Exodus 19: 2-6 + Psalm 100 + Romans 5: 6-11 + Matthew 9:35 – 10:8
You can almost sense the pace at which he is moving. There is no suggestion that he was on a stroll around the countryside enjoying the scenery. He was motivated and on the move. He was not in some of the towns and villages, he was in them all, and Matthew tells us what kept him going: compassion. He saw something wrong and set about the business of doing something about it. What he saw, he knew should not be happening. Those who should have been doing something were not, so he did. That is what is going on here. This is what Matthew leads us into – a revelation of what one’s identity as a follower and disciple of Christ must be: people of compassion who see something wrong and make it right.
What is revealed here is not the mission of Jesus Christ, but the mission God has planned for God’s people. Jesus is clever when he invites these people to pray for laborers. He knows that if they do so, it will gradually dawn upon them that they are the laborers for which they are praying. It will finally become clear to them that blaming someone else for the way things are while doing nothing about it oneself is more of a problem than the fact that no one is doing anything.
We have become a culture of blame; our children learn it early on. Our leaders do it all the time, passing the blame from one party to the other, and from one country to another. The consequence of all this blame is all the more problematic because we are becoming numb to the disasters and problem around us. The media brings a typhoon one day and an earthquake the next. The homeless in our country because of mortgage failures is eclipsed by the homeless in another place because of floods, and the more we watch, the more numb we become and then caught up in that numbness, we do nothing except wonder: “Why doesn’t someone do something?”
Into that mess of paralysis comes Matthew chapter nine and what it reveals. The “someone” who can do something about almost everything sits in this church in the presence of the Lord, being taught by his Word, and called by his grace. Our prayer here must not be for the Lord to send laborers unless we are willing to get up and labor. What the disciples discovered is what we must also discover: we are the ones called and sent, disturbed by compassion and strengthened by grace.
We think about vocations to the priesthood as though it should be someone else’s job, as though it should be some other country or culture who should come here and provide for us what we will not provide for ourselves.
We look at the failure of health care, of education, of transportation, and it’s failure we are looking at: and at best we wonder whey someone will not fix the problem. At worst, we have become so paralyzed by the complexity and conflicting solutions that we don’t even ask anymore.
We do have that luxury. We do not have a call to be served or be waited upon. We have no privilege except the privilege of faith, and it’s call to service, to responsibility, and to an identity that in every life bears some obvious and serious resemblance to the life of Jesus Christ. We cannot allow ourselves to be anesthetized to the pain of this world. Compassion must still and always stir in the depths of our hearts, and when it does, we shall be moving around to all the towns and villages and know that we have what it takes to experience the Kingdom of Heaven. We find here, we celebrate here and live it out there today and everyday.