NewCreation

Homily for Sunday 11 in Ordinary Time Year A

Hello, my sisters and brothers. As you can see, I have a different background today. I'm in the north of Mexico, staying with my former novice master, the bishop, who very kindly went to see the Holy Father on my behalf. It's going to be his 75th birthday next week, and so this is kind of retirement celebrations for him, and I was able to come here. So this is where I'm preaching to you with a slightly different background — no longer an Airbnb, now a bishop's… well, bishop's residence. "The Bishop's Palace" would be too much — it's not. But this is where I am. So much love, much love to you all from here. Looking at the Gospel passage today, I think it contains a number of elements which are just wonderful for what we're going through now in our different countries. First of all, the readings set us up with a parallel, whether we want it to or not. The first reading is from the book of Exodus, and it comes when Moses takes the people to the mountain at which the law will be given. But immediately before that, he's been spending a great deal of time dealing with the troubles and anxieties of the people. He's become a kind of a judge, and he's tiring himself out. And eventually his father-in-law comes to him and says, "You're working too hard, mate — you must get some help." So Moses obeys his father-in-law, and he appoints a whole series of others to be judges. He sets them over groups of 50 and 100 and 1000 and so on, so that there are people to sort out the problems amongst the people of Israel. That's immediately before him then taking them to the mountain, so they can listen to the word of the Lord. St. Matthew's Gospel shows Jesus with a very different approach to the issue of the people — governing the people, if you will. He's not interested in governing them at all. The first thing we see about him 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 protesters, or difficult people, or people who he needs to pacify in some way. No — he sees people who are harassed like sheep without 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, sort out their difficulties, and tell them to get on with life. 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 the 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. And then he names the apostles. He appoints the 12 and sends them. The sending is when they become apostles, from the word "apostello," meaning to send. So he summons the 12 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, put 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-familial, 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, in 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, these ends in people alongside them — people with ordinary names. We think of them as very important names because they're the apostles, but these are ordinary people. This is Pete and Jim and Andy and Tom, and eventually, of course, the guy who would betray him, Judas. So we're talking about a very low-key, very gentle sending into the midst of a group of people who didn't know where they're going, don't know what happened — rather, we've been shaken up by the mixture of pandemic, of at last it began to become clear quite how devastating long-term have been the consequences of the North Atlantic slave trade in the foundation economic success of all our countries, and quite how much work we have to do in penitence to start to put that right. All of these kinds of things he was seeing, and appointing people to go and move into that world and do them — cast them out, cure every disease and sickness. He gives the names of the 12. Then the instructions: "Go nowhere amongst the Gentiles, not the Samaritans." They're not going to understand this yet. It's only when God has visited Israel and been able to restore Israel to what it's meant to be — hence the twelve, because of the twelve tribes — it's only when God has been able to visit and bring back to life Israel, that what it's all about is going to spill over and become contagious amongst the Gentiles and the Samaritans. But he's 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. Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, 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 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 they'll latch on 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 labourers into the harvest, and that we may become those labourers ourselves. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.