Jeremiah 25:36-27 "Hark! the cry of the shepherd, and the wail of the lords of the flock! For the Lord if despoiling their pasture, and the peaceful folds are devastated, because of the fierce anger of the Lord."
John 10:14-15 "I am the good shepherd. I know my own as my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep."
What a crazy pairing of texts! How could the same metaphor - sheep and shepherds - get pulled into two such drastically different directions? How could the shepherds of Jeremiah, slain and dispersed as the flocks are despoiled and devastated by an angry God, even exist between the same two covers as the shepherd of John, who is Jesus himself, a loving leader directing the flock toward a fatherly God? The two are almost irreconcilable.
To me, juxtaposing the two reveals what a schizophrenic text the Bible really is. When I read them together, one of my first thoughts was of standing between two mirrors and seeing myself drawn into two opposite infinities, but being equally present in both of them. Here, these two authors pull is into opposite theological strains: Jeremiah confronts us with the angry God and the certainly that we are sinners, and that we will be judged, and we will be punished. John presents a loving God and the equally strong assertion that we are intimately known and forgiven, and blessed.
Determining which is more right, or reconciling John and Jeremiah with each other, is the work of theologians far more educated than I. For now, I see fit to praise God for the multiple personalities of the Bible - for its ambivalence, its cacophony of voices, its devastated shepherds and its gentle ones. Because of these qualities, it is a suitable guide for my own cacophonous life, as well as the multivocal community of Christians around the world who all turn to these same pages. A young American girl in New York City, a middle-aged evangelical preacher in Indonesia, an orthodox nun in Eastern Europe - their experiences are as distant from each other as the two flocks in today's readings, but they all take refuge between the same two covers. That to me is wondrous, and I take comfort in the fact that even though this book often makes no sense to me, I know I'm looking in the right place.
(Kiersten Rooke)
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