The First Saturday of Advent -- December 4, 2010

Matthew 9:35 - 10:8

Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”

Jesus called his twelve disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out evil spirits and to heal every disease and sickness.

These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon (who is called Peter) and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee, and his brother John; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.

These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. As you go, proclaim this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received, freely give.


My own understanding of God has evolved through the years. I think of God and describe the essence of God differently now than I did 20 years ago . . . or 5 years ago . . . or even 6 months ago. And I'm sure that a year or two from now, I'll have yet other images for who God is and how God is present in me, you and the world.

Right now, I'm taken by the image of God as endlessly Self-giving. That is, the chief characteristic of God is that God gives God's Self away. And God does so endlessly, without coming to a place of emptiness. God is not depleted in the spending. It is not as if God comes to the end of the reservoir and all that's left are dust and rocks. No . . . the more God gives away, the more God has to give. God is replenished in the giving.

The guiding image from the Gospels for this is the parable of the Sower, where God is imaged as walking through a field with a sack of seed, which generously and extravagantly God throws about the field, on the good soil and the bad, the rocky soil and the hardpan, into the weeds and among the grasses. God indiscriminately scatters the seed, not judging the soil on which it falls, only concerned that the seed be generously spent.

And what is the seed? What is it God gives away? When God gives God's Self, we experience God's giving in the world as mercy, compassion, healing, forgiveness, love and peace. Where we find the essence of these things authentically in the world, whatever their form, we can be assured that God has authored them.

So in the Gospel reading for today, when Jesus came upon people who were beat up by life, "harassed and helpless" -- or as one translation says, "lying prostrate from exhaustion" -- he spent compassion on them. "Compassion" is the summary word for the healing, cleansing, giving, straight-making, life-giving work that Jesus was doing among the people, as noted in these verses.

There is a bit of a catch in these verses, though, because Jesus doesn't do all the work. It's not about sitting in the cheap bleacher seats and applauding Jesus for his merciful interactions that bring healing and life to the harassed and helpless. Jesus sends his followers out to do the very things he has been doing, that is, to spend mercy and compassion in the world so that people will be healed.

Do you get the double cut here? On the one hand, the disciples become the seed that Jesus is scattering in the world. They embody the generosity of God, the Self-giving of God. Jesus is sending the disciples out -- not so much to have compassion as to be compassion -- into the world to embody his life and love. So from this Energy Center which is God, the disciples are propelled out into the world, carrying the very essence of Jesus within them.

And here's the second cut: What are they to do in the world? The very thing that Jesus has done . . . they are to scatter the same seeds of mercy, compassion and healing. They are to do what Jesus has been doing. They are the seeds . . . and then they scatter God-seeds of their own.

As God is generously Self-giving, so the followers of Jesus are to be generously self-giving. It is the way we become like God and experience union with God.

In the last verse Jesus puts the double-cut to his followers this way: "Freely you have received from God, now freely give away."

In other words, "You have received what God has sown in the world of God's Self. Now, give that away without fear that you'll be diminished. What you spend will be replenished. What you give away will never be depleted." This is the giving that will heal the world.