The Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ According to Matthew
Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. 36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without ashepherd. 37 Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. 38 Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”
Jesus called his twelve disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out impure spirits and to heal every disease and sickness.
These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon (who is called Peter) and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee, and his brother John; 3 Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; 4 Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.
These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. 6 Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. 7 As you go, proclaim this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ 8 Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy,[a] drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give .(Mt. 9:3-10:23)
———————————————–
Do you remember the upheaval caused by the murder of a black man, George Floyd, and others, killed in police actions because of their colour, their ethnicity, their lowly place in society, the world was forced to see the injustice, and trapped feelings of a suffering people – something it had been blind to until then, and to act.
What will it take to change the way things are in the world?
When I was a little boy, I went to visit my uncle Bob. He had a fine henhouse, and a flock of chickens roosting in it. And this day he showed me a chicken that he had just bought and was going to place in the hen house with the others.
I went with him and watched as he opened up the hatch, and revealed the chickens sitting on the perch, in a row, next to each other.
He leaned in and moved some of the chickens along the perch and then took the new arrival and placed it between two others on the perch. Or I should say he tried.
The birds closed rank and the new bird was squeezed out, and it happened again and again, no chicken was willing to give up its position – its rank ifyou like – signified by its place on that perch. and he finally put the new bird right at the far end of the perch. The not so nice section?
The perch was plenty long enough for many hens, but those stubborn chickens didn’t want to give up their little piece of real estate.
Keep that story in mind for a minute:
My first job in Canada in 1967 was with an encyclopedia company as the office manager. My boss was an American from St. Louis Missouri, a nice guy, big and bluff, and good natured. He went by ‘Woody.’
The subject of race came up and he told me that on one occasion, the blacks from the poor part of town in St. Louis began to march toward the white part of town, and had to cross a bridge. He said, ” We weren’t going to allow them to cross that bridge so we got our weapons and went to stop them.
” Were they violent?” I asked.
“No,” he said, ” But we weren’t going to give them the chance.”
” Then what was the problem with them demonstrating?’
“They wanted my job!, ” he said, vehemently.
I said, ” They didn’t want your job, they just wanted an equal chance at getting a job.”
He laughed at my naivety. He didn’t see that point of view at all.
I was getting paid a hundred dollars a week, and he was getting five hundred dollars a week and in 1967 that was a lot of money. So you might think he would be a smart guy.
But when it came to race he was about as smart as uncle Bob’s chickens.
In our contemporary version of the Gospel, we read that Jesus looked at the crowd and was moved with compassion for them. He was moved to the very depth of his being.
He was moved to compassion by the world’s pain. He was moved to compassion for the sick. He was moved to compassion for those with no hope.
The common people were desperately longing for God – why else wouldthey follow Jesus in such great numbers? – And the pillars of orthodox religion of his day had nothing to offer them.
People were ruled and exploited by the Romans. And exploited by the religious rulers.
They were at the bottom of the rung in that society. And no hope of any relief.
They were at the end of the perch, you might say.
Does it remind you of the situation in our society today? Of those who are at the bottom of the pecking order and are exploited, or worse still ignored, by those above?
And are so because of their colour, their education or lack of it. Their religious dress. Their difficulty with the language. Their uncultured accent?? Their address?
There have been conferences over the years, where national and international leaders have gotten together to try and solve the problems that exist because of prejudice, and the realisation that having so many disenfranchised people could be dangerous for society.
I remember a promise to eradicate world poverty by – was it 2010? It required, among other things, massive donations of money, lifting of tariffs, help and encouragement to improve weak economies.
The Secretary General of the UN has asked where is that help that was so generously promised?
Precious little has been forthcoming.
Why? Because helping others means that we have to sacrifice a little of what we have. And our leaders think we can’t handle that: that we don’t want to be moved along the perch.
We feel sorry for disadvantaged people . We pray for them of course.
And prayer is good. It indicates our concern.
But you know, prayer without good works is dead.
Martin Luther had a friend who was in the same mind about Christian faith as he was. His friend was also a monk. They came to an agreement. Luther would go into the world and battle for Reformation, while the friend would stay in the monastery and uphold Luther with prayer. So that’s what they did.
But one night, the friend had a dream. He saw a huge field of corn, as big as the world, and one solitary man was trying to reap all that corn. He saw the reaper’s face. It was Luther. Luther’s friend saw the truth in a flash. He was meant to be down there with him, labouring in the harvest.
As we heard in today’s Gospel, this was something that Jesus’s disciples had to do. Jesus was sending them out to bring in the harvest.
The harvest was – and is – all those untold numbers of people who needed God in their lives; who needed healing; who were like lost sheep.
There are some who can do nothing else but pray, for life may have rendered them physically or financially helpless. But for most of us, prayer is not enough.
The men chosen by Jesus to go out into the countryside, telling of the coming of the kingdom of God, were ordinary men. They had no wealth, no position, no academic background, no social advantages.
You see, Jesus isn’t looking for extra-ordinary people. He is looking for ordinary people who are willing to be used to do extra-ordinary things.
God is always looking for hands to use. God is always saying. “Whom shall I send?”
Jesus had called these twelve men to go into the world as his apostles. They would not be representing themselves. They would represent him. Nor would they be bringing their own messages. Representing Jesus they would bring his message.
I often hear people talking about their faith in a way which tells you more about them than about the Jesus they are supposed to represent.
There are religious people who will tell you they are for or against birth control, or abortion, or gay rights, or women priests, or dancing, or kneeling, or standing for prayer, or waving their hands while they sing hymns, or long sermons, or church ritual – all the things that they like or dislike and which define them and their ‘faith’ – but who have somehow forgotten the compassion, caring, and loving, that is expected from apostles.
And that’s us. Because we are – his apostles.
Believe it.
As an apostle we don’t do what we want to do, we try to do what he would do.
Like we need to be fascinated with Jesus rather than with ourselves.
God is looking out for us, so we can take our eye off that particular ball and look out for someone else, can’t we?
Several years ago, conductor Eugene Ormandy was leading the Philadelphia Orchestra. It doesn’t matter what they were playing. Certainly not Mozart, perhaps Stravinsky. But at any rate, he was giving all of himself to it. He was putting energy into it. To the degree that he dislocated his shoulder!
Conducting!!
He dislocated his shoulder conducting an orchestra??
Gerrouttahere!
I read that and asked myself the question: Have I ever dislocated anything by working so hard for Jesus?
He gave his life, working for me?
You know what I mean? .
I wonder what it takes.
I wonder how we get that fire of the Holy Spirit inside of us so that we just can’t stop doing stuff for our Lord; just full of energy trying to be like him.
Dislocating something.
It’s got to be about motivation, do you think? .
Fear motivates people. Some people, anyway.
I heard a story about a young man who took a shortcut through a cemetery one dark night, and fell into an open grave.
He tried to climb out, scrabbling at the sides with his hands, but couldn’t make it., He tried shouting, but no-one heard him. He decided to sit down in a corner and wait for daylight.
A little while later another person cut through the graveyard and fell into the same open grave. This man, like the first, tried to climb out, using his fingernails and toes, to try and get a grip in the soil, but slipping back.
The first man, sitting there in the dark, heard the newcomer trying to get out, as he had, and said, “You’ll never get out of here.”
But he did!
Fear was a real motivator, there, wasn’t it/?
But fear doesn’t always work, it seems.
Think about it: We have been threatened with Hell for centuries: devils with pitchforks, pushing us into a lake of fire ,for ever and ever. But it doesn’t seem to have made much difference to the way people live. Does it?
People just don’t seem to fear the hereafter, as horrible as it sounds.
So we can forget fear .
So what can motivate us?
What about compassion?
Jesus’ heart wept for the people who followed him.
I think when I first saw a picture of a starving child, in Biafra, decades ago, my heart wept. I think the first time I read about women and children being deliberately killed in war, my heart wept. I think the first time I read about families being headed by nine year-old children in Africa, because both parents had died from AIDS, my heart wept.
But there is so much of it, pictures in the papers, on television, news stories of millions threatened by starvation – the sheer numbers boggle the mind, that my heart can’t weep any more.
We can’t take it any more, and we pass by on the other side.
What is needed is a new motivation. Not the pictures of starving children used in TV ads, but a heartfelt compassion, and a love, and a desire to bring healing.
We need a vision of that vast harvest, and Jesus out there doing it all by himself, and a realisation that he needs each and everyone ofus out there with him.
We have received freely. We are called to give freely.
And every time we do that, we move this world closer to the day when the kingdom of God will come on earth – the time when His will is done here, as it is in Heaven.
Where there will be no hatred, no fear, no discrimination, just love!
Amen.