Ezekiel 34:11-16
Lectionary Reading St Peter and St Paul
Thus says the Lord God: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land; and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the watercourses, and in all the inhabited parts of the land. I will feed them with good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel shall be their pasture; there they shall lie down in good grazing land, and they shall feed on rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.
What I love about this is the clear picture that is drawn of God’s desire to love us. He uses the imagery of a shepherd and his sheep. How He will seek us out and search for us. He will rescue us. He will bring us out of places we don’t belong and into a place of our own. The place he has chosen for us is beautiful and filled with good things and He longs to feed us and take care of us and give us rest. It is a picture of God seeking out those who are lost or who have strayed. Those who are injured and weak. God himself will care for them, heal and nurture them, and rescue them from those who have taken advantage of them. This is God’s desire.
In the last two sentences there are two ways that we can read that. We can read that God will actively rescue the oppressed and destroy the oppressors. When we read it this way, we have to adopt a view of God that he actively destroys his children when they are not obeying. This way of viewing God, that he becomes like the oppressors, in that He oppresses them. They are bullies and so God bullies them. God is bigger and stronger and they are weak and powerless against Him so He does what they do. This view shows God as a rescuer that loves conditionally. His love for his children is not based on who He is but on who His children are. We are often okay with this view of God because we tend to think that He has righteous reasons for being like them. Even though this view clearly doesn’t fit His nature. His nature is that He is love. He is this loving shepherd who wants to take care of his sheep. It doesn’t fit that he would kill the bad sheep. That is not a loving shepherd.
So the other way to look at it is that as God rescues the oppressed, those who oppress them can no longer sustain their way of life. Their way of life will be destroyed because it relies on having the weak to oppress. Imagine company XYZ makes widgets and sells billions of them. What if company ABC came along and offered XYZ employees 3x’s their pay and a profit sharing plan. So all of XYZ’s employees left to work for a better company. There is now no-one to make the widgets so the executives who lived lavishly off the backs of their minimum wage workers, now have a problem. They have no one to work in their factory and can no longer live the life they are living. It has now been destroyed.
God, in His goodness will rescue the oppressed and that same goodness destroys the oppressors. They are left with no choice but to humble themselves and join God in His goodness.