THE WORD OF THE LORD came to me: 2“Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Woe to the shepherds of Israel who only take care of themselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? 3You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock. 4You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally. 5So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and when they were scattered they became food for all the wild animals. 6My sheep wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. They were scattered over the whole earth, and no one searched or looked for them.
7“ ‘Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the LORD: 8As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, because my flock lacks a shepherd and so has been plundered and has become food for all the wild animals, and because my shepherds did not search for my flock but cared for themselves rather than for my flock, 9therefore, O shepherds, hear the word of the LORD: 10This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I am against the shepherds and will hold them accountable for my flock. I will remove them from tending the flock so that the shepherds can no longer feed themselves. I will rescue my flock from their mouths, and it will no longer be food for them.
11“ ‘For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I myself will search for my sheep and look after them. 12As a shepherd looks after his scattered flock when he is with them, so will I look after my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places where they were scattered on a day of clouds and darkness. 13I will bring them out from the nations and gather them from the countries, and I will bring them into their own land. I will pasture them on the mountains of Israel, in the ravines and in all the settlements in the land. 14I will tend them in a good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel will be their grazing land. There they will lie down in good grazing land, and there they will feed in a rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. 15I myself will tend my sheep and have them lie down, declares the Sovereign LORD. 16I will search for the lost and bring back the strays. I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak, but the sleek and the strong I will destroy. I will shepherd the flock with justice.
17“ ‘As for you, my flock, this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I will judge between one sheep and another, and between rams and goats. 18Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture? Must you also trample the rest of your pasture with your feet? Is it not enough for you to drink clear water? Must you also muddy the rest with your feet? 19Must my flock feed on what you have trampled and drink what you have muddied with your feet?
20“ ‘Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says to them: See, I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. 21Because you shove with flank and shoulder, butting all the weak sheep with your horns until you have driven them away, 22I will save my flock, and they will no longer be plundered. I will judge between one sheep and another. 23I will place over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he will tend them; he will tend them and be their shepherd. 24I the LORD will be their God, and my servant David will be prince among them. I the LORD have spoken.
25“ ‘I will make a covenant of peace with them and rid the land of wild beasts so that they may live in the desert and sleep in the forests in safety. 26I will bless them and the places surrounding my hill. I will send down showers in season; there will be showers of blessing. 27The trees of the field will yield their fruit and the ground will yield its crops; the people will be secure in their land. They will know that I am the LORD, when I break the bars of their yoke and rescue them from the hands of those who enslaved them. 28They will no longer be plundered by the nations, nor will wild animals devour them. They will live in safety, and no one will make them afraid. 29I will provide for them a land renowned for its crops, and they will no longer be victims of famine in the land or bear the scorn of the nations. 30Then they will know that I, the LORD their God, am with them and that they, the house of Israel, are my people, declares the Sovereign LORD. 31You my sheep, the sheep of my pasture, are people, and I am your God, declares the Sovereign LORD.’ ”
Original Meaning
EZEKIEL 34 IS a dual oracle of judgment and salvation. It is an oracle of judgment on the shepherds and fat sheep who have oppressed the flock, and of salvation for the rest of the flock through the personal intervention of the Lord as their shepherd.
This chapter opens with an oracle against “the shepherds of Israel” (34:1–16). The title shepherd was a well-known ascription of both kings and gods in the ancient Near East. For example, the second millennium Babylonian king Hammurabi describes himself as “the shepherd who brings salvation and whose staff is righteous,” while his much later successor Merodoch-Baladan II is called “the shepherd who gathers together again those who have strayed.”1 Frequently, in this role the earthly king stood as a representative of the divine shepherd who had appointed him.2 A similar notion of the relationship between the king and God was present in Israel. Thus, when the tribes came to David at Hebron to make him king over them, the basis of their action was the Lord’s declaration concerning David: “You will shepherd my people Israel, and you will become their ruler” (2 Sam. 5:2).
In Ezekiel’s oracle of judgment, however, the Lord is coming against his shepherds—the former kings of Judah—because they have failed to fulfill their role of shepherd properly. The proper task of a shepherd was to care for the flock, that is, to protect it from dangers on the outside and dissension within—gathering those who strayed, leading the flock to good pasture and clean drinking water, and taking special care of the poor and the weak. On the contrary, these shepherds have viewed their position as an opportunity for personal gain, ruling harshly and brutally, feeding only themselves, not the flock, and even slaughtering the choicest animals (Ezek. 34:2–6). The phrase “to rule . . . brutally” (34:4) is only found in two other passages in the Old Testament. In Exodus 1:13–14 it refers to the way the Egyptians treated their Hebrew slaves, while in Leviticus 25:43, 46 it is forbidden to treat a fellow Israelite in this manner. Ezekiel thus accuses the “rulers of doing what their own history should have taught them to abhor and what the law of Moses expressly forbade.”3
Because of the shepherds’ sinful self-interest, judgment is coming on them (Ezek. 34:7–10). In the absence of a true shepherd, the flock has been scattered and plundered (34:8). But now the Lord will step in and remove the false shepherds from their office so that they can no longer feed themselves at the flock’s expense. Their shepherding will be brought to an end as the Lord acts to rescue his sheep (34:10). Now the Lord will himself search out the flock and take care of them, gathering them from all the places where they were scattered (34:12).
This metaphorical image of shepherd and sheep is made from a concrete promise of return from exile in verse 13: “I will bring them out from the nations and gather them from the countries, and I will bring them into their own land. I will pasture them on the mountains of Israel, in the ravines and in all the settlements in the land.” The day of clouds and darkness when they were scattered, the day of judgment,4 is over; now they can look forward to a return to the “mountains of Israel,” the heart of the Promised Land. There they will experience the full blessing of the Lord’s shepherding: He will feed them on rich pasture and cause them to lie down in safety; he will search for the lost and bind up the injured; he will establish justice, punishing the oppressors and strengthening the weak (34:16).
This last thought leads into a further oracle of judgment (34:17–22) against the “rams and goats” (v. 17) or the “fat sheep” (v. 20). These are the broader class of leaders of the community, who had oppressed the weak with violence and grasped the limited resources for themselves without considering the needs of those without influence or power.5 Even what they did not need for themselves they spoiled, thus denying it to others (vv. 18–19). They had abandoned the traditional responsibility of the upper class for the social well-being of the other classes.6 In the desperate times leading up to the Exile, the weakest went to the wall. To prevent that happening again in future, the Lord will intervene to execute judgment within his flock, judging between sheep and sheep (v. 22). He will thus deal with both external and internal dangers to the peace and security of his flock.7
As elsewhere in Ezekiel, we see in this chapter a double critique of the failures of the past: the divine response of punishing those responsible and the divine promise of intervention to reverse those failures.8 In concrete form, the intervention takes the form of setting up over them “one shepherd, my servant David,” who will act as their “prince” (nāśîʾ, 34:23–24). This figure of a nāśîʾ is often taken as something less than a king, a kind of “apolitical messiah,” who rules “among” rather than “over” the people.9 However, such a stress fails to note that the new shepherd is placed over the people (34:23). His relationship to them is not simply primus inter pares (first among equals) but shepherd to sheep, a relationship that involves authority as well as service.
Indeed, the change to be wrought in Israel’s situation is not so much a change in the nature of the office as in the nature of the occupant. God’s solution to a history of bad shepherds is not to replace shepherding with a better system, but to replace the bad shepherds with a good shepherd.10 This good shepherd will be like the great king David, the king after God’s own heart (1 Sam. 13:14), the archetypal picture of a strong king ruling with justice and fairness.11
This future ruler is not merely an ad hoc solution to the necessities of governing the restored people. On the contrary, it is nothing less than the fulfillment of the covenant with David. God promised David that he would “raise up” (Hiphil of qwm) his offspring to succeed him and that he would establish his kingdom (2 Sam. 7:12, 25). Solomon subsequently received the promise that, if he followed the pattern of his father David, his throne would be established (Hiphil of qwm) forever. Now that dynastic oracle will be fulfilled with the raising up (Hiphil of qwm) of a new David (Ezek. 34:23; cf. Jer. 33:14; Amos 9:11), who would be the Lord’s servant and his people’s shepherd.
In addition, the Lord will make “a covenant of peace” with his flock (Ezek. 34:25). In place of the curses of the Sinai covenant, which they have experienced while being under the judgment of God—wild animals, drought, famine, and the sword (Lev. 26:14–35)—they will now experience the blessings of the covenant: safety, rain in its season, fruitfulness, and peace (Ezek. 26:4–13). The state of experiencing the blessings that flow from a harmonious relationship with God is what makes this distinctively a “covenant of peace.”
This covenant is thus not so much a “new” covenant as it is the experience of the blessings promised in the original covenant. In place of the monarchy divided by sin, God’s people will be united under one shepherd. In place of an undistinguished procession of monarchs, they will be given a ruler after God’s own heart, a new David. In place of famine, plague, drought, and the sword, they will see a new level of peace and prosperity so that they will no longer bear the reproach of the nations (Ezek. 34:29).12 Then indeed they will know that the Lord their God is with them—for blessing and not for curse—and that they are his people. They will be his sheep and he will be their God, the harmonious relationship celebrated in Psalm 100:3.13
Bridging Contexts
THE SHEPHERD METAPHOR. Who is my shepherd? The answer to that question should be known even by Sunday school children. As Psalm 23:1 affirms: “The LORD is my shepherd.” But the New Testament unfolds the answer further when Jesus asserts in John 10:11: “I am the good shepherd.” Jesus is the tough yet tender leader of his flock, who protects his sheep against the dangers of marauders and knows each one by name (10:11–14). He is the one shepherd who unites in himself his flock (10:16). He is the good shepherd, who leaves the ninety-nine sheep on the hillside to search for the one lost sheep, and when it is found, brings it home rejoicing (Luke 15:4–6). Jesus is also the discerning shepherd, who separates the sheep from the goats on the final Day of Judgment (Matt. 25:32).
However, just as in the Old Testament the notion of God as the Chief Shepherd was combined with that of the king as the shepherd of the people, so also Christ presently rules through the leaders of the church, who are appointed as undershepherds (1 Peter 5:2–4). As Peter makes clear, this is a position that combines authority with service: They are to “oversee” the flock but not “lord it” over them. Unlike the bad shepherds of Ezekiel 34, they are not to serve for their own benefit. Like the Chief Shepherd, they will have to be on the lookout for marauding wolves while watching tenderly over the flock, committed to their care (Acts 20:28–29).
It is this special combination of toughness and tenderness that the image of shepherd is uniquely fitted to convey. Of the two aspects, the toughness involved in being a shepherd is easily missed today. We must heed the helpful insight of Alastair Campbell: “[In the Bible, the shepherd’s] unsettled and dangerous life makes him a slightly ambiguous figure—more perhaps like the cowboy of the ‘Wild West’ than the modern shepherd in a settled farming community.”14
The blessings of the new covenant. In addition, we should note that the blessings of the covenant we experience as Christians are different from those that believers experienced under the old covenant because we have a different relationship to the land in which we live. For them, the land of Canaan was in a special way “God’s land,” which they inhabited as his tenants. For that reason, the fertility of the land functioned, in Chris Wright’s phrase, as a “spiritual thermometer” of the relationship between Israel and her God.15 When they were obedient to their covenant obligations, God’s goodness was demonstrated in rainfall and abundant harvests; when they were disobedient, his displeasure made itself manifest in the lack of these things (Deut. 28). This provided a pictorial prefiguring of the final eschatological state of blessing for the righteous and curse for the covenant-breakers.16
Under the new covenant, what is decisive for us as Christians is the perfect obedience of Christ in our place (Heb. 2:17–18; 4:15–16). For this reason, even though by nature we are covenant-breakers, we may still possess every spiritual blessing in Christ (Eph. 1:3). The heart of these blessings is nothing less than peace, life in all its fullness. Now we have peace with God and with our fellow human beings, as Jews and Gentiles united together in Christ, who is our peace (2:14). Through his death on the cross, those who were once in separate sheepfolds—those “far away” and those “near” (2:13)—have now been welded into a single flock, “one new man” (2:15). Through that death, this peace is already a present reality in our lives (Rom. 5:1).
However, at present we only experience that blessing in a partial way; our lives are an ongoing struggle against sin, and we continue to live in a fallen world. This world is a place of ongoing tribulation (John 16:33). Sometimes those trials are the result of our own disobedience, sometimes not. Sometimes obedience results in material blessing, sometimes in persecution and hardship. But even in the midst of the trials of this life we may yet experience incomprehensible peace and inexpressible joy because of the nearness of the Shepherd (Phil. 4:5, 7).
Contemporary Significance
CEO OR PASTOR? In the contemporary church, the image of minister as shepherd is rapidly becoming an endangered species. Our models of leadership are increasingly borrowed from business. In place of the traditional view of the minister as a “pastor,” the minister is now viewed as the equivalent of the CEO of a major corporation or, to continue the agricultural metaphor, as a “rancher” overseeing a large sheep-producing enterprise.17 It is argued, perhaps correctly, that only thus can large churches be established and maintained.
But what is the theological cost of viewing ministry as management and pastors as professional organizers, albeit in charge of spiritual organizations? What is lost in the switch is the biblical vision of the pastor as a shepherd of a flock of souls. Such a vision is far from being a peripheral matter; in Thomas Oden’s words, the shepherd image is the “pivotal analogy” for leadership in the Scriptures.18 As we have moved from being pastors to ranchers, we have traded in the vocation of handcrafting saints for the business of mass-producing sheep.19
But what does it mean for a pastor to be a shepherd? It is a unique combination of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. The bad shepherds of Ezekiel 34 were criticized because they ignored the fat sheep who were oppressing the other sheep, while they lived comfortably off the products of the flock. In contrast, the good shepherd will both confront the fat sheep and tenderly care for the weak sheep (34:16).
Most of us who are shepherds fall far short of this standard. Sometimes, we don’t challenge those who are comfortable for fear of stirring up conflict—after all, the fat sheep are often big givers who underwrite the church’s budget (and pay our salaries). Nor do we always comfort the weak sheep as we should. Taking care of the weak sheep is hard, painful, time-consuming work, and we have been told that there are more important things to do with our time. As a result, we gradually turn into managers of the flock, and as long as the flock is growing in numbers, no one around us complains. God is against such shepherds, however. He is the one to whom we are ultimately accountable, and what will it profit us if we grow a sizable megachurch, yet neglect our calling to shepherd the sheep? We will stand under his condemnation.
The good shepherd. The good shepherd will know his flock by name; he will know their strengths and their weaknesses, their joys and their sorrows. He will be there to share in the joy of their wedding celebrations, to celebrate the birth of their children, to comfort them in their sickness, and to be there when they die. Like being a watchman, being a shepherd is a heavily responsible task; it is not a job where you punch in and out and work “professional hours” (see Gen. 31:38–40). But it is also a profoundly rewarding task. Who else gets to share in all of these profoundly important moments in people’s lives? Who else gets to shape and influence people’s lives in such a deeply significant way?
If we are to return to truly being shepherds, perhaps we need to reconsider our love affair with big churches. It is possible to lord it over a flock of thousands; it is possible to herd a flock of hundreds; but is it really possible to pastor a congregation of more than about two hundred?20 At the very least, within larger churches we need consciously to create subcongregations of this size or smaller, in which real shepherding takes place, where loving concern and care is expressed and strong, scriptural accountability is exercised.
In our organizational chart, someone must be shepherding our sheep. Moreover, the leader of the larger congregation must resist the pressures to retreat into the role of superstar preacher or of vision-casting executive. Though such people may not be able to shepherd all of the people all of the time, they should certainly be shepherding some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. Otherwise, there is a real danger that contemporary pastors will lose touch with their sheep and they with them.21
Jesus, the model. In all of this, Jesus is our supreme model of what it means to shepherd the flock. He did not act as the rancher of a large herd, comfortably managing a megaflock from a distance through intermediaries. He picked a small group of twelve disciples and lived together with them in a way that completely changed their lives. He ate with them and slept with them; he sweated with them and sat with them; he laughed with them and cried with them. He was their pastor.
In addition, Jesus also had a ministry to a larger group of people, to the thousands who followed him around. He confronted the self-righteous Pharisees boldly, pointing out how far the righteousness of which they were so proud fell short of God’s standards. But the needs of the multitudes moved him to compassion, for he saw that they were “like sheep without a shepherd” (Matt. 9:36). As a result, he was never too busy to sit with ordinary people, even with tax collectors and sinners, finding out their concerns and worries while pointing them to their deeper spiritual needs.
In Jesus we see the perfect balance of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable that is the shepherd’s task. He afflicted the comfortable. That is, to those who relied on their own righteousness, he was unmerciful in tearing away the fig leaves of their excuses, driving them to see their utter need of the gospel. But he also comforted the afflicted. The sinners and outcasts did not need to have the law preached to them; they had heard it too often on the lips of the Pharisees. They needed instead to be drawn to God. They needed to hear that God did not delight in their extermination but rather was wooing them to come to him so that they might live. They needed to know that there was a place in his flock for the adulterer and homosexual, the alcoholic and the drug addict.
Most of us who are pastors will naturally gravitate toward one style of pastoral ministry or the other. By temperament, we typically either draw people to Christ or we drive them to Christ. But the image of the shepherd calls us to a richer, more balanced view of our calling: as drawers and drivers, drivers and drawers, by all means winning those whom God, the Great Shepherd, is adding to his flock.
Jesus, the fulfillment of Ezekiel 34. But Jesus is not merely the model shepherd who makes contemporary pastors feel guilty by how far short we fall. He is himself the One of whom Ezekiel 34 speaks. He is the One in whom all the covenants of the Old Testament find their fulfillment. He is the ultimate Shepherd-King, who fulfills the Davidic covenant, as the crowds recognized during his triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Matt. 21:9). He fulfills the Mosaic covenant both as the Lawgiver, who speaks his authoritative word from the mountain (Matt. 5–7), and also as the One who has come to fulfill the law given from Sinai (Matt. 5:17). He is the Second Adam, who through his obedient life, death, and resurrection fulfills the covenant of creation (1 Cor. 15:45–49). He is the One who ushers in for his people the blessings of the covenant by being the covenant-keeper in our place. In him, we have peace with God; in him, we have peace with one another; in him, all creation finds peace.
All of these blessings have both a “now” and a “not yet” aspect to them. We see them in part now, but we do not yet see them in all their fullness. Creation still groans with anticipation as it awaits the revelation of the new heavens and the new earth and of ourselves as sons and daughters of God (Rom. 8:19–23). In the meantime our experience frequently continues to be “trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword” (8:35). But these are momentary light afflictions in comparison to the glory that awaits us (8:18). One day Christ will return, and all will be gloriously fulfilled as God gathers his worldwide flock from many nations into his presence. Then there will be no more suffering, no more pain, no more disharmony with God, my neighbor, or the world. As Revelation 7:17 puts it:
For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd;
he will lead them to springs of living water.
And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.