Hosea 8:4-7,11-13, Ps 115:3-10, Mt 9:32-38
There seems to a lot of different things going on in today’s readings. I would like to simply give you my impressions about them. Often when you pray by using the Bible as a starting point the best thing you can do is simply pay attention to what strikes you and then stay with and follow the reaction you have to it. That is what seemed important to do with these readings.
When I listened to the reading from Hosea, I heard a God who is truly disappointed in His people. Israel is making Kings and establishing princes even creating godlike artwork all without reference or acknowledgement of the God of Abraham and Sarah and Isaac and Rebekah. As a result, God laments, “How long will they be unable to attain innocence in Israel?” Then a little later God says, “Though I write for him my many ordinances, they are considered as a stranger’s”. Hosea goes to far as to say, “God shall … punish their sins: they shall return to Egypt. I don’t think it’s a surprise that God is upset when he sees Israel doing things that will only hurt themselves. Ultimately God doesn’t want to see Israel return to Egypt. I don’t think the verse means actually going back to the land of Egypt but I think it means that when we separate ourselves from the good God wants for us, we end up in a kind of slavery, a bondage to attitudes and outlooks that are not the freedom God wants for us.
This same kind of thing is going on in the Gospel. Jesus is freeing people from the many things that have kept them from living a full human life. In this case, it starts with driving a demon out of a man and while some people are amazed at what Jesus does the Pharisees can’t accept that this is an act of love and graciousness. So, once again, I don’t think it is a surprise that Jesus says that the crowds of people make him think of sheep without a shepherd. He does good things for people and even these good things like curing disease and spiritual healing end up being a source of division among people. People didn’t know who to trust or believe.
Today we know far more about how people can be different from one another than Jesus and people in his time would have known. Not only do we know more about the planet as a whole and therefore, its huge cultural differences between nations and races but also the psychological and personality differences between people even in the same family. The human capacity for difference is amazing. Each of us can interpret situations and people in startlingly different ways. So often we are divided from one another in what we believe and how we react to the world around us. All this inherent difference is, of course, also a blessing. Because as St. Paul points out in his letters we each have different gifts to bring to the Body of Christ. The difficulty is accepting another person’s difference as a good thing. Too often we see what is not familiar as wrong or at least a problem to be solved.
Jesus may not have known about the Enneagram or the Myers-Briggs type indicator but he understood that people could only be free and joyful if they could love and care for each other. None of us is going to be happy isolated on our own. Each of us has to be a worker in this kind of harvest. For centuries the harvest wasn’t brought in by a few elite, highly educated and trained workers. No really important or great harvest gets gathered by a few. The great harvests come in because everybody goes out in the field and brings in what she or he can. It is a group effort. The harvest of heaven, the harvest of joy, the harvest of a fulfilling life, the harvest of peace on this earth will take all of us. Each of us will have to take loving care of our piece of reality. Then we won’t look like sheep without a shepherd but like disciples who know very well what needs to be done.
