There is a sentence in today's Gospel that I want to sit with for a moment before I say anything else. Matthew tells us that when Jesus saw the crowds, he was “moved with compassion.” But the word Matthew uses in ancient Greek – splanchnizomai – meant something more visceral than moved with compassion…it meant more like, his gut wrenched. It meant he felt the suffering of those people in the very core of his body. It meant the pain of the harassed and helpless was not abstract to him. It landed in him physically. It hurt.
And after that gut-wrenching compassion comes action, prayer, the sending of laborers, the naming of the mission: to proclaim the kingdom, to cure the sick, to raise the dead, to cleanse those the world has declared unclean, to cast out the demons of fear and exploitation and indifference. And then, perhaps the most astonishing line in the whole passage, "Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give." This is not an optional instruction for the especially holy. It seems that this is Jesus’ description of discipleship itself.
Before we can be sent, we have to see. And seeing -- real seeing -- the seeing that wrenches the gut, requires that we look at who the crowds actually are.
They are the families sleeping in their cars a few miles from here, within sight of some of the most expensive ZIP codes in the country. They are the undocumented worker who got injured on a job site and is afraid to call 911. They are the asylum seeker who has fled violence, crossed thousands of miles, and now waits in uncertainty, told by a system that seems not to care, that her case will take years. They are the Black teenager followed in a store, the transgender young person rejected by family. The woman whose gifts are diminished at every turn, the elderly man who has outlived everyone he loved, the homeless woman riding the train all night too afraid to go to a shelter for fear of violence.
Jesus saw the crowds and he did not look away. He did not manage them at arm's length, process them through a system, sort them into groups of deserving and undeserving. He was moved. He was filled with compassion. He saw them as sheep without a shepherd, not as a problem to be solved, but as beloved children of God in need of someone to journey with them as they walked through their private valley of darkness.
So as disciples, sent, who do we see? Who do we allow our gut to wrench for? And this is a harder question: who do we look away from? Who has our society trained us to be blind to? I think that probably most all of us have at some time in our lives felt unseen, felt unwelcomed, unloved. And in converse to this reality, Paul in Romans then writes, "God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us." While we were still sinners. Not after we had cleaned up. Not after we had proven ourselves. While we were yet broken, love came.
That unconditional grace received without cost, it is the source and the energy of our mission.
When Jesus sends the twelve, he sends them light. No gold, no silver, no extra tunic, no staff for self-defense. There is something deeply countercultural, even counter-instinctual. We live in a world that tells us to secure ourselves first, to accumulate leverage, to build walls of protection before we go out. And here is Jesus saying: go as you are. Go with what you've been given. Trust.
This is not a romanticization of poverty. Jesus knew poverty and he healed it wherever he found it. This is something different -- a call to radical dependence on God and on the communities we go to serve, rather than on accumulated privilege and power. It is the posture of the peacemaker.
In our tradition, we talk about nonviolence not merely as a tactic but as a way of seeing, a way of being in the world! A conviction that every human being carries the image of God and that no cause, however just, justifies the destruction of that image. That stance towards the world, going without sword or shield, trusting in the power of truth and love, in the power of the Holy Spirit is exactly what Jesus embodies in Matthew's Gospel, and what he asks of the laborers he sends.
We who are gathered here know what it means to work for justice in a world that sometimes pushes back hard. We know what it is to advocate for the immigrant family facing deportation, to show up at a school board meeting for inclusive policies, to speak out when the silence of the comfortable becomes complicity in harm. That work is exhausting. And it is holy. And it begins, always, in that gut-wrenching compassion that Jesus modeled, seeing the harassed and those in need of help and refusing to look away.
In a few minutes, we will come to this table. We will receive without cost the bread of life. We will receive what we did not earn, have not merited, and could not purchase. We will receive grace. And that will be sufficient for the work of the day.
And then the proclamation, “the Mass is ended” and we will be sent: Go, this is our mission. We are the laborers. The harvest is abundant. Those who are worn down, harassed and in need of help are waiting, not as objects of charity, but as the face of Christ, as the ones in whom God has placed the sacred image that our calling, as disciples, is meant to serve.
Blessings,
Fr Tim
And after that gut-wrenching compassion comes action, prayer, the sending of laborers, the naming of the mission: to proclaim the kingdom, to cure the sick, to raise the dead, to cleanse those the world has declared unclean, to cast out the demons of fear and exploitation and indifference. And then, perhaps the most astonishing line in the whole passage, "Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give." This is not an optional instruction for the especially holy. It seems that this is Jesus’ description of discipleship itself.
Before we can be sent, we have to see. And seeing -- real seeing -- the seeing that wrenches the gut, requires that we look at who the crowds actually are.
They are the families sleeping in their cars a few miles from here, within sight of some of the most expensive ZIP codes in the country. They are the undocumented worker who got injured on a job site and is afraid to call 911. They are the asylum seeker who has fled violence, crossed thousands of miles, and now waits in uncertainty, told by a system that seems not to care, that her case will take years. They are the Black teenager followed in a store, the transgender young person rejected by family. The woman whose gifts are diminished at every turn, the elderly man who has outlived everyone he loved, the homeless woman riding the train all night too afraid to go to a shelter for fear of violence.
Jesus saw the crowds and he did not look away. He did not manage them at arm's length, process them through a system, sort them into groups of deserving and undeserving. He was moved. He was filled with compassion. He saw them as sheep without a shepherd, not as a problem to be solved, but as beloved children of God in need of someone to journey with them as they walked through their private valley of darkness.
So as disciples, sent, who do we see? Who do we allow our gut to wrench for? And this is a harder question: who do we look away from? Who has our society trained us to be blind to? I think that probably most all of us have at some time in our lives felt unseen, felt unwelcomed, unloved. And in converse to this reality, Paul in Romans then writes, "God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us." While we were still sinners. Not after we had cleaned up. Not after we had proven ourselves. While we were yet broken, love came.
That unconditional grace received without cost, it is the source and the energy of our mission.
When Jesus sends the twelve, he sends them light. No gold, no silver, no extra tunic, no staff for self-defense. There is something deeply countercultural, even counter-instinctual. We live in a world that tells us to secure ourselves first, to accumulate leverage, to build walls of protection before we go out. And here is Jesus saying: go as you are. Go with what you've been given. Trust.
This is not a romanticization of poverty. Jesus knew poverty and he healed it wherever he found it. This is something different -- a call to radical dependence on God and on the communities we go to serve, rather than on accumulated privilege and power. It is the posture of the peacemaker.
In our tradition, we talk about nonviolence not merely as a tactic but as a way of seeing, a way of being in the world! A conviction that every human being carries the image of God and that no cause, however just, justifies the destruction of that image. That stance towards the world, going without sword or shield, trusting in the power of truth and love, in the power of the Holy Spirit is exactly what Jesus embodies in Matthew's Gospel, and what he asks of the laborers he sends.
We who are gathered here know what it means to work for justice in a world that sometimes pushes back hard. We know what it is to advocate for the immigrant family facing deportation, to show up at a school board meeting for inclusive policies, to speak out when the silence of the comfortable becomes complicity in harm. That work is exhausting. And it is holy. And it begins, always, in that gut-wrenching compassion that Jesus modeled, seeing the harassed and those in need of help and refusing to look away.
In a few minutes, we will come to this table. We will receive without cost the bread of life. We will receive what we did not earn, have not merited, and could not purchase. We will receive grace. And that will be sufficient for the work of the day.
And then the proclamation, “the Mass is ended” and we will be sent: Go, this is our mission. We are the laborers. The harvest is abundant. Those who are worn down, harassed and in need of help are waiting, not as objects of charity, but as the face of Christ, as the ones in whom God has placed the sacred image that our calling, as disciples, is meant to serve.
Blessings,
Fr Tim
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