June 18, 2023
Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 18, 2023 – Exodus 19:2-6A; Romans 5:6-11; Matthew 9:36-10:8
“They never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games.” A little unseasonable, but I think you’ll see the point. Janis Ian had a surprise hit in the 1970’s with the line, “Valentines that never came, and those whose names were never called when choosing sides for basketball.” All of us have felt the sting of exclusion at some point in ourr lives. Being rejected because of what we were or what we were not. Put on the sidelines. Ignored. But we got over it and moved on. Nevertheless, it continued to rankle for months or perhaps years afterward.
So then why, literally in the name of God, does Jesus practice exclusionism in today’s gospel? He says to his apostles, “Go only, only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Don't go into Pagan territory. Don’t even go into Samaria where those heretic Jews live.” Why would He do that?
The answer to the question lies in another part of the story. He says to them, “As you go, proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Matthew is writing for an audience largely of Jewish Christians who are now separated from their loved ones. They are sidelined. Ostracized because they have chosen to believe that Jesus is the promised Messiah. Worse than that, the symbol of their racial, religious, and ethnic heritage, Jerusalem, lies in ruins. And so, now they're living out in diaspora, among largely non-Jewish people. And, worse than that, they are a minority in the church community, as more and more pagans surrender themselves to the way of Jesus. And they feel that they are being marginalized. Because they do, they are failing at the fundamental work of any Christian community, which is to bring others to Christ. Matthew has to comfort them for their loss, assure them of the value of their heritage, and get them moving.
So, Matthew sees all of the history of his people as an arc that comes to its climax in the life of Jesus. It is important, for him, that people see the long story, the big picture. It took a long time for it to be possible for God to enter human history and now they're at a crisis point, where they have to choose are you with Christ or are you not?
That's why, at the end of Matthew's gospel, he reverses himself. He has the risen Jesus on a hillside in Galilee, deep within Jewish territory, say to the apostles, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, you go, not me, you go and preach the gospel to all the nations.” To all the nations. “Now it is time to open our faith to everyone.”
There are different ways of looking at it. In John's gospel, Jesus gives the power of mission on the night of resurrection. In Luke's Acts, Jesus gives the power of mission at the time of the Ascension. But the fundamental belief of Christians is the same. That’s why I asked you to listen to who's in the crowd.
Matthew says, “Jesus saw a large multitude of the troubled and abandoned.” The troubled and abandoned. This is a common refrain in all three of the gospels - Matthew, Mark, and Luke. At some point, or even more than one point, Jesus sees a vast crowd coming toward Him and He … dot, dot, dot - fill in the blank. There are three responses that Jesus gives to the vast crowds coming toward Him. In this morning's gospel, He's moved with pity for them, and He sends the apostles. In another gospel, He’s moved with pity and so, He preaches all the day long, telling them many things they need to know for their lives. In another gospel, He spends the whole day walking through the crowd and healing those who are sick. In another gospel, He takes loaves and fishes and feeds a large multitude of people for fear they'll go hungry on their way home.
Jesus’ response to his own feelings of pity is always to go and do something. And that's the story behind the story we have in today's gospel. Jesus sees this crowd and He sends his followers out to do the things He did. They variously grouped curing the sick and raising the dead and cleansing the lepers. In Jesus’ time, people wrongly believed that almost all diseases were caused by demons. And so, what he is talking about is metaphorical healing and metaphorical feeding. There's more than just taking care of the body. Our very beings are wounded. There are the troubled and abandoned among us, who need to be fed by truth and fed by kindness. And that's our mission.
In the first reading, God told Moses, “Your people are dearer to me than all the other people in the world, although all the earth is Mine.” God loves all of his creation but loves this group in a special way. Because of that, and because of the exclusionary passage in today's gospel, we need to deal with the church's behavior in mission. Because the church’s behavior in mission frequently has been exclusionary in some way.
Right now, it’s very popular on PBS and other documentary series, to blame all the ills of Native Americans on the Catholic Church. We were just terrible. Well, to a certain point, we were. The problem is that all of Europe was Christian in the 16th century. Whether Protestant or Catholic, it was Christian. And all of the Christian world believed that only those who adopted Christ would be saved from eternal punishment. And so, they felt a deep-seated need to tell as many people as possible, in the world, about their dear Savior Jesus before the world came to an end. And, like many of us, they let the end justify the means. So, all the Christian missionaries, both Catholic and non-Catholic, did do some terrible things in their preaching of mission. However, it's not a black-and-white story.
The peoples they encountered had some practices that could, in no way, be thought of as noble or culturally beautiful. The sacrificing of other human beings to any kind of God is abhorrent to the human spirit. So is the conquering of other ethnic peoples of your own ethnicity so you can have their land. A horrible thing. And so, there was some point to the first missionaries viewing what they saw as not acceptable and trying to move it in another direction.
Now, ever since the Vatican Council, and certainly in the 21st century, our way of doing mission is what we call journeying. Journeying. We walk with other people. We tell them our story and listen to their story, and look for the points of convergence, and see how those points of convergence can be expanded to mutual acceptance of the presence of God in our lives. That's the big picture.
The small picture is who are the troubled and abandoned in our communities and in our own families and what are we called to do for them? Sometimes we see the challenge as far beyond our pay grade. What are we going to do about all these big terrible things? What we’re going to do is what Jesus said to do, metaphorically and literally. Cure. And heal. And teach. And feed.
Go. Sometimes we won’t have to go any further than our own house.