Proper 34 – Christ the King

Jeremiah 23.1-6
Colossians 1.11-20
Luke 23.33-43

Shepherds, shepherding stories, and shepherding metaphors abound throughout the Bible, as one would expect in that culture. The creative thing in Israel’s traditions, though, was the development of ‘the shepherd’ as a metaphor first for the king (the lowly status of shepherds makes this daring), and then for God himself. These traditions explode like fireworks in the Gospels as Jesus, who probably never herded a sheep in his life, reuses them to explain his strange activity.

Jeremiah’s polemic against the wicked shepherds goes with the preceding denunciation of the rump of the Davidic house. Hezekiah and Josiah have not been able to save Judah from the slide into shame, exile and devastation; the would-be shepherds, Jehoiachin and his like, have done nothing to look after God’s sheep. In that setting, God promises to gather his sheep once more, and to set wise and caring shepherds over them.

Rising out of this promise, but far transcending it, is the pledge that God will raise up a ‘branch of righteousness’ who will put God’s justice into effect, who will create salvation for God’s people. This Davidic king will bear a strange name: ‘Yahweh is our righteousness’. He will embody God’s own promise, covenant faithfulness, justice and loyalty.

What will this look like in practice? Imagine Luke answering this question by tearing down a curtain in front of a great but deeply shocking painting. Here is the king who embodies the justice, the loyalty, the salvation of God: praying for those who nail him to the cross, mocked as a false king, taunted as Jeremiah taunted Jehoiachin as though he were a mere sham, an impostor. Here he is, fulfilling God’s promise to bring in his kingdom of justice and mercy, rescuing those who turn to him and his kingdom only when all other hope is exhausted. Is this, or is this not, asks Luke, what Jeremiah (and so many others) was talking about? Is this not the shepherd who would embody the saving faithfulness of God?

Colossians 1.15-20, in effect, sets all this to music. The grand poem, in which verses 15-16 balance 18b-20, with 17 and 18a themselves balanced in the middle, exploits some of the most deep-rooted Jewish language about God – that of the ‘wisdom’ through which God made all things – in order to talk about Jesus. He is the one through whom all things were made – and redeemed; he is the one who now embodies the ruling and reconciling work of the creator God, Israel’s God. What seems bold and daring, almost oxymoronic, when we meet it in Jeremiah, is woven so closely together here as to seem almost natural. Why should not the living God come to live among us as a creature bearing God’s image? Why should he not be the first-born from the dead? And why (we ask with fear and trembling) should he not unveil his royal splendour most fully when engaged in the bloody work of peacemaking?