November 23, 2025
Jeremiah 23:1-6
Luke 23:33-43
Ancient Israel had a somewhat romantic view of shepherds. They pictured themselves as herding people rather than farming people, people of the hillsides rather than the plains. They ignored lots of the gritty details of shepherding, including the long hours, low pay, and lengthy list of discomforts. Rather they praised the virtues of the shepherd, including attentiveness, diligence, bravery, and self-sacrifice.
Over and over again in the writings of the Old Testament, the Hebrew writers compared their monarchs to shepherds. In that best remembered psalm, the one-time shepherd who became a monarch compared a shepherd to God.
Both the psalmists and the prophets urged the nations’ leaders to emulate the virtues of the shepherd, to keep the people together, to attend to their needs, and to protect them from outside dangers. The Scriptural record says that on some occasions they were successful. A few of the kings of Israel and Judah received the praise of the prophets themselves and, later, the ones who wrote the histories of the Bible. But most of the time, both prophets and historians sounded more like Jeremiah here, who most likely had the last king of Judah, Zedekiah, in mind when he wrote, “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 drive them away, and you have not attended to them.”
I’m afraid it’s not unusual in human societies that people call upon their leaders to emulate the virtues of the shepherd and, instead, find themselves afflicted with the gritty realities of sheep herding: long hours, low pay, and a lengthy list of discomforts. In the meantime, the leaders live large.
It’s an old, old story.
Jeremiah lived that old, old story even as he told it so frankly and so boldly. The “righteous branch” from David’s line translates the Hebrew “Tzemach Tzedek,” an ironic reflection on the king’s name, “Tzedekiya,” or “the LORD is my righteousness.” Essentially, Jeremiah said that God was not the king’s righteousness, and another branch from David’s family tree would do much better, thank you very much.
Around six hundred years later, Jesus excited a lot of interest, a lot of speculation, and a lot of comment as he moved through Galilee and Judea. Jews had come to long for, even expect Jeremiah’s “righteous branch,” an “anointed one,” or “mesiach,” which we tend to pronounce “Messiah.” This would be someone to free them from the foreign rule of Rome and to clear the greatly disliked descendants of Herod the Great from their thrones. This would be a new monarch who would fulfill the yearnings of the centuries for a ruler who would display the virtues of the shepherd: attentiveness, diligence, bravery, and self-sacrifice.
But maybe not as much self-sacrifice as Luke described in chapter 23. As Debra J. Mumford writes at Working Preacher, “If Jesus was true royalty, he would not have been crucified on a cross. Secondly, even if Jesus somehow ended up on a cross, as a person with authority in those days, He would have had the power and influence to secure his own deliverance. So, they likely mocked Jesus because it was obvious to them that Jesus could not have been the person some claimed him to be.”
I really can’t overstate this. Kings didn’t get crucified. Saviors didn’t submit to a cross. Messiahs didn’t get executed by the ones they were supposed to overthrow.
The center of the Christian Gospel is that this time, that’s exactly what happened. The center of the Christian Gospel is that a crucified Messiah is exactly what we need. The center of the Christian Gospel is that even death cannot overthrow the righteous shepherd.
The prophets and the psalmists called for a monarch who would demonstrate the virtues of a shepherd for centuries. Even they, I’m sure, would have stood agog, even aghast, to see Jesus take that call to a cross.
What we have in Christianity is a monarch who sets aside the privileges of a king for the virtues of a shepherd.
We’ve spent the last two millennia trying to come to terms with that.
As Alyce McKenzie writes in her blog:
How can a crucified king bring us life? How can a forgiving king right the wrongs done to us and that we have done to others?
How can a peaceful king end the wars that rage within us and around us?
How can a compassionate king find the strength to lead us?
The result, I’m afraid, has been history in which Christian leaders imitated the rulers Jeremiah criticized so harshly more than they emulated Jesus. Contemporary American Christian Nationalism would look comfortably familiar to those who ordered the destruction of the Cathars in the 14th century, or authorized the Doctrine of Discovery in the 15th century, or launched the wars between Protestants and Catholics that afflicted the people of Europe for hundreds of years.
Jesus’ crucifixion forces us to ask who he is, as Emerson Powery writes at Working Preacher. “What kind of king will he be? Posing the question in this way is really another way of asking a more personal question: what kind of church should we be?”
Will we imitate Jesus, or imitate those who crucified him?
This congregation is not, I believe, filled with people in positions of power. We are not the movers and the shakers of the time. We are, however, moving and shaking within our own circles.
First, who are we moving and shaking for?
We need to move and shake for ourselves to some degree. Eating is a good thing. Housing is a good thing. And despite the mythology about people who do nothing and live large that is so widespread in the United States, the only people who live in comfort without working live in mansions. Most people do the job of a living wage, but they’ve also got to advocate for a living wage or they may not get one. As I keep saying, this nation believes in the value of hard work right up until it’s time to pay for it.
I’d argue, however, that if we’re only moving and shaking for ourselves, we’re subject to the same criticisms Jeremiah made of those ancient monarchs.
Even if we’re moving and shaking for our families, that’s still not enough, is it? Those ancient monarchs did what they could to see that their children inherited the power and the privilege that they did – sometimes they did it well, and sometimes they didn’t. But while they focused their attention on the welfare of their own family, what happened to the country? What happened to the people they were supposed to care for?
“Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture,” says the LORD.
Is it enough to include our friends in our care and concern? Or at least those among our neighbors who think right, act right, do right? A “coalition of the willing,” if you like. Well. Perhaps. It’s pretty good. You can build a community that way. But is it enough?
No. Not according to Jesus.
Cheryl Lindsay writes at UCC.org, “From the Incarnation at his birth to this moment of humiliation on the cross, Jesus has demonstrated that the kindom of God does not reflect the dominance-driven kingdoms of this world. Strength does not come from exerting one’s power against the powerless or stripping power and authority from enemies. The power of the Spirit enables us to love our enemies and to share power and other resources for the good of all.”
“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
Jesus did his moving and shaking for the entire realm of God.
He also showed us how. Not, as Rev. Lindsay wrote, by exerting brute power over enemies. That’s the way of the monarchs, not the shepherds. Instead, it’s with forgiveness. Mercy. Sharing. Love.
That’s what a righteous shepherd looks like.
Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “If there is any moment in the Christian calendar that must smack all smugness out of us — all arrogance, all self-righteousness, all contempt — this one has to be it. Our king was a dead man walking. His chosen path to glory was the cross. If paradise was anywhere, it was with him, only and exactly where his oppressors left him to die: Today. With Me. Paradise.”
That is Christ’s gift to us: Today. With me. Paradise. It is also Christ’s challenge to us that we imitate the righteous shepherd, not the unrighteous monarch, and extend to others that same gift:
Today. With me. Paradise.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes to his prepared text while preaching, sometimes accidentally, and sometimes deliberately. What you read and what you heard will not precisely match.
| The image is Christ and the Robber (1893) by Nikolai Ge, 1831-1894, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=59662 [retrieved November 23, 2025]. Original source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ge_ChristandRobber.jpg. |
