Replies

From: Jeremiah 23:1-6

[1] “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!”
says the LORD. [2] Therefore thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, concer-
ning the shepherds who care for my people: “You have scattered my flock, and
have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. Behold, I will attend
to you for your evil doings, says the LORD. [3] Then I will gather the remnant of
my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them, and I will bring them
back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. [4] I will set shepherds
over them who will care for them, and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed,
neither shall any be missing, says the LORD.

The future king

[5] “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a
righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute
justice and righteousness in the land. [6] In his days Judah will be saved, and
Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be called: ‘The
Lord is our righteousness’.”

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Commentary:

23:1-8. The previous chapters (21:1-22:30) announced the exile to come, and
come it did, on account of the kings’ failure to keep the Covenant. The kings, in
chronological order, were the subject of the various oracles. Now Jeremiah, loo-
king to the future, uses the image of shepherds to proclaim a new era in which
God himself will be the shepherd-ruler of his people (vv. 1-4); he will raise up a
new king who will govern justly (vv. 5-6); and the new situation that will develop
after the return from exile will be more glorious than that of the period after the
exodus from Egypt (vv. 7-8). Bl. John Paul II refers to this oracle to stress that
the new people of God, the Church, will always have pastors to guide it: “In
these words from the prophet Jeremiah, God promises his people that he will ne-
ver leave them without shepherds to father them together and guide them: ‘I will
set shepherds over them [my sheep] who will care for them, and they shall fear
no more, nor be dismayed’ (Jer 23:4). The Church, the people of God, constantly
experiences the reality of the prophetic message and continues joyfully to thank
God for it. She knows that Jesus Christ himself is the living, supreme and defini-
tive fulfillment of God’s promise: ‘I am the good shepherd’ (Jn 10:11). He, ‘the
great shepherd of the sheep’ (Heb 13:20), entrusted to the apostles and their
successors the ministry of shepherding God’s flock (cf. Jn 21:15ff; 1 Pet 5:2)”
(Pastores dabo vobis, 1).

23:5-6. The promise of the new king is the key to understanding Jeremiah’s
thought. The passage is repeated (with slight variations) in 33:15-16. “The days
are coming”, a phrase often found in oracles of salvation, is a reference to the
End time, but sometimes it can mean the return from exile. The “righteous
branch”, meaning the future king, will eventually become a technical term for the
Messiah, in both Zechariah (Zech 3:8; 6:12) and the New Testament (cf. Lk 1:78):
he is “righteous”, he shall “executeâ€¦righteousness” and he will be called “the
Lord in our righteousness”. All this insistence on justice and right indicates, first-
ly, that Jeremiah wants to justify the accession of Zedekiah, whose name means
“justice of the Lord”; but he also wants to show that the future Messiah will be
David’s legal, legitimate descendant: the Lord guarantees this by calling him a
“righteous” that is “legitimate”, branch. And the main message, of course, is that
in the new era justice will reign and there will be peace and security; it will be the
time of definitive salvation.

Thus, Jeremiah is proclaiming the coming of a descendant of David who will bring
about a new era of prosperity and salvation. Jeremiah is the last prophet, in order
of time, to proclaim a Messiah King, an intermediary between God and his people.
At the same time, he is also promising direct intervention by God.

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Source: “The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries”. Biblical text from the
Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries by members of
the Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, Spain.

Published by Four Courts Press, Kill Lane, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland, and
by Scepter Publishers in the United States.