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From: Jeremiah 23:5-8
The future king
[7] “Therefore, behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when men shall no
longer say, ‘As the Lord lives who brought up the people of Israel out of the land
of Egypt.’ [8] but ‘As the Lord lives of the north country and out of all the coun-
tries where he had driven them.’ Then they shall dwell in their own land.”
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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 af-
ter the return from exile will be more glorious than that of the period after the exo-
dus from Egypt (vv. 7-8). 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 never 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 definitive 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 mini-
stry 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 “execute…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.