Our Shepherd King

I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep. (Ezekiel 34:15a ESV) Our biblical understanding of the End Times has a direct impact on our everyday living. Today, we hear how our Shepherd King is coming to judge the nations. Yet this image of the Shepherd King and Judge is focused on His action to gather the lost and hurting, those forgotten and oppressed. While His judgement may surprise us, His action is what gathers us into His eternal presence.

Times of harvest and ingathering are special times for giving thanks. This “Day of Thanksgiving” is an opportunity for us to give thanks to God for all He has given us, or as Luther has said in his explanation of the 1^st Article of the Apostles’ Creed, how God our Heavenly Father “richly and daily supplies me with all that I need to support this body and life.” Here at International Lutheran Church, we have been focused on the Bible’s view of the End Times, that final day of “clouds and thick darkness” when God will “gather in the nations.” This Sunday is also known as Christ the King Sunday, or Sunday of the Fulfillment, when we remember how on that Day the Great Shepherd will come to judge the nations. This Shepherd King motif is developed further in our Old Testament reading from Ezekiel today.

Ezekiel, the great exilic prophet who accompanied God’s people to Babylon with the first deportation, looks forward to that day when God Himself would shepherd His people in justice. Ezekiel announces that God Himself will gather from the ends of the earth those who were scattered to the mountains of Israel to be fed by Him. This image of the final consummation of God’s action comes with a comforting tone of rich supply after the devastating news of the destruction of Jerusalem in Ezekiel 33. What God has scattered, He Himself will gather. His gathering will be a comfort and blessing to those whose hope is the LORD. Their distress is ended and now they will enter His peace. This day of “justice” will also reveal the injustice of our lives.

The way we live demonstrates the reasons for God’s judgement upon what we have done and not done – our sins of commission and omission. The warning is clear and needs to be heard. Our lives are judged both on our inability to avoid evil, and our failure to act in a way that demonstrates God’s goodness. Matthew 25:31-46 is the third in a series of End Times parables. Not only are we judged for the wrong we do, but our lack of compassion condemns us as well. What we fail to do for the “least of these” is declared as clear evidence of God’s righteous judgement to come.

The Psalmist’s mussing is not idle chatter. “If you, O LORD kept a record of sin, O LORD who could stand?” (Psalm 130:3 ESV) Who could be saved if we are to be judged not only for the evil that we have done, but even more importantly for the good we fail to do? Here Ezekiel points again to the LORD’s solution as God declares that He will be our Shepherd. His “Servant David” will be made Prince. Jesus, David’s descendant but also David’s Lord, will be raised up from among them as that Shepherd King to judge the nations. Jesus, the sinless Son of God whose life “for the least” was visited with our condemnation when He was lifted upon the cross and crowned our Messiah King with thorns.

This is how God gently and effectively gathers us, and brings us to Himself. He gives us His own Body for our food, His righteousness covers our nakedness. With His Great Thanksgiving, He delivers and gathers us from our bondage to sin into His presence. Through His resurrection from the dead, God has appointed Him judge of all the living and the dead.

As we wait for the coming of our Shepherd King and the final gathering with eager expectation, even now we live with faith and hope as we are scattered to the ends of the earth to bring this good news to all.

Pastor Carl