Let me tell you a story about Bob and Tony. They were brothers who decided to order a kit car and build it together. They both were car enthusiasts and thought it would be a great way to bond with each other. So they put in the order and waited. Initially, the company they ordered it from said that it would be there in a week. When it didn’t come in a week, Bob got frustrated and called their customer service line. After about forty five minutes listening to their hold music, Bob was connected with a “customer service specialist” who apologized and informed him that they had not gotten a certain part and that it would probably be a few weeks delayed. Frustrated, Bob thanked the agent for her help and promptly hung up on her. Finally, a month later, the kit finally arrived. “It’s about time!” Bob thought as he looked out his front window at the series of large boxes FedEx was unloading on his driveway. He immediately called Tony and told him, “The kit is finally here. How soon can you come over?”
Tony drove over early that evening and together they started looking at the directions. The instructions said to set the body on a four wheeled furniture dolly and put it in the garage. The only problem was, Bob’s garage was currently full of junk. He hadn’t yet cleared it out. When Tony mentioned that they should probably do that first, Bob said, “That can wait, let’s start sorting out the parts. I want to see what we’ve got!” For the next hour they became engrossed looking through all the different boxes and sorting the parts. As it turned out, they were so engrossed that they didn’t notice the dark clouds moving in. When raindrops finally started to hit, before Bob and Tony could move anything under cover, it began pouring. Instead of starting their project that day, they were delayed yet further because the boxes all got soaked and had to dry out over the course of several days before they could be moved. Also, they still had to clear out the garage.
Today in the Gospel we see the Lord at work with the Apostles. First, we see Jesus’ heart moved with pity for the crowds, those desperately looking for the guidance of the Shepherd of their souls, those who for so long had been awaiting the Messiah. So Jesus summons the Twelve and gives them His own authority, instructing them at that point to go to the “lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Here He is sending them to their own people who are desperately in need of Jesus, the Good Shepherd.
We can recognize here that Jesus had a specific order for doing things. First, He called and equipped His apostles. He walked with them and taught them, continuing to heal each one of his brokenness within. Matthew, the human author of this Gospel, knew well his own struggles. When he listed the apostles, including himself, he made sure to add the detail that he had been a tax collector, almost as if to show that the Lord had healed him from that separation from his own people which would have come about due to his collusion with the occupying Romans. But Jesus called and Matthew followed, finding healing. Matthew and all the Apostles still had their hangups and failures, but they all experienced ongoing healing as they moved forward with the Lord. In all of them, there was the clear willingness to be sent out by Jesus. When Jesus summons them, they come and follow His commission.
Jesus is very specific at this time, likely sending them to those that He knew were prepared to receive the Good News, those lost sheep of God’s people, Israel. Later, Jesus would commision them to go out into all the world proclaiming the Good News, but not yet. He knows His timing, His order.
That ordering by the Lord is something for all of us to consider in our hearts this Sunday. We can see two levels of ordering in what Jesus is about. First, He puts the Apostles’ own hearts in order, then He sends them out in an orderly way–not just to anyone, but to those whom He has prepared at that time to receive the Gospel. Later on, before His Ascension into Heaven, Jesus expands His call for the Apostles to go out to all people. He knows that the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost will prepare the hearts of people everywhere to receive the Good News, so that is when He commissions them to go to all the world.
So there is that order to Jesus’ call when He gives it to us. First, He wants to order and heal our hearts interiorly to prepare us to follow the order of His call to serve others. The principle at play with the Apostles and all of us is that Jesus doesn’t call us because of our greatness, He calls us knowing that we are weak and broken by sin, and He heals us in order to send us out. He doesn’t call the equipped, He equips those He calls. St. Paul was very aware of this. He reminds us today:
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.
Let’s all take this to heart. We don’t have to be perfect for God to use us. He calls us in the midst of our unworthiness and equips us for mission. I think the difficulty some of us have is that we think that just because we are here in Church, we have done what we need to do. But that is getting it totally backwards. Whether we realize it or not, we are here because we are in need of God! We come with our brokenness and weakness to be made whole and strengthened by the Lord in order to be sent out.
Too often, like Bob in my story from the beginning, we get focused on the wrong things first. He set himself back by his impatience. If he had just listened, the car would have been built much more speedily, but he was unwilling to respect the order of the instructions and the advice of his brother. Our own hearts can have that same temptation to get the order wrong. We think that if we just do a few more things, try this or that strategy, maybe we can draw our family and friends to come to church. We forget the first step of letting God heal and reorder our hearts and just jump ahead to our own plans. It would be like the Apostles telling Jesus, “OK, thanks for your call, Lord, we’ll take it from here!” We don’t want to do this. The one Apostle who did? Judas. Let’s not be Judas.
When we get into that wrong mindset, our attitude toward Mass and the Sacraments can become distorted as well. We can falsely look at them as our own possession, rather than the gift of God. We think that if people just do what we tell them to do, we can make them ready to share in the prize of the Sacraments that we receive as the chosen ones.
God’s order is different. He invites us to recognize that nothing we enjoy in the Sacraments is earned. In these wonderful encounters with Jesus, we are filled, not because of the greatness of our love or effort, but because of the greatness of God’s love for us! “Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give.” In Jesus’ day, roving preachers would come through and charge for people to hear them or be healed by them. They charged because their mission was about themselves, so they were concerned with profit. Jesus sent the twelve out to preach and heal freely, because it wasn’t about them, it was about Jesus and His Kingdom!
God wants us to recognize our brokenness and inability to live without Him, to come humbly so that we might taste freely and deeply the sweetness of His abundant, everlasting love and come to desire more! He invites us to have our hearts reordered by Him so that He is in charge and we can be open to the mission He has for us–listening for His call and looking for who He is sending us to–those whose hearts He is already preparing to receive Him. And when we respect this order it allows us to go out like the Apostles, humbly empowered to let Him work through us.
Too often, we fail to taste the Lord’s love more fully because we have forgotten or ignored His great gift in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. If we are carrying around mortal sins on our souls, we are blocking ourselves from the deep encounter with God’s love that He intends us to have. If it has been more than a year, that in and of itself is a grave matter, because you are disobeying a precept of the Church, who, with Jesus’ authority, requires sharing in Reconciliation at least once a year! Remember–the three conditions for mortal sin are grave matter (the sin is serious), full knowledge (you know it is serious) and full freedom (you do it anyway). If that is where you are, please wait to come to Communion until you have tasted of Jesus’ abundant healing love in Confession. Because without that healing your heart won’t be ready to receive the awesome gift of Jesus Himself here in the Eucharist!
Come to the Confessional to allow Jesus to put things in order in your heart. Come to experience the peace of knowing for certain that through the priest in the Confessional, Jesus wipes away all your sins and renews your heart to follow Him. And if you have been to Reconciliation recently, praise God! Know that Jesus wants you to drink ever more fully of His love each time you receive Him in the Eucharist.
“Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give.” This is the order–freely receive Jesus and His love, then freely give His Love. All too often, we run out in front of Jesus’ grace and find ourselves failing miserably, like Bob staring at those rain soaked boxes on his driveway.
He wants to equip you to go out, just like the Apostles, because this world needs you to be on mission. There are so many lost sheep all around us, so many starving for the love He poured out on the Cross for them. Will you let Jesus heal you by His love and then lead you to the lost sheep in your life so that He might touch them through you? Right now, close your eyes and ask the Holy Spirit to put one of those lost sheep on your heart. Come, Holy Spirit, show us the lost sheep you need us to reach out to. Now, please repeat this prayer after me:
+Jesus, help me to encounter Your love.
Fill me to overflowing with Your love.
Send me to the lost sheep you have shown me.
Let that person sense Your love through me
And let them thirst for more. Amen. +