When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. (Matthew 9:36)
Matthew is describing how he thinks the crowds affected Jesus. He had compassion for them. You may remember that word compassion – in the Greek it is rather more colourful than our politer English. The Greek word literally refers to the bowels, the viscera – that is the way the old KJV sometimes translates it – and indeed that is where some people experience emotion. Jesus was disturbed and upset by what he saw. Why…? They were harassed and helpless, it says.
Harassed… well, some manuscripts have one word for this and some have another. If you choose word #1, it means they were torn, vexed, troubled, annoyed; word #2 means they were exhausted, fainting, despondent… unstrung says one authority. You get the picture... they didn’t have a lot going for them. And “helpless” is a Greek word which literally means thrown aside, discarded. So, they are anxious and confused. There was anger and defeat. They seemed to Jesus, says Matthew, like sheep without a shepherd.
Theologians like to talk about “the human condition”. Whatever that is, it’s pretty dire. In New Zealand, beautiful, blessed and remote… even here we have the classic indicators of distress... eruptions of violence, inequalities and social injustices, prejudice and paranoia, diseases we shouldn’t have, insecure employment and income, serious damage to the environment and natural resources… Our anxieties are there when people meet.
A funeral I attended was bereft of inspiration, faith or living hope. There were good people there, but one or two generations removed from any vital faith or ideals, living now on sentimentalism, sport, Steinlager and shallow clichés. I would say, sheep without a shepherd. But if you say that it’s heard as patronising… and the religion people see they widely dismiss as compromised and irrelevant. And they are not entirely wrong about that. The religion the 1st century crowds saw – the priests, scribes and pharisees, the temple system -- which Jesus also saw, was compromised, exploitative and élitist.
Jesus’s visceral reaction to crowds of needy and anxious people is echoed by contemplative teachers of our time, who highlight what they call Jesus’s preference for the poor – not only poor economically, but starved of hope and ideals, dependent on divisions and discrimination. You can’t read the New Testament gospels without seeing how, time and again, Jesus is drawn by human need, rather than by celebrity or achievement, status or power. Nicodemus, the Woman of Samaria… just two, by no means economically deprived, but whom Jesus met in the poverty of their minds and hearts.
It is time (kairos) for contemplative life and prayer, not as a solution or panacea, let alone as an escape, but as a way forward in faith, a way to live in wisdom and peace. We learn to be at peace, as Jesus put it, without enemies, without hostility. We learn not to be afraid, not to be ruled by our fears of the future and of mortality. We learn to speak peace, and to love our neighbour by seeing our neighbour as God sees, and as we ourselves are seen, in truth, realism and love. In stillness and silence we are consenting to change in ourselves, and a realistic appraisal of what we can and cannot do. Go in peace, says Jesus – and one reason at any rate for that is that we are unlikely to be much use in human need otherwise.
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