Village Shepherd

The memory is a strange phenomenon. As we grow older, we tend to remember more about the days of our childhood and youth than we do about what happened ten minutes ago. And I'm told that eventually many people begin to remember events of their childhood which have lain hidden and undisturbed for years.

The memory is also selective. Although we remember specific events from childhood onwards that have caused us pain, many of us also tend to look back on any bygone era as a golden time.

I well remember a parish priest who moved to Norfolk from a bustling UK city. He constantly told his parishioners how wonderful life had been in that city and how he longed to return. When he did eventually return, he apparently spent hours regaling his new parishioners with tales of how wonderful life had been in Norfolk! He was looking back to a golden age.

Perhaps this occurs even more when we look back to a previous historical era. Thus the folk memory of church attendance in Victorian times is that churches were crammed to the doors and everybody attended. This may however, be something of an exaggeration. While it's probably true that a higher percentage of the population attended church, it certainly isn't true to say that everybody was a church attender.

Throughout their history, the Jews had golden ages and golden people to which they constantly referred. The first really golden age was the forty years of wandering in the wilderness when Moses led the people out of slavery in Egypt towards the Promised Land.

If you read the story of that nomadic existence in the book of Exodus, it doesn't sound particularly idyllic. The people were constantly whinging about their Spartan existence and Moses was forever lecturing them about the dangers of following foreign ways and foreign gods. But in the collective memory of later years, that time in the wilderness being led so clearly by God, was regarded as a golden era. The psalms are full of songs of praise harking back to those days.

The other golden time, and the king who was regarded as golden par excellence, was the reign of King David. David was no saint by modern standards. His worst sin in modern eyes was the seduction of Bathsheba and consequent murder of her husband in order to cover up the sin. But despite that appalling abuse of power, David was still regarded as the most glorious king the Israelites had ever known.

He was the king who united the previously warring factions of the North - Israel - and the South - Judah - into the Holy people, the chosen race, the children of God. And despite his human failings, David was a king of immense courage and style and vitality and charisma, and he followed God's pathway throughout the whole of his life.

It's no surprise then, that God promises a Messiah who will be a David look-alike. He will be born into the royal line stretching right back to David and will usher in a new golden era of justice and prosperity and safety for the nation.

Today's passage from the book of Jeremiah is thought to have been written by an unknown author around 600 years before Jesus was born. All the elder statesmen and the intellectuals and the skilled artisans had been dragged away from their homeland into exile hundreds of miles away in Babylon, and after two or three generations in exile, had just returned. So immediate memories were sore and the writer points to a new promise from God, to a new golden age when things will be even better than they were under King David.

"In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety," says God, through the words of the writer. And God, as is God's wont, gives this promised time a strange name, "The Lord is our righteousness."

We stand now at the beginning of Advent, looking forward just as the Jews who read this passage so many centuries earlier looked forward, to the birth of the Messiah. But we have the benefit of hindsight. We know that the Messiah was born at Christmas, and so we look forward with the anticipation of reliving that event, that birth in Bethlehem.

Has that birth ushered in a new golden age, as God promised and as everyone expected?

The answer perhaps has to be yes and no. Anybody taking a serious look at the world today can only conclude that human beings are no better now than they ever were. We still rape and murder, steal and pillage. We still seduce and are seduced. We still abuse power and keep a quarter of the world's population in poverty. It's thus very clear that human beings are still sinners.

The difference for modern human beings is that we have a way out. God's kingdom is both here now for the taking, and even more fully apparent after death. Jesus has broken the hold that sin has over us so that we can live in God's kingdom right now if we wish to do so.

Jeremiah's prophecy came true at the first Christmas when God fulfilled his promise. He gave us the Lord, our righteousness, the greatest Christmas gift that has ever been given.