Christ the King (A)
November 26, 2023
Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24
INTRODUCTION
Today is the final Sunday of the liturgical year: Christ the King Sunday! Even as our hearts and minds have turned this weekend toward Advent and Christmas and Christ’s first coming, we take this day to remember also that Christ will come again, and reign over and judge all the earth.
That judgment piece isn’t such a warm fuzzy image, but it is couched today in another, nicer image: that of Christ the King as a shepherd. We’ll see this especially in Ezekiel and Matthew. Matthew’s parable is the culmination of his end-times teaching, and in fact is the very last teaching of Jesus before his passion begins. This is a famous one, frequently quoted by those advocating for care of those in need, “the least of these” as Jesus calls them. In short, he tells` us to see Christ in the face of the one in need.
Ezekiel has some lovely moments all by itself, but it much richer with a fuller context, so that is actually where my sermon will go today. Before you hear it though, a few things to know: First, Ezekiel offers this right after he has learned that the Jerusalem Temple has fallen, and everyone will be deported to Babylon (where he has already been sent, during the first wave of deportations). After losing everything, he assures them of God’s care, as a shepherd cares for their flock. Second, you should know that “shepherd” was a common way to refer to kings in the ancient Near East, and Israel had had quite a few bad shepherds over the past few centuries. Third, it will hopefully be clear that Jesus is pulling from the imagery in this passage in the parable about the sheep and goats: Ezekiel says that God will judge between the rich, fat sheep who bullied and butted the weaker sheep, and the weak sheep who were exploited. In Matthew, this becomes judgment between sheep and goats, but, same idea.
Calling Christ “the King” is a political statement. As you listen, consider how it looks when our leaders today act as shepherds, caring for the sheep, or when they don’t. Let’s listen.
[READ]
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Israel had a, uh, complicated relationship with the idea of kingship.
This week in our Bible Huddles, we got to read the beginning of that relationship, how they got started with kings. Israel was a fairly new nation, and at that point (around 1400 BC) they had no central government. God wanted it that way; they did not need a king, because God was their king! God was rightly concerned that if they had an earthly king, then their loyalties would be split, and they would start to trust that earthly ruler more than they trusted God. But the people really, really wanted a king. “All the other nations have one,” they whined. “We want a king like the other nations!” Finally, God gave in – but not before warning them that they would regret this.
Along came Saul, who went out one day to collect his father’s donkeys who had strayed and came back a king (pretty weird day for him). He really looked the part of a king – handsome, and quite tall, which was apparently reason enough to make him king! He won a lot of battles for Israel, but soon enough he got too big for his britches, and thought he knew better than God. Eventually David, a shepherd boy (who was decidedly not tall, especially compared to some!), was selected as the next king, and in response, Saul was basically driven into madness, and ended up dying a gruesome death.
Now David – he was a pretty good king. As a plucky kid, he defeated a giant armed with only a slingshot and his trust in the Lord. And his trust seldom wavered. He was a strong leader, who united the tribes of Israel into one kingdom, and made Jerusalem the capital. Finally, they were a real kingdom! But even David was human, and famously found himself on a commandment-breaking spree that was spurred by catching sight from his roof of the beautiful Bathsheba bathing. He wanted her for himself, and… well, long story short, he committed adultery with her and had her husband killed to cover it up. (Whoopsies!) Still, sin and all, David was the gold standard, and God promised that from David’s house, his line, would come another messianic leader who would bring God’s blessing to the whole world. (Looking forward toward Christmas – remember how Joseph, Jesus’ earthly dad, is from the house of David, from David’s line? Eh? See what they did there?)
Now, David’s son Solomon started off okay. He was known for his wisdom and for building the Temple. But he was also known for his love of the foreign ladies, and for bringing their foreign gods into Israel’s religious life. Hello, 1st commandment! And, well, another long story short, he ran Israel into the ground. David’s united kingdom split into the northern kingdom of Israel, and the southern kingdom of Judah, where Jerusalem and the Temple were located. (By the way, if you want to know what happens in all these gaps I’m leaving, you can curl up in front of your Christmas tree this afternoon with some hot cocoa and the books of 1-2 Samuel and 1-2 Kings. Enjoy! Or, watch these overview videos: 2 Samuel; 1&2 Kings)
What followed this split was a run of bad kings. Literally, the book of Kings is full of chapters that begin, “Then so-and-so began to reign, and did so for X number of years. He did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” What that means is that these kings didn’t trust God, they were not faithful to the covenant (like, following the 10 commandments), and they didn’t rid Israel of idolatry. Instead, they treated the people with injustice, exploiting the poor for personal gain.
So God sent prophets to set these bad kings back on the right track, to call them back to faithfulness and justice and adherence to the Torah, the law. This is where our reading from Ezekiel comes in. Ezekiel was a prophet in Judah, the southern kingdom, at the time when Babylon attacked. He was in the first wave of deportations to Babylon, before the Temple that Solomon had built fell. Once he was in Babylon, he began warning the people to buck up or suffer the consequences, until one day he heard what he knew was coming: that the Temple had fallen, and all of Judah would be deported.
You have to understand how devastating this is. They, God’s chosen people, had lost the land God had promised them. The Temple was the house they had built for God, where God lived – now where was God? They had lost everything, and the sheep, the people of Israel, had scattered, sent into exile. Talk about a reality check.
This is a good place to talk about an important image used in scripture to talk about kings (so if I lost you in all that history, this is your cue to come back to me now!). In the ancient Near East (not just in Israel!), kings were often called shepherds. The image lifted up two important traits of a ruler: authority, and care and protection. So we have seen that many of the kings in Israel were good on the authority part, but not so good on the care! David had been a shepherd king, who cared for his people better than most, but they longed for another shepherd who would truly care for this flock.
Back to our story. After Ezekiel learns of the Temple’s demise (in chapter 33), his tone shifts from one of judgment to one of hope. “These kings, these so-called shepherds you have had,” he says, “are anything but. They haven’t fed the sheep, but rather, have benefited off of them! They have eaten the sheep!” Listen to this accusation from just before our reading, which sounds remarkably like the parable we just heard in Matthew: “You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost.” But, Ezekiel goes on, this – this state of being scattered and wounded and sick and weak and uncared for – this is not where the story ends. “Thus says the Lord God: I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep… 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….”
This is what God wanted to do all along for his beloved people: God wanted to be the one and only Sovereign in their lives, a shepherd who would care for the flock, who would guide them in ways of righteousness. God gave them laws to follow, laws that would ensure loving and just treatment of one another. God showed them life-giving ways to live. And eventually, several hundred years later, God did give them a shepherd king from the house of David, who was both earthly and divine: his own son, who would declare himself “the good shepherd” who “came so that [we] may have life, and have it abundantly.”
Today, on Christ the King Sunday, we celebrate that the ways of our shepherd king are unlike anything an earthly leader can give us, fulfilling God’s hope for a shepherd for His people. Even now, our shepherd comes among us, both in times of rejoicing and in times of suffering, our own and that of our neighbor. He does not come to flank and shoulder us, butting us around, like so many earthly leaders. No, he comes to seek us out and bring us home, to bind up our injuries, and to strengthen us when we are weak. He comes to save us.
Let us pray… Good Shepherd, we long to be cared for. Help us to trust that you are a shepherd king who will show us the way, tend to our ailments, bring us home, and save us from our enemies. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Watch the full service HERE.
Photo credit:
Cranach, Lucas, 1515-1586. Christ as the good shepherd, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=57054 [retrieved November 27, 2023]. Original source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lucas_Cranach_d.J._-_Christus_als_guter_Hirte_(Angermuseum).jpg.
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