11th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Reflection: Be more compassionate
By SISTER MARY McGLONE
In 1965, in the heat of the Civil Rights Movement, Jimmie Lee Jackson, a Baptist deacon, was fatally shot in Marion, Ala., after being brutally beaten by state troopers for his participation in a voting rights march. As a result, ecumenical groups organized marches in Selma to support the right of African Americans to vote.
The Catholic bishop of the area forbade the priests and religious of his diocese to participate under pain of being banned from the diocese.
Sisters of St. Joseph from Rochester were staffing the only large hospital that served African Americans in Selma. While they were entirely committed to the rights of their people, they knew that following their conscience by participating in the marches would mean the end of their hospital. Their solution: offer hospitality to the visiting marchers and care for the injured. They exercised creative compassion — supporting a large number of priests and religious who came to witness to Christian values.
That sounds like today’s Gospel. We hear that as Jesus moved from town to town healing and preaching, his “heart was moved with compassion” by people in need. We hear that phrase twice in Matthew’s Gospel, in today’s Gospel and in Matthew 15, when Jesus “felt compassion” for people who sought him out, leading him to teach and feed them.
There are three common translations of the central word here: compassion, mercy and pity. The word in Greek is splanchnizomai — not exactly part of our everyday vocabulary. In case your Greek is a bit rusty, this word refers to movement in our “inward parts” or the womb. Its Hebrew counterpart is r-ch-m, a word with the same root as the word womb. The implication is that feeling this kind of compassion is tantamount to the emotion of a mother who feels the needs of her child. It’s a feeling of such intimate connection that another’s need moves your guts.
That was Jesus’ feeling for people seeking him. Like a nursing mother whose body responds when she hears her infant crying, his body as well as heart and mind were moved by their thirst for what he could offer. Then, as now, the need was greater than his own ability to respond.
So, he gathered his disciples and named 12 — a symbol of the 12 tribes of Israel — to share his mission. That meant that they were not only to have a share in his healing power, but that all they did would flow from the sort of compassion he felt.
This helps us understand the vital importance of his instruction to “ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers.” No one can assume this vocation on their own. It’s a mission, meaning that Christ sends and offers disciples the grace of sharing his own motivation — splanchnizomai.
To take on Jesus’ own motivation is an awesome and costly invitation: awesome because of the intimacy it entails with him, costly because it pulls us completely out of ourselves. As Ignatius of Loyola taught, Christian disciples interiorize God’s desire and therefore strive to become indifferent to the apparent success or failure of the mission and what it might give them in fame or disparagement, wealth or poverty, health or fragility.
Jesus knew that his disciples didn’t yet understand the motive and breadth of his mission. At the same time, he knew two other important facts: He could not do everything alone and, in the process of doing his work, his disciples learn what no words would ever teach them. So, he sent them out to comprehend his mission by immersing themselves in it.
The disciples went out proclaiming, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” That statement came true every time they healed people and confronted evil spirits, every time they gave people hope with Jesus’ message.
In a very real way, the sisters from Rochester did exactly the same thing. Finding their way around ecclesial restrictions, they confronted the evils of racism and what felt like hierarchical indifference, in compassionate and defiantly creative ways.
Today, suffering and injustice surround us. African Americans are still being disenfranchised, the poor throughout the world are losing access to services that respond to their most basic human needs, and as Pope Leo XIV pointed out, the world is “being ravaged by a handful of tyrants” who have the power to undermine the progress of the kingdom of heaven. They spend billions on killing while withholding their abundant resources that could preserve life.
The verse with today’s Alleluia acclamation says, “The kingdom of God is at hand.” Of course, it always has been and always will be. Today’s Gospel question asks how we might practice the creative compassion that incarnates it.
Reading 1
(Exodus 19: 2-6a)
In those days, the Israelites came to the desert of Sinai and pitched camp.
While Israel was encamped here in front of the mountain,
Moses went up the mountain to God.
Then the LORD called to him and said,
“Thus shall you say to the house of Jacob;
tell the Israelites:
You have seen for yourselves how I treated the Egyptians
and how I bore you up on eagle wings
and brought you here to myself.
Therefore, if you hearken to my voice and keep my covenant,
you shall be my special possession,
dearer to me than all other people,
though all the earth is mine.
You shall be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.”
Responsorial Psalm
(Psalm 100 1-3, 5)
R. We are his people: the sheep of his flock.
Sing joyfully to the LORD, all you lands;
serve the LORD with gladness;
come before him with joyful song.
R. We are his people: the sheep of his flock.
Know that the LORD is God;
he made us, his we are;
his people, the flock he tends.
R. We are his people: the sheep of his flock.
The LORD is good:
his kindness endures forever,
and his faithfulness to all generations.
R. We are his people: the sheep of his flock.
Reading 2
(Romans 5: 6-11)
Brothers and sisters:
Christ, while we were still helpless,
yet died at the appointed time for the ungodly.
Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person,
though perhaps for a good person
one might even find courage to die.
But God proves his love for us
in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.
How much more then, since we are now justified by his blood,
will we be saved through him from the wrath.
Indeed, if, while we were enemies,
we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son,
how much more, once reconciled,
will we be saved by his life.
Not only that,
but we also boast of God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
through whom we have now received reconciliation.
Gospel
(Matthew 9: 36- 10:8)
At the sight of the crowds, Jesus’ heart was moved with pity for them
because they were troubled and abandoned,
like sheep without a shepherd.
Then he said to his disciples,
“The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few;
so ask the master of the harvest
to send out laborers for his harvest.”
Then he summoned his twelve disciples
and gave them authority over unclean spirits
to drive them out and to cure every disease and every illness.
The names of the twelve apostles are these:
first, Simon called Peter, and his brother Andrew;
James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John;
Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax collector;
James, the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus;
Simon from Cana, and Judas Iscariot who betrayed him.
Jesus sent out these twelve after instructing them thus,
“Do not go into pagan territory or enter a Samaritan town.
Go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
As you go, make this proclamation: ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’
Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, drive out demons.
Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give.”