Apostleship as the answer
Proper 6A  |  Matthew 9:35-10:8(9-23)

Last week, we read about Jesus calling Matthew to be a disciple. And then he brings him along to eat with tax collectors and sinners. Jesus is then confronted for transgressing the bounds of behavior. You don’t eat with those people. That’s the rule.

We see Jesus heal a woman suffering for twelve years and raise a girl from the dead.

Since last week’s gospel, Jesus also healed two blind men and one who was mute. 

Healing people is the overarching message we should be taking from the gospel at this point. Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount in chapters five through seven and then spends all of chapters eight and nine healing lots and lots of people.

This vision of the world: as full of people in need of healing: influences Jesus’s thinking. He keeps encountering people in their suffering. And not small things, like when I strained my achilles tendon a few weeks ago. Twelve years of suffering is serious.

So when Jesus looks at the crowds with the same eyes, he sees the suffering of a people. And something turns here. He sees the whole people. People who are harassed and helpless. 

Then the evangelist offers that phrase that sticks with us: they were “like sheep without a shepherd.” And we think: Leaderless.

But that doesn’t catch the whole thing.

Harassed and helpless

The word in this whole section I’ve ignored for years is that first one: harassed. Without it, this seems like it could be just about any collection of wayward people. We often feel helpless, don’t we? Confused? In need of a shepherd to lead us.

This is what we often do with scripture anyway. Make it something universal and applicable to our everyday life. Generic. The helplessness they feel can inform the helplessness we feel.

Except that isn’t really what is happening. Or what Jesus is expressing sympathy for.

He sees people who are being harassed and rendered helpless. 

And what harassment have we just read about in the text? Harassment for tax collectors and sinners. For those who eat with them. And those who don’t fast enough. The blind, the mute, and those possessed by demons. Even the woman whose suffering is ignored for twelve years.

But there’s something about seeing these as individual harassments linked to individual maladies that is just too easy. Because he sees the crowd as harassed and helpless. Not five thousand separate problems. One.

There is a common problem, a common harassment, that is causing mass suffering. And there is one blatantly obvious cause for it: Roman occupation.

Rome’s power over them. Power over their Temple. Making them all, as a people, victims of harassment. Helpless. Ultimately leaderless.

It is about power

If we were to take a universal reading from this, it is about power. Which is a really common theme within the gospels, after all. 

The people have no power and are victims of the powerful. They are harassed by the empire and Temple officials. And helpless in the face of it.

So then, what is the antidote? How would one hope to solve this problem of being harassed and helpless?

Giving them power, obviously!

But what does that really mean?

Kicking Sand

There’s an old comic I read as a kid. About a scrawny young man at the beach. A brawny brute comes along, kicks sand in his face, and steals his girlfriend. Too bad, skinny guy! That’s just how it is.

That young man gets the powers cosmic, becomes Silver Surfer and now has the power to humiliate his bully (and win the girl, too!).

This vision of power—of selfish and specific—plays on the reversal of fortunes. But always individually. This one kid is harassed and he gets the power to bully his tormenter. This isn’t any real solution to bullying.

When we keep these stories on the individual level, we obscure the truth that they tell us. That our culture encourages bullying as a sign of masculinity, for example. Or that communities watch helplessly while their people suffer. We gather in groups, like this one, and we say to each other: What can we do?

And then we pretend like the answer is automatically nothing.

Working together

Given that Jesus has spent the last two chapters “curing every disease and every sickness” there’s probably something more than nothing! Especially as his sympathy for the common plight leads him to distribute power to his disciples. They become apostles who can cure and heal and save like Jesus can.

And yet, it is also more than that; a sum greater than its parts.

This is a vision of shared power, offered as the antithesis of individual power. For, Jesus has just taken the power that is embedded in himself, in the one Messiah and made that power communal. It is a power shared by his followers. 

These problems were never individual. Jesus shares with the apostles and they become a we: able to solve community problems.

That some people don’t want the problems solved is a further reminder of the kind of problem we’re exploring. That we have common suffering because some use their power to make it thus! Because the nature of their problem, revealed in harassment and helplessness, is not a lack of individual power among the masses, but of communal power for the people.

We are quite familiar with the idea that powerful individuals can cause common suffering—and prevent common action. Like the anti-Reconstruction whites who tricked the white working class to hate the black working class. The byproduct wasn’t only deeply-rooted racism.  They did so to specifically prevent working class solidarity.

Apostleship is the antidote.

It is the antidote to common suffering. And the illusion that our suffering is always ours alone.

This is the Good News that Jesus brings. We call it liberation and freedom. It is also comfort to the afflicted and hope to the defeated.

It is action when we feel helpless. And guidance when we feel lost.

And it looks like teamwork, generosity, and community. We see it in pot luck dinners and gatherings of toiletries for the needy.

We have the power to change lives. By our love. Our faith. And our hope.

That is what Jesus keeps inviting us to see.

That it isn’t just love for one’s family or occasional acts of charity that he is inviting us to live into. It is a whole other way of being that we are still uncovering. Together. As a we. 

A great experiment that requires faith in God and our neighbors, love for them, and hope that a new world is possible.

And with the Spirit with us—a guide, a shepherd—it is. Our common world. Like heaven. But by our hands.