A recent Prime Minister – and we’ve had quite a few of them in the past five years – used regularly to criticise “Doomsters and Gloomsters”. He might well have had the author of today’s first lesson  in mind, for the Prophet Jeremiah’s name has long been proverbial for pessimism, and a Jeremiah is a speech or a piece of writing in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and predicts its imminent downfall. 

There is a great deal of doom and gloom in the Book of Jeremiah but today’s short passage suggests that there was much more to Jeremiah than sustained pessimism. It’s true that the first few verses roundly condemn the rulers who have been bad shepherds of their people. Jeremiah’s particular target was Jehoiakim, King of Judah, during whose reign King Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem and forced much of the population of Judah into exile in Babylon. This, Jeremiah suggests, was God’s judgement on Jehoiakim’s corrupt rule. In the preceding chapters Jeremiah makes clear that Jehoiakim was guilty of ruling unjustly and oppressing the poor. 

But today’s passage doesn’t end on a gloomy note. 

“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.”

“Justice and righteousness”. 

That phrase is used eleven times in the Hebrew Bible and five of those nine are to be found in Jeremiah. It is one of his key ideas, and his emphasis is always on the vocation of earthly rulers to provide justice and righteousness, 

That phrase brings us up with a bump against the difficulties of translation. The two Hebrew words which Jeremiah uses have overlapping meanings which aren’t clear in English versions of the passage. To quote the American Episcopalian priest and writer Fleming Rutledge:

“To our contemporary ears, ‘righteousness’ is a stuffy word connoting adherence to a set of moral codes.”

That’s not what Jeremiah meant by righteousness. A better translation of the Hebrew word would be “virtue” for virtue is a positive quality. Of course we want to be governed by people who don’t break the rules they are supposed to uphold,  but we also want to be governed by people who live virtuous lives, which is another way of saying people who live justly, people whose treatment of their fellow men and women is positive, supportive and caring. 

By way of an example or rather two; many years ago, travelling in a taxi down Regent Street in London, I caught a glimpse of one of my heroes. Bishop Trevor Huddleston was then a frail, elderly man and he was walking with the aid of a stick in his right hand, his left hand resting for support on the shoulder of a younger companion. As a young man, Trevor Huddleston served for some years as a priest in South Africa. He was a strong campaigner for racial justice in the era of Apartheid, and his African parishioners and fellow activists conferred on him the title Makhalipile, the dauntless one. One of the best-known stories about him is an excellent illustration of the power of virtue. One day in Johannesburg he saw a black woman who was cleaning the outside of a house, watched by her young son. Huddleston courteously greeted her by raising his hat. Her son was astonished. He had never before seen a white person treat a black person with respect. The boy’s name was Desmond Tutu and, under the influence of Trevor Huddleston, he grew up to become a priest and Archbishop of Cape Town, and an influential campaigner against Apartheid. 

When Apartheid came to an end, Tutu understood that there was a strong desire among many black people for justice in the form of revenge against those who had excluded and mistreated them. Part of his response to those feelings was to write a book with the challenging title No Future Without Forgiveness. The central theme of that book was that God’s justice is not about retribution, but about restoration – about putting things right. That’s not a sentimental or a wishy-washy belief. Restoration is costly, and may involve giving up privilege, acknowledging wrong-doing and  compensating those whom we have wronged. 

For Desmond Tutu, as for the Prophet Jeremiah, righteousness and justice were inseparable. Jeremiah believed in a God who wants to put things right and who has the power to make right what has gone wrong. He also believed in the possibility that human beings, including rulers, can be part of that divine project. His hope was that God would provide a righteous king, a descendant of David who would be the good shepherd and would execute justice and righteousness. 

What he didn’t foresee was how many centuries would pass before that divine initiative bore fruit and what form it would take. Not a king in the earthly sense, nor a politician but rather the Jesus of whom we read in today’s Gospel, the man of compassion, the teacher and the healer, the Good Shepherd. Those who aspire to political power need to follow that example and those in democracies whose duty and privilege it is choose them should, when politicians claim to be defenders of Christian values, consider carefully whether their lives and their actions demonstrate a genuine commitment to justice and righteousness.