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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"[I]n the measure that we learn unconcern about our reputation, in that measure the Father can produce in us the same love which he has for his Son, and the same love which he and his Son have for the human race. Here is where we have to make an imaginative effort, or at least I do. That love is in no way marked by any desire for vindication, for restoring besmirched reputations, for turning the tables of this world, and all that might seem to us to be just and proper, given the horror of the violence of our world. That love loves all that! It loves the persecutors, the scandalized, it loves the depressives and the traitors and the finger pointers.
"That love doesn't seek a fulminating revelation of what has really been going on as a final vengeance for all the violence, even though we may fear that it will be so. That love is utterly removed from being party to any final settling of accounts. That love, the love which was the inner dynamic of the coming of the Son to the world, of Jesus' historical living out, seeks desperately and insatiably that good and evil may participate in a wedding banquet.
"This means that it is the mind fixed on the things that are above which allows the heart to be re-formed in the image of the Father's love, forgiving the traitors, the executioners, the persecutors, the weak, those gone astray, not on account of some ethical demand, or so as to obey some commandment, but quite simply because they are loved, they are delighted in.
"When Luke has Jesus on the Cross say: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Lk 23:34), he was not only depicting a Jesus who was effectively revealing the mechanism of death, which includes the blindness of its participants as to what they are doing, nor was it an ethical imperative that Jesus should forgive them so that he might go to his Father ‘clean’; rather it was just that, in truth, and without any remorse or sadomasochism, Jesus loved his slayers.
"This means that when we are able to stand loose from our reputation, and because of that, from our need to insist on a day of reckoning, the eschatological imagination, the mind fixed on the things that are above, begins to give us the capacity to love human beings without any sort of discrimination, in imitation of that love, quite without rivalry, which the Father has for us. Another way of saying this is to say that there begins to be formed within us something of a shepherd's heart which is deeply moved by humans and human waywardness.
"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, pp. 187-188
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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 harassed 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, inter-familiar, 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 behaviour. 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: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper_6a/]
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