The Shepherd Who Came Looking Himself

The news reached Babylon in the middle of winter, carried by a man who had escaped from Jerusalem and walked all the way. He found the prophet Ezekiel among the captives and gasped it out: "The city has fallen!"

The walls were down and the Temple was burned, and God's people were scattered across the world like sheep running every which way across a hillside when wolves get into the flock. God gave Ezekiel a message for Israel's shepherds.

(In those days people called a king a shepherd, because his job was to feed his people and keep them safe.)

"You shepherds only feed yourselves!" God said. "You eat the best meat and wear the wool, but you do not feed my sheep. You have not made the weak ones strong or healed the sick ones. You have not gone after the ones that wandered off. You have ruled them with a hard hand. So my sheep were scattered, and wild animals ate them. They wandered over every mountain, and no one went looking."

(It was like a babysitter who eats the children's supper, puts on their coats, and sends them out to play in the road.)

"I am against those shepherds," God said. "I will pull my sheep out of their mouths."

So God gave the shepherd's job to himself.

"I myself will search for my sheep. On the dark, cloudy day when they were scattered, I will go after them and bring them home. I will feed them on the green mountains of Israel, beside the streams. I will look for the lost and bring back the strays. I will bandage the hurt ones and make the weak ones strong. I myself will be their shepherd, and I will let them lie down and rest."

God had words for some of the sheep, too. The big ones were shoving the weak ones with their shoulders and butting them with their horns. They ate the best grass and trampled the rest flat. They drank the clear water, then stomped in it with muddy feet so nobody else could drink.

(Anyone with a big brother knows how this works.)

"Is it not enough for you to eat the good grass and drink the clear water?" God asked them. "Must you trample the rest and muddy it with your feet? I will judge between one sheep and another, and I will save my flock."

"I will set one shepherd over them," God said, "my servant David. He will feed them and be their shepherd." (King David had been dead for nearly four hundred years. God knew that perfectly well.) "I will send the wild animals away, so my sheep can sleep safe in the woods. I will send rain at the right time. You are my sheep, and I am your God."

Seventy years later, some of the scattered sheep were home and the Temple stood again. But no king from David's family ever took the throne, and the promise waited five hundred years.

Then a man from David's family began walking the roads of Israel, looking for lost people. In the town of Jericho he stopped under a tree and called a cheating tax collector down out of it. "I came to look for the lost," he said, "and to bring them home safe." When soldiers came for him in the dark, he stepped in front of his friends. "Let these men go," he said. He died for his sheep, and on the third day he was alive again.

God had promised to come himself, and he had promised a shepherd from David's family. Both promises came walking over the hills in one man, and his name was Jesus.