The second portion of this reading from Jeremiah envisions a different type of society, one in which God has gathered God’s people to be just leaders. God is going to bring justice and not only in a personal sense, not in a distant eternity but in a material and solid way in the systems of the world. There are more than 2,000 verses in the Bible about social justice, but many ministers ignore them, especially those who preach the false doctrines of the prosperity gospel and Chistian Nationalism.
The elite and powerful who disregard God’s values of compassion and justice should wake-up from their greed and egotism. Amid the unfolding of excessive inequality, ecological destruction and the violent systems that do harm based on race, greed and gender this a time to call out God to overcome these demonic forces.
The kingdom of God is not advertised on some large neon sign towering over Time Square, but rather it’s a treasure buried in a field. It’s not an expensive jewel displayed under a glass with bright lights. But it’s like a pearl that someone just happens to stumble upon in an unlikely place. The Kingdom does not call attention to itself like a marching band. But it is instead like the yeast that seems to disappear into the larger lump of dough. What started as a small thing grows into something large, like the Kingdom of God.
The Kingdom and the One who shepherds over it is the King of Kings, the greatest shepherd ever to walk on planet earth. Jeremiah predicted it and Jesus fulfilled it. We should now live it.
AMEN
