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| Corn Harvest by Bruegel |
Matthew 9:35–10:1, 10:5a, 6–8
Chapter 9
35 And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every infirmity. 36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. 37 Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; 38 pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”
Chapter 10
1 And he called to him his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every infirmity.
5 These twelve Jesus sent out, charging them, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans,
6 but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. 7 And preach as you go, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ 8 Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. You received without paying, give without pay.
Cited in the Catechism: In promulgating the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Blessed John Paul II explained that the Catechism "is a statement of the Church's faith and of catholic doctrine, attested to or illumined by Sacred Scripture, the Apostolic Tradition and the Church's Magisterium." He went on to "declare it to be a sure norm for teaching the faith and thus a valid and legitimate instrument for ecclesial communion" (Fidei Depositum). Passages from this Gospel reading are cited in the Catechism paragraphs 543, 1509, 2121, 2443 and 2611.
Commentary
The Need for Good Pastors
9:35. The Second Vatican Council uses this passage when teaching about the message of Christian charity which the Church should always be spreading: “Christian charity is extended to all without distinction of race, social condition or religion, and seeks neither gain nor gratitude. Just as God loves us with a gratuitous love, so too the faithful, in their charity, should be concerned for mankind, loving it with that same love with which God sought man. As Christ went about all the towns and villages healing every sickness and infirmity, as a sign that the Kingdom of God had come, so the Church, through its children, joins itself with men of every condition, but especially with the poor and afflicted, and willingly spends herself for them” (Ad gentes, 12).
9:36. “He had compassion for them”: the Greek verb is very expressive; it means “he was deeply moved”. Jesus was moved when he saw the people, because their pastors, instead of guiding them and tending them, led them astray, behaving more like wolves than genuine shepherds of their flock. Jesus sees the prophecy of Ezekiel 34 as now being fulfilled; in that passage God, through the prophet, upbraids the false shepherds of Israel and promises to send them the Messiah to be their new leader.
“If we were consistent with our faith when we looked around us and contemplated the world and its history, we would be unable to avoid feeling in our own hearts the same sentiments that filled the heart of our Lord” (St J. Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, 133). Reflection on the spiritual needs of the world should lead us to be tirelessly apostolic.
9:37–38. After contemplating the crowds neglected by their shepherds, Jesus uses the image of the harvest to show us that that same crowd is ready to receive the effects of Redemption: “I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see now the fields are already white for harvest” (Jn 4:35). The field of the Jewish people cultivated by the prophets—most recently by John the Baptist—is full of ripe wheat. In farmwork, the harvest is lost if the farmer does not reap at the right time; down the centuries the Church feels a similar need to be out harvesting because there is a big harvest ready to be won.
However, as in the time of Jesus, there is a shortage of labourers. Our Lord tells us how to deal with this: we should pray God, the Lord of the harvest, to send the necessary labourers. If a Christian prays hard, it is difficult to imagine his not feeling urged to play his part in this apostolate. In obeying this commandment to pray for labourers, we should pray especially for there to be no lack of good shepherds, who will be able to equip others with the necessary means of sanctification needed to back up the apostolate.
In this connexion Paul VI reminds us: “the responsibility for spreading the Gospel that saves belongs to everyone—to all those who have received it! The missionary duty concerns the whole body of the Church; in different ways and to different degrees, it is true, but we must all of us be united in carrying out this duty. Now let the conscience of every believer ask himself: Have I carried out my missionary duty? Prayer for the Missions is the first way of fulfilling this duty” (Angelus Address, 23 October 1977).
The calling of the twelve apostles
10:1–4. Jesus calls his twelve apostles after recommending to them to pray to the Lord to send labourers into his harvest (cf. Mt 9:38). Christians’ apostolic action should always, then, be preceded and accompanied by a life of constant prayer: apostolate is a divine affair, not a merely human one. Our Lord starts his Church by calling twelve men to be, as it were, twelve patriarchs of the new people of God, the Church. This new people is established not by physical but by spiritual generation. The names of those apostles are specifically mentioned here. They were not scholarly, powerful or important people: they were average, ordinary people who responded faithfully to the grace of their calling—all of them, that is, except Judas Iscariot. Even before his death and resurrection Jesus confers on them the power to cast out unclean spirits and cure illnesses—as an earnest sign of and as training for the saving mission which he will entrust to them.
The Church reveres these first Christians in a very special way and is proud to carry on their supernatural mission, and to be faithful to the witness they bore to the teaching of Christ. The true Church is absent unless there is uninterrupted apostolic succession and identification with the spirit which the apostles made their own.
“Apostle”: this word means “sent”; Jesus sent them out to preach his Kingdom and pass on his teaching. The Second Vatican Council, in line with Vatican I, “confesses” and “declares” that the Church has a hierarchical structure: “The Lord Jesus, having prayed at length to the Father, called to himself those whom he willed and appointed twelve to be with him, whom he might send to preach the Kingdom of God (cf. Mk 3:13–19; Mt 10:1–10). These apostles (cf. Lk 6:13) he constituted in the form of a college or permanent assembly, at the head of which he placed Peter, chosen from among them (cf. Jn 21:15–17). He sent them first of all to the children of Israel and then to all peoples (cf. Rom 1:16), so that, sharing in his power, they might make all peoples his disciples and sanctify and govern them (cf. Mt 28:16–20; Mk 16:15; Lk 24:45–48; Jn 20:21–23) and thus spread the Church and, administering it under the guidance of the Lord, shepherd it all days until the end of the world (cf. Mt 28:20)” (Lumen gentium, 19).
10:1. In this chapter St Matthew describes how Jesus, with a view to the spreading of the Kingdom of God which he inaugurates, decides to establish a Church, which he does by giving special powers and training to these twelve men who are its seed.
The apostles’ first mission
10:5–15. After revealing his intention to found the Church by choosing the Twelve (vv. 1–4), in the present passage he shows that he intends to start training these first apostles. In other words, from early on in his public ministry he began to lay the foundations of his Church. Everyone needs doctrinal and apostolic training to follow his Christian calling. The Church has a duty to teach, and the faithful have a parallel duty to make that teaching their own. Therefore, every Christian should avail himself or herself of the facilities for training which the Church offers—which will vary according to a person’s circumstances.
10:5–6. In his plan of salvation God gave certain promises (to Abraham and the patriarchs), a Covenant and a Law (the Law of Moses), and sent the prophets. The Messiah would be born into this chosen people, which explains why the Messiah and the Kingdom of God were to be preached to the house of Israel before being preached to Gentiles. Therefore, in their early apprenticeship, Jesus restricts the apostles’ area of activity to the Jews, without this taking from the worldwide scope of the Church’s mission. As we will see, much later on he charges them to “go and make disciples of all nations” (Mt 28:19); “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to the whole creation” (Mk 16:16). The apostles also, in the early days of the spread of the Church, usually sought out the Jewish community in any new city they entered, and preached first to them (cf. Acts 13:46).
10:7–8. Previously, the prophets, when speaking of the messianic times, had used imagery suited to the people’s spiritual immaturity. Now, Jesus, in sending his apostles to proclaim that the promised Kingdom of God is imminent, lays stress on its spiritual dimension. The powers mentioned in verse 8 are the very sign of the Kingdom of God or the reign of the Messiah proclaimed by the prophets. At first (chaps. 8 and 9) it is Jesus who exercises these messianic powers; now he gives them to his disciples as proof that his mission is divine (Is 35:5–6; 40:9; 52:7; 61:1).
Source: The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries. Biblical text from the Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries by members of the Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, Spain.
Published by Four Courts Press, Kill Lane, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland, and by Scepter Publishers in the United States. We encourage readers to purchase The Navarre Bible for personal study. See Scepter Publishers for details.
"Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ." St Jerome
