Exodus 19:2-6 (NRSV Updated Edition)
They journeyed from Rephidim, entered the wilderness of Sinai, and camped in the wilderness; Israel camped there in front of the mountain. Then Moses went up to God; the Lord called to him from the mountain, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob and tell the Israelites: ‘You have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now, therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites.”
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Most of the time when I have heard the words, "priestly kingdom and a holy nation" in a church context, it has had somewhat of a triumphalist tone, as in, "Isn't it wonderful that *we* are set apart for God, that *we* are the special ones!" I think this response quite misses the point, especially in light of the beginning of the sentence: "Indeed, the whole earth is mine..." The setting apart of Israel (in this passage) was not to emphasise how special or wonderful they were, but so that they would be a 'priestly kingdom' among the kingdoms of the world, not considering themselves somehow superior to 'the Gentiles', but to serve them.
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Matthew 9:35-10:8 (NRSV Updated Edition)
Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”
Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness. These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon, also known as Peter, and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee and his brother John; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus and Thaddaeus; Simon the Cananaean and Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed him.
These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not take a road leading to gentiles, and do not enter a Samaritan town, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick; raise the dead; cleanse those with a skin disease; cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment.”
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"Please notice that “heart of a shepherd” means being able to look at wolves in their sheepliness. It is not a question of us fearing that there are many people dressed as sheep who are, in fact, wolves, but, on the contrary, of being able creatively to imagine wolves as, in some, more or less well-hidden part of their lives, in fact, sheep, and to love them as such.
"Various times in the Gospel the word 'splangchnidzomai' crops up, which we usually translate as “moved with compassion.” Jesus was moved with compassion by this or that person or situation, or that the multitudes should be like sheep having no shepherd (Matt. 9:36). However the word is rather strong, and means a deep commotion of the entrails, a visceral commotion.
"This is what is so hard to imagine: as we become unhooked from our partisan loves, our searches, our clinging to reputation, with these formed in reaction to this situation or that, there begins to be formed in us that absolutely gratuitous visceral commotion, born outside all reaction, which the ancients called agape and which is nothing other than the inexplicable love which God has for us in our violence and our scandals. We begin to be able not only to know ourselves loved as human beings, but to be able to love other humans, to love the human race and condition."
- James Alison, Raising Abel, pg. 188
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"The first thing we see about [Jesus] is that he's looking at them and he's gut-wrenched. He has an extraordinary sense of love for these people, he doesn't regard them as rioters or protestors or difficult people, people he needs to pacify in some way. No, he sees people who are harrased like sheep with a shepherd, and he longs for their building up and for their good.
"So his first reaction is not to send in some sort of force of order - judges, people who will sort them out, deal with their problems... and tell them to get on with it. No, it's very much more holistic than that. He seems to want to choose rather ordinary people to work in their midst alongside them, and his response, once he's been moved is to say, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” In other words, he's asking them to ask God for something. He wants the request to come from us. He can see what can be done, but it's not to be done from above, it's to be done by people from inside...
"Sending is when they become apostles, from the word 'apostela' meaning to send. He summons the twelve disciples and gives them authority over unclean spirits to cast them out and to cure every disease and every sickness. It's interesting his first reaction is not 'go out amongst them and sort them out, make them right, make them behave. No, it's an act of mercy, to see all the collapsed forms of in-between, what I call the in-between: the sick relationships - social, personal, interfamiliar, economic - all of the ways in which our in-betweens build us up and can imprison us. This is the world of evil spirits, of mental health problems, of profound psychic and psychosomatic sicknesses. This is people bent double, in ways that many many of us still are, and many many countries still are, by various forms of imprisonment tied into repetitive mechanisms of self-destructive behavior. All of this is part of us not flourishing.
"Again he sends people alongside them, people with ordinary names - we think of them as very important names because they are the Apostles, but these are ordinary people, this is Pete and Jim and Andy, Tom, and eventually of course the guy who will betray him: Judas. And so we're talking about a very low-key, very gentle sending into the midst of a group of people but who didn't know where they're going... All of these kinds of things he was seeing and then pointing people to go and move into that world...
"[H]e is wanting to build the humanity of the people not give them a specific religious instruction, so “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick; raise the dead; cleanse those with a skin disease; cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment.” In other words, they are to be very very vulnerable but never transactional - there is to be no quid pro quo, no payment, because that would be just to take part in the sickness of the society.
"There's this completely gratuitous element of the sending which involves vulnerability. And if you are sent and gratuitous and vulnerable, then you run the risk of being assailed by the various demons and bad things in the society, because all that comes to someone who's weak. But if you're able to stand and speak, that's when the demons start to go away, that's when people start to be set free. If you don't play tit for tat with that then people begin to sense what humanity looks like.
"So I think that this is a wonderful wonderful gospel for us at this time, and I would ask you to pray that we be given that heart, that gut-wrenched heart which Jesus had, and that we learn how to ask the Lord to send more laborers into the harvest and that we may become those laborers ourselves."
- James Alison, from video "Homily for Sunday 11 in Ordinary Time Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVjyx4_oyTM)
[Source of quote from James Alison's book Raising Abel, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper_6a/]
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