Wednesday, August 21, 2024
Memorial of Saint Pius X, Pope
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Who is pasturing whom?
Should not shepherds, rather, pasture sheep? You have fed off their milk, worn their wool, and slaughtered the fatlings, but the sheep you have not pastured.
And these are not just the baa-ing animals out on the back forty.
You did not strengthen the weak nor heal the sick nor bind up the injured. You did not bring back the strays nor seek the lost, so they were scattered and became food for all the wild beasts.
God’s chosen children have been betrayed by their priests and prophets, and Ezekiel calls them out on the carpet. Why on earth would they do such a thing? God accuses them and calls them selfish. By now his people are nearly lost.
My sheep wandered over the mountains, my sheep were scattered over the whole earth, with no one to look after them or search for them.
God sounds like he’s finished with the leaders who have betrayed both Him and his people.
I am coming against these shepherds. I will claim my sheep from them. I will save my sheep, that they may no longer be food for their mouths.
And so God gets into farming. We are his people, the sheep of his pasture. Is this what we want, is this what God wants, for us to be sheep? Well … maybe. What could be finer than to play in the fields of the Lord? What could be better than to live with God and know the intimacy that comes between his creatures when He cares for them and feeds them and even gives them room to grow.
You make me lie down in green pastures, you lead me beside still waters, you restore my soul.
Who wouldn’t want to not just memorize those words but live them beautiful moment by moment and perfect day by day? To be a lamb in the pastures of heaven? Generous joy all around.
The landowner found others standing idle in the marketplace.
Millenia later, Jesus encountered another flock of skeptical, selfish cynical sheep, wanting all they could get for themselves. Does anything ever change when it comes to human failing and frailty? David’s psalm went right over their heads. They caught the words but not the flow of life, their consciences seared by their lives in the world where fallen parents guide new children into the same old lives. It’s all they knew.
It’s all we know.
They grumbled against the landowner. But he said, “My friend, I am not cheating you. Are you envious because I am generous? Thus the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
So often when I read Ezekiel or Jeremiah or others of the prophets, I think they are reading me, reading our culture, reading our mail. Our confessional honesty requires remorse and acknowledgment of our personal, immediate and corporate sin. And so we say, in one way after another, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”
(Ezekiel 34, Psalm 23, Hebrews 4, Matthew 20)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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