Days will come when they will say, ‘As the Lord lives who brought the descendants of Israel from all the lands to which I banished them in order to plant them once again in their own land.’ In the first four verses preceding the passage which constitutes today’s First Reading, the Lord, speaking through the prophet Jeremiah, declares war on the shepherds (the kings and other leaders) he had put in charge of his people because of the disastrous job they had done. Instead of shepherding the flock by leading them to fullness of life, all that the kings had done was to scatter the flock (cf. Jeremiah 23:2). But the Lord had some good news for the flock: the Lord was going to gather them from all the lands into which they were scattered and bring them back to their land where their fortunes would certainly increase. And most importantly, the Lord’s doing was going to mark a new chapter in the people’s relationship with their Lord: the relationship was going to be described in the present tense! Rather than looking at their God in terms of what the Lord had done in the past (to their ancestors), they were going to talk about what the Lord was doing to them before their very eyes.
The objective of Jeremiah’s prophecy was to bring a new understanding (and appreciation) of the Lord and his relationship to the people. For a long time, all that the people talked about was the Lord’s mighty deeds in Egypt and in the desert. It made the Lord to appear somewhat ‘old’ and ‘outdated.’ The people were facing new threats, and they needed to change the slogan. And the Lord agreed. From thence onwards, it was going to be about the present. The mighty deeds of the Lord in the past were going to be re-enacted in the present. It was no longer going to be a thing of oral tradition but rather of actual experience.
By assuming a creaturely nature, Jesus Christ became the embodiment of the Lord’s new relationship with his people. By choosing to live as a creature in the midst of other creatures, Jesus Christ concretized the Lord’s promise to ‘deal’ with his people in the “present” tense. Jesus Christ allows creatures to have a ‘closer’ look at, and to behold God. As Jesus ministered to the people and worked mighty signs in their midst, he enabled the people to speak about what God was doing in their midst (cf. Luke 7:16: ‘A great prophet has risen up among us; God has visited his people). May the commemoration of the incarnation of God’s ever abiding presence be a reminder to us that God relates to us in the present, and in our lifetime. May we see in the works of Jesus, and hear in his words, God telling us that he has come to gather us together in order to give us life.