14th Sunday 2022
Isaiah 66: 10-14; Galatians 6: 8-14; Luke 10:1-12, 17-20.
“Ask the Lord of the harvest to send labourers to His harvest.” The word on which I would like to focus is “labourers”. As one of my duties as a Sixth Form tutor in the early days of my priesthood, I used to join the lads in what was known as “public work”.
It was timetabled on a Monday afternoon, and entailed anything from gardening to painting benches. I much preferred the latter: gardening has never been my forte and I tend to go by the motto “if in doubt, let it sprout”, though I would happily uproot such abominations as parsnips and broccoli, an invasive species if ever there was one.
Generally, the Sixth Form enjoyed their hour or so working in the open air or in the outhouses, though I recall one occasion when a colleague of mine, growing exasperated with one youth who was effectively skiving, admonished him rather tartly with the rebuke “The Lord wants labourers for His harvest, not fairies for the bottom of His garden”. I should point out, lest I be accused of homophobia, that this was purely a reference to his idleness, and carried no inference about his sexuality.
As Christians, we are called to labour, in our various ways, in the harvest. For consecrated religious, and for priests, the call takes on a particular urgency. Religious brothers and sisters have their own tasks. Of priests, it used to be said that they “don’t do very much, and they do it early in the morning”.
Some priests took umbrage at that, and would list all that the average priest does, as if he is uniquely hard-working and overstretched. I have never subscribed to that theory, or been impressed by that response. Admittedly, the priest is on call outside normal working hours, but so are many other people, not least the parents of young children, and to claim, as I have heard some do, that because of his supposed availability, a priest works a twenty four hour day, is unmitigated baloney.
What then should a priest be doing, if he is to be a genuine labourer in the harvest? The fashionable answer is “evangelisation”, coupled with the call to be a “missionary disciple”. I have to tread very carefully here, because I am aware that both expressions are used by Pope Francis, for whom I have not only loyalty but also an immense admiration. Nevertheless, if I am to be honest, I have to put my head above the parapet and say that I really don’t know what these expressions mean.
Am I, are you, expected to head out like the seventy two of today’s Gospel, walking through towns, knocking on doors, asking “Have you heard the Good News of the Lord Jesus?”? If so, I have to enter a nolle prosequi. I am neither willing nor able to do it. My brief experience of conducting parish missions showed me that, and I have long had a deep distrust, and indeed disgust, for those “evangelicals” who prowl the staircases and corridors of universities, spreading confusion, dismay, and a most un-Christlike form of Christianity.
Part of me is convinced that, with the greatest respect to the Holy Father, both “evangelisation” and “missionary disciples” are examples of those Crackerjack words of which the Church is inordinately fond. (You may remember the children’s television programme “Crackerjack” in which the youthful audience had to shout “Crackerjack!” in unison whenever the word in question was mentioned.)
Holy Mother Church has, over the past half century, had a succession of such words: community, celebration, evangelisation, mission, and now evangelisation again and missionary disciples. I stand open to being convinced that these words actually mean something, and are not simply jargon and gobbledeygook, but no one has yet offered a convincing definition of any of them.
So we are brought back to the question “What are we supposed to do?” In search of an answer, I have to return to my original chosen word “labourers”. I do know what “labourers” means: it means “people who work”.
What then are we to work at? I would answer “Whatever God gives us to work at”. There are so many tasks under our noses: “all kinds of service to be done”, as St. Paul puts it. Perhaps the first thing is to pray for vision, that God may show us what to do here and now, and then to do it. I suspect that, if we are really serious in our prayer, God will give us enough tasks for a lifetime. Then perhaps we shall be able to consign the Crackerjack words to the compost heap at the bottom of the garden, though not, I hope, to help grow parsnips or broccoli.
