To Feed with Justice
Ezekiel 34:11-24
November 19, 2023
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVwEil3qHAQ
“You cannot tell the story of injustice without telling the story of power.”[1] So says Cole Arthur Riley in her wonderful book This Here Flesh. “You cannot tell the story of injustice without telling the story of power.
The prophet Ezekiel is also concerned with the relationships between injustice, or justice, and power. We did not read the first part of chapter 34. It begins with “Woe to the shepherds.” It accuses them of five sins of omission, and for emphasis, the usual Hebrew word order is reversed. The word from the Lord to the shepherds is:
· the weak you have not strengthened
· the sick you have not healed,
· the injured you have not bound up,
· the strayed you have not brought back
· the lost you have not sought.[2]
In Ezekiel’s time, shepherd was a common metaphor for a king. Kings were expected to govern well, to protect and diligently care for their subjects. The last four kings had worthless, not so much shepherds, but wolves. Wolves who ruled so brutally that it recalls the harshness of the Hebrew people’s suffering under Pharoah’s rule in Egypt.[3] The result of their failed leadership is that the flock has been devoured and scattered, taken into captivity by a foreign nation.
Ezekiel is describing the time when they are without a king, without a shepherd, in exile. God has had it with the human shepherds. Now God will be their shepherd. God will seek the lost, bring back the strayed, bind up the injured and strengthen the weak
The thirteenth-century German theologian, Meister Eckhart, said that “you may call God love. You may call God goodness, but the best name for God is compassion.”
God is the quintessential Good Shepherd, actively gathering the scattered sheep, tending injuries, nursing the sick, restoring the flock to wholeness. This is a mercy and tender love at their very best. The best name for God is compassion.
But it is not only the shepherd-kings that God is angry with. There are other leaders from within the flock who, Ezekiel says, “pushed with flank and shoulder and butted at all the weak animals with their horns.” There were bullies, strong ones who abused the weaker ones.
Some sheep got to the good pastures first and when they had eaten their fill, they tromped it down so that others couldn’t eat. They got to the clean streams and then polluted them so that there was not clean water for others. God is also displeased with those sheep.
When I was young, I was taught a certain simple narrative about the Bible. I was taught that there was a pattern in the Old Testament. The pattern was that things would go well for a time while the people were worshipping and obeying the true God, but then they would fall away and worship idols and things would go badly for them. Eventually, things would go so badly that they would turn back to God. God would forgive them and things would go well as long as they kept to God’s ways. But inevitably they would turn away from God and worship idols and the pattern would repeat itself.
That’s what I was taught. Maybe some of you were taught that too. It is somewhat true, not a bad way to describe the arc of much of Biblical history. Except that when it was taught to me, it came with another message. The accompanying message was that we modern Christians were not like those ancient Hebrew people. Because Jesus had broken that cycle and delivered us and we always only worshipped the true God and never fell away. That is a dangerous message. It is easily put to work to bolster anti-Semitism for one thing. For another, it falsely presumes that we do not have our own idols.
What I believe is that the Bible tells us the stories of a particular people, because we understand things best when they are specific. But the stories are not unique to the ancient Hebrews. The stories describe the tendencies of all human beings. They teach us what it is to be human.
My friend, Vince Amlin, is a pastor in Chicago. Last summer, during his sabbatical, he had a powerful experience. He describes it like this,
On a rainy Wednesday afternoon, my family gathered with a dozen others outside the mouth of a cave in Northern Spain. Our guide unlocked the gate and led us on a 20-minute walk, deeper and deeper into the earth.
Finally, we stood in total darkness at the heart of the cavern until our guide turned on his flashlight and panned it slowly across the rock wall to reveal a horse, painted in purple with a black mane and standing in a red field. This image, the cave’s earliest, is thought to be as many as 36,000 years old. By far the oldest human-made thing I have ever been in the presence of.
It was beautiful…and daunting.
To hold my own life up against that timeline. To reckon my days against that horse’s. It makes my time here seem very small. And makes the God who stretches from everlasting to everlasting seem very large.”
“It makes the psalmist number his days,” Vince says. “To count each one as precious, knowing how few we have been given by the one who was before horse paintings, and before horses, before caves that lead into the earth, and before the earth itself.”[4]
Vince’s story reminds that humans have been around for a very long time. It gives me a window on Scripture, an appreciation for the ancient people whose stories still matter.
Ezekiel describes corrupt political leaders, those who use the power of their office for themselves, in ways that destroy the vitality of the whole country. Sound familiar? It describes people who push to the front of every line and take all that they want with no concern for those behind them. You and I know people like that. These are old patterns, but we are still living them out. We might even understand verses 17-22 as descriptive of people who exploit the resources offered by the earth and pollute what remains. For people in our time concerned with environmental stewardship, Ezekiel’s word are more relevant than the prophet could have imagined.[5]
The solution to bad shepherding and stray sheep is the Good Shepherd, the God whose name is compassion, the one who seeks and gathers and binds up and strengthens. And one more thing, God says, “I will feed them with justice.”
“I will feed them with justice.” We may read that and cheer. The fat sheep, the bullies are going to get what’s coming to them. It’s payback time. We think that justice means to give people what they deserve, like payback or punishment, but in the Bible, the word justice means that people get what they need.
God will feed the flock with justice, the whole flock. God will distribute the resources so that everyone gets what they need to live. That’s one sense of the phrase. But we can also hear another meaning. The idea that the flock needs to eat justice. They need to be nourished with justice so that justice will become the fiber of their lives. They need to receive justice where everyone gets what they need and also they to absorb the ways of justice, so that they will live justly in the renewed land to which they will return.[6]
“You cannot tell the story of injustice without telling the story of power.” The story of injustice that Ezekiel tells is a story of the abuse of power, the exploitation of privilege, the failure of leadership. Many of his proclamations have condemned all the people, both those Judeans who remained in the homeland and those deported to Babylon.
For much of this book, all of the people shared the blame for the situation. But here, he recognizes that many of the people are victims, led astray by those whom they should have been able to trust.
In his time, Jesus spoke about religious and political leaders who tied up heavy burdens and laid them on other people’s shoulders, but were unwilling to lift a finger to move them themselves. It’s the same pattern than Ezekiel saw.
Cole Arthur Riley writes now as a person of color in a white-supremacist culture. She says, “We cannot trust a society that makes judgments on the morality of a person without taking responsibility for how its own morality has instigated the conditions that call for such desperate decision-making . . . You cannot tell the story of injustice without telling the story of power. It requires integrity to become honest about how our power systems and our position in the world affect our capacity to do justice. Which is to say, justice can never be severed from mercy.” [7]
That message that I absorbed as a child, that message that we are different, that we no longer worship other gods was wrong and dangerous. We still go after idols like status, self-sufficiency, and convenience. We still maintain systems that exploit or neglect or stigmatize. We give our primary allegiance to something other than God, whether it be family, or political party, a way of life or national identity.
Today we mark the last Sunday in the church year. Next week Advent begins. Advent is the first Sunday in the new church year. Some of us have done this cycle so many times that we forget. We have been keeping the church running for so long that we may be in danger of forgetting the point. So, today, Ezekiel reminds us about the true nature of the God we worship. God is the true shepherd of the sheep, the one who nurtures and protects and guides us. And God is the one who feeds us with justice. At the end of a year, on the threshold of another one, it is all about love and justice. Thanks be to God.
[1] Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us (New York, Convergent Books, 2022), p. 122
[2] NIB, p. 1466
[3] Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 21-37, Anchor Bible Commentary, Volume 22a (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1997) p 69.
[4] https://www.ucc.org/daily-devotional/your-days-are-numbered/?fbclid=IwAR1K2sJaw-CWnABmgQw2ELq0hX4fade552DoMvWL3rPnTfd2l6qm-FhfoIY
[5]Katheryn Pfisterer Darr, New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume 5, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2015), p. 1469
[6] John Holbert, “On Recognizing the Shepherd: Reflections on Christ the King Sunday,” https://www.patheos.com/progressive-christian/on-recognizing-the-shepherd-john-c-holbert-10-13-2014
[7] Cole Arthur Riley, pp 121-123