“Because of them, the people do not know God.” But it is Jesus who knows God. The shepherd should not preach himself, but rather put people in contact with Jesus…
JEREMIAH 23, 1-7
Woe to the shepherds who scatter and let the sheep of my pasture be lost! declares Yahweh. Therefore, thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: You have scattered my sheep, and you have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. Behold, I will attend to you for the evil of your deeds, declares the Lord. I myself will gather the remnant of my sheep from all the lands to which I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. And I will set over them shepherds who will shepherd them, and they shall never again be afraid or dismayed, nor shall any be missing, declares Yahweh. Behold, the days are coming, declares 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. 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.”
This is a characteristic text of the preaching of the Prophets: to reproach the leaders of Israel (the King and the Priests) for their neglect of their mission: to be good shepherds of the people. Because of them, the people do not know God and all kinds of misfortunes befall them. But God Himself will take care to raise up the true Shepherd.
The Church sees in these oracles of the prophets announcements of Jesus, who could rightly call Himself the Good Shepherd.
But in the current moment of the Church, in which many faithful suffer great perplexity due to the disparity of positions of their shepherds and the intransigence with which they are defended, the text can be a very serious warning: we usually blame the current problems of the Church on external circumstances, the secularized world, the consumerist society, etc., etc… but never on our own errors, excesses, and abuses. I wonder if it cannot be said of the Church, we-the-church, the phrase of Isaiah: “You have scattered my sheep, you have driven them away…”.
EPHESIANS 2, 13-18
But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.
The author sings a hymn of pure Pauline mentality, giving thanks to God who has torn down the wall that divided the Jews from the other peoples. This was Paul’s great work, to open the narrow limits of orthodox Judaism that oppressed him, to make everyone understand that what Jesus did transcends the borders of any people or culture, that it is Good News for all humanity. This will be the fundamental thesis of Luke in The Acts of the Apostles. In Jesus, all distinctions of persons by race, religion, social condition… have died. Jesus makes present the New Man, whose identity as a brother is due, above all, to his awareness of being a Son.
The text poses several problems for us: first of all, Paul (whoever the author of this writing may be) is talking about a problem that in itself seems very distant to us, although at the time it was crucial: whether what Jesus did is a renewed Judaism or something more; whether it is necessary to go through the Old Law to reach Jesus. This problem does not matter to us much today, but beneath it lies another, very current one, which does matter to us.
The first communities of Pauline stamp actually broke with the mentality of the communities of “Judaizing” stamp (those of James). But the triumphalist Church that began to emerge from the mid-2nd century and the triumphant and ostentatious Church of the 4th century and beyond recovered ideas, ways, and forms of the Old Testament that have nothing to do with Jesus, for example in the conception of God (from Abbá to the Almighty Judge more fearsome than endearing), in the introduction of the idea of redemption as bloody vicarious atonement applied to the death of Jesus and later extended to the theology of sacrifice applied to the Lord’s Supper and in many other cases.
The Church re-Judaized itself. The theology of the letter to the Ephesians already suffers from this setback. As we mentioned last Sunday, and this is the second problem posed by the text, these readings, due to their more than questionable theology and their complexity that makes them incomprehensible to ordinary people, are not suitable for the Eucharist.
José Enrique Galarreta