At the sight of the crowds, Jesus’ heart was moved with pity for them because they were troubled and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest.” Then he summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits to drive them out and to cure every disease and every illness. (Matthew 9.36-10.1)
Ari Shapiro, in his recent collection of stories accumulated from years as a White House correspondent and radio reporter for NPR that he turned into a book called “The Best Strangers in the World,” tells of the time that he was traveling to Israel. He had arrived there via a cruise ship on which he had been hired to give some speeches. When the immigration agent thumbed through his passport and saw a lot of locations stamped–including Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries that clearly were not tourist attractions–he became suspicious and asked Shapiro why he had been to those places.
Shapiro explained that he was required to travel all over the world as part of his job covering the White House. Skeptical and unsure, the agent questioned him, “Do you have any evidence to prove that you actually fly with the President of the United States?” Thinking quickly, Shapiro reached into his backpack, pulled out a crumpled Air Force One napkin that read Aboard the Presidential Aircraft–he habitually squirreled away the napkins in a stash that he gave as gifts to his nieces and nephews and interns–and handed it to the immigration agent, telling him, “You can keep that.” It worked. The napkin was proof enough that he flew with the President of the United States.
The question for us today is whether, in similar circumstances, we could provide proof that we fly with Rabbi Jesus, the Galilean teacher and healer who formed a coterie of believers to whom he entrusted his cause when his days ended on earth. That question is put before us today in the passage from the Gospel of Matthew that we hear in which Rabbi Jesus speaks of his need for laborers who are willing to do the work that he has begun.
The context is important. Immediately before the text that we have today, the evangelist gives us that context. He tells us that Rabbi Jesus “went about to all the cities and the villages, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the Good News of the Kingdom, and healing every disease and every sickness among the people.” Here we have the basic parameters of the Rabbi’s work.
Then, Matthew tells us that Rabbi Jesus’ heart was moved with pity for the crowds that he saw in these places because they were troubled and abandoned. As we often see, translations from the Greek into English generally limp along, as is the case here. The word for troubled is better translated as harassed and the word for abandoned might be better understood as helpless. These words convey to us in a clearer way the degree of suffering that the crowds have experienced.
Harassed means the powerful have exploited these people. We might say bullied. Included in the word is the notion that those who have power have plundered the poor people who are defenseless against the assaults. Similarly, to say that they are helpless lays bare to us their plight. A precise translation would be to say they laid prostrate, an image that projects this group being pushed to the ground so often that they can’t even stand on their own two feet anymore, the will to rise gone, the ability to stand stolen from them by persecution and by plundering.
Seeing the dire straits of the people, Rabbi Jesus is moved with compassion, so says the gospel writer. Again, a literal translation of the word means his stomach is destroyed at the sight of so much suffering. The pain that he feels when he sees the people in such distress hits him in the guts. When Matthew uses the same word later in his gospel, it is when the Rabbi cures the sick, feeds the hungry, and restores sight to the blind. Each of these instances results in Rabbi Jesus’ feeling the plight of others to the bottom of his bowels.
It is not without significance that when the word is used in the gospel, it results in action. When Rabbi Jesus feels compassion–almost a lukewarm word when compared to the Greek—he does something. He cures the sick. He feeds the hungry. He gives sight to the blind. And what does he do in this particular instance put before us today when he is surrounded by the suffering of the poor who stand before him, bullied and beaten down by the powerful, a situation that hits him in the guts?
He looks at his followers and he says to them, “The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers to his harvest.” In other words, he wants workers to help him with the work that needs to be done. He wants followers who will see the bullied and the browbeaten of the world and do something about it , do something that alleviates their suffering.
It is important that we hear clearly what he says when he tells his disciples that laborers are few. He is speaking of someone who spends his days working in the fields underneath the scorching heat of the sun, sweat pouring from their skin, hands calloused and cracked from cultivating the crevices of the clayed fields, worn out by the end of the day from the work.
The work is brutal because, as he says, the harvest is abundant, a benign way of saying that the plight of those without power is staggering. Simply stated, the only way to alleviate their pain is by subjecting ourselves to an equal amount of pain through our hard work on their behalf. Anything less and nothing much happens.
Unless we have clarity about what Rabbi Jesus is saying here, we easily could confine ourselves to a comfortable discipleship, catering to causes that require little or no effort, content to sit on cushioned seats in air-controlled churches, quick to criticize those outside our immediate circle who seem to always want a handout of one sort or another. Or, as one scholar of the scriptures said, “Christians must stop simply going to church and learn rather to become the church among our communities.”
His words seem apropos in light of what Rabbi Jesus does immediately after saying that the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few. As Matthew tells us, “He called to himself his twelve disciples.” So, he finds those who are willing to get in the game, those not satisfied to sit on the bench. And he lays out the work that awaits them, “giving them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every sickness.”
If anything stands out about this job description–and many things should–it is the fact that the tasks he gives the twelve are precise and practical, providing us with means to measure our own output as one of his followers. The causes he directs his disciples to tackle are not found in quick fixes or handled by a phone call or two. He’s talking about fighting demons and diseases and death-dealing devices.
It’s obvious–or it should be–that Rabbi Jesus sees clearly that demonic forces are stealing people’s spirits, that obscene acts of violence are crushing the life out of people, and that every type of pain is destroying the mind, body, and soul of those suffering under its persecution. To put it bluntly, it is a war zone out there and he’s asking his followers to fight the war against evil to an inch of their lives and to their last breath.
If we think Christianity is supposed to be a walk in the park, then we’ve been listening to the wrong preachers. Contrary to what they may say, God doesn’t want us to be rich and he doesn’t measure our worthwhileness by our material success. Rabbi Jesus’ words make it clear that God stands on the side of the poor, the persecuted, and the oppressed. If we’re not taking their side, then we’re on the wrong side.
Honestly, in the face of the seemingly herculean tasks that are apparently part and parcel of following Rabbi Jesus, there is a tendency on our parts to downplay our potential, to say we don’t have the right stuff, to admit defeat before we get to the front line. We want to push the heavy lifting onto people who are better suited for it, people who have the stomach that Rabbi Jesus had.
Here, it is important to remember that the twelve apostles whom we meet today were very ordinary people, not one of them with a resume worth looking at twice. Snuff-spitting fishermen. A shady tax-collector. A stealthy rabble-rouser. A short-fused hothead or two. Not a who’s who in anybody’s list of celebrated characters. In other words, people pretty much like you and me, with no claim to fame, nothing exceptional about us save for the fact that on our better days we want better things for this world.
Yet, the apostles accepted the work given to them by Rabbi Jesus and they made it work, surely by the grace of God. Admittedly dim-witted, often slow-moving, frankly scared-stiff, they somehow slogged and slugged it out, staying on the path set for them by their teacher. And, as a result of their persistence, the world moved an inch or two closer to getting it right.
So, if we’re prone to selling ourselves short–and who isn’t except maybe on Sundays when no work is required of us–we might take heart from something Ari Shapiro said in his book. He admitted that when he got his first real job at NPR after having worked there as a temp for more than a year, he knew he wasn’t ready, especially in the sense of being equal to the mentor whom he especially admired.
But he resolved to learn. As he said, “I knew from studying the piano that if you do something a little bit every day, you’ll get better at it. So I told myself that I didn’t need to create the perfect radio story. I just needed to start practicing.” Actually, he’s telling us pretty much the same thing that our primary school teacher did when she taught us penmanship and assured us that “practice makes perfect.”
Granted, when it comes to imitating the ways and the works of Rabbi Jesus, we won’t ever get it perfect. But if we practice it enough, we stand a very good chance of getting somewhere on the field, which is a better place to be in baseball and in discipleship than sitting in the bleachers, watching somebody else do all the work.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 