11th Sunday 2023
Exodus 19:2-6; Romans 5:6-11; Matthew 9:36, 10:8
I love that second reading. St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans isn’t exactly a bag of laughs, nor is it always easy to understand—disagreements over its interpretation may be said to have triggered the Reformation—but it contains some real gems within it.
Today’s passage is one of them. Why is that so? It is because of the consolation, the encouragement, the re-assurance which it offers. All of us need to be consoled at times, to be encouraged at times—and bear in mind that the word “(en)courage” is rooted in the Latin word cor meaning “heart”, so to encourage someone is to put heart into them—and all of us need re-assurance.
St. Paul here re-assures us of God’s love for us; God’s determination not to let us fall out of His hands. He bases this re-assurance on Christ’s death for us, a redemptive death which we did not deserve, to which we were not entitled.
“What proves that God loves us” writes Paul, “is that Christ died for us while we were still sinners.” Effectively we were not on God’s side: as a species, we had let God down, fallen away from Him. Despite this, He sent His only Son to die on our behalf, a sacrifice on the Father’s part which beggars our imagination. Having made this sacrifice, Paul implies, God is not going to waste it by letting us be lost.
He then gives us a further ground for re-assurance, namely that we are filled with joyful trust in God. Are we? And what does Paul mean by it?
Are we supposed to go around wearing smiley badges saying “Smile, Jesus loves you”? I have to confess that the sight of such a badge fills me with an almost irresistible temptation to bop the wearer on the nose, and then say “Try smiling now, sunshine”.
What Paul is urging us to display is not a superficial jollity, but something which goes much deeper. It is something which lies at the very heart of us, which remains within us at difficult times, when we may be incapable of smiling, and when we cling on to trust only by our fingertips. Do you, do I, have that joyful trust? We should have it, says St. Paul, we have every reason to have it, because the Son of God died for us, and God is therefore very much on our side. That belief, that knowledge, should sustain us even in the darkest times.
Our Lord Himself knew that we would endure dark times. He knew it from His own experience: He knew it too from the people He saw around Him. These people, we are told, were harassed and dejected, like sheep without a shepherd.
What was His response? It was to choose the twelve apostles and to send them out, effectively to be healers, to be shepherds, who would console the wandering, dejected flock. Notice what the Twelve are to do. They are not to threaten the people with eternal damnation. Instead, they are to “proclaim that the Kingdom of Heaven is close at hand, (to) cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils,” and to do it all without charge.
How positive is all of that? And how positively, OR NOT, have preachers throughout the ages proclaimed what is, after all, Good News? Yes, of course, Jesus elsewhere punctuates His preaching with the word “repent”, but the basic meaning of that is not “beat yourself up for being a sinner”, but have a change of outlook, of focus, of heart—be changed, if you like, from negativity to positivity. And through it all runs this thread of compassion, of concern to heal, to comfort, to renew.
Who is to do this? Firstly, the apostles, from whom we consider the bishops to be descended, with their co-workers, the priests and deacons. Anybody else? At Sinai, God tells Moses that the whole people of Israel are to be “a Kingdom of priests, a consecrated nation”, and in the First Letter of St. Peter, that designation is applied to the Church.
We are all a priestly people. Those who are ordained have a special role within that people, but each of you is called to be a source of healing and consolation, a sign of the Kingdom, to the harassed and dejected people of today. Can you do that? Yes, you can, because, as St. Paul has told us, Christ died for you. Thus, we come back to our starting point.
