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 and they shall dwell once again in their own land.’ In the first four verses preceding the passage we read in the First Reading, the Lord speaking through the prophet declares war on the shepherds he had put in charge of his people (the kings) because of the bad job they had done. Instead of shepherding the flock, all that the kings had done was to scatter them (Jeremiah 23:2). But the Lord had some good news for the people: 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 were going to 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 did in the past (to their ancestors), they were going to talk about what the Lord had done to them before their very eyes.
The objective of Jeremiah’s prophecy was to bring a new understanding (and appreciation) of the Lord. For a long time, all that the people talked about was about the Lord’s mighty deeds in Egypt. It made the Lord to appear ‘old’ and ‘outdated.’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.