11th Sunday Reflection: The Harvest Is Rich But The Labourers Are Few
Franciscan Reflections From The Hermitage – Eleventh Sunday In Ordinary Time – The Harvest Is Rich But The Labourers Are Few – (Matthew 9:36-10:8)
Ask the Lord of the harvest to send labourers… but has the servant become the sentinel, the gatekeeper of the harvest?
Pride is always that desire within me to be more important; more attractive; more acknowledged than others. Pride fails to acknowledge the good works of others. In St Francis Admonition eight, there is a great insight into the envy that follows such pride. St Francis writes that envy of another in what God does through them is blasphemy because in reality, we envy God who is the source of all good. That is why this empty arrogance often hides behind the law, behind being right, being righteous; hides behind a face of virtue, respectability, self-sacrifice and extreme diligence. This is the face that pride wears as it crucifies the Christ.
Perhaps we have forgotten that we are a people on a journey. And when we set out on a journey, when we are on a path, we always discover new things, things which we did not know. Perhaps we have closed ourselves off to the God of surprises.
Do I believe that the story ends with Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection? Or do I believe that the journey moves forward toward maturity, toward the manifestation of God’s glory?
Am I capable of understanding the signs of the times and of being faithful to the Lord’s voice? It is necessary that we ask these questions, and ask the Lord for a heart that Loves the Love. This calls to mind the tearful mourning of St Francis, “Love is not Loved”.
We cannot give what we do not have, only transformed people transform others through the grace of Christ. Christ is the Master of the harvest. Yet as a corporate Body, the Church has created a system of elite ‘labourers’, a system of patronage, corruption and ‘Gatekeeper Politics’ that regulates access to resources and opportunities through this controlling elite.
If we allow ourselves to become enculturated into these values we lose our ability to be gospel bearers and peacemakers. Transforming our wounds through the light of Christ, we become peace. If we do not transform our wounds, our pain and suffering, we will always transmit these wounds to others.
The effect of the sickness of sin is always a loss that leads to fragmentation and estrangement between people, God and the very earth that is our home. Such a loss of Love is the loss of the very life blood of the heart and leads to death… the great infection that leads to all greed, suffering war and death. Pray the Lord of the harvest to send labourers…
Thomas Merton warned that it’s a risky thing to pray, and the danger is that our very prayers get between God and us. The great thing in prayer is not to pray, but to go directly to God. If saying your prayers is an obstacle to prayer, cut it out. The best way to pray is: stop. Let prayer pray within you, whether you know it or not. This means a deep awareness of our true inner identity. It implies a life of faith, but also of doubt. You can’t have faith without doubt. Give up the business of suppressing doubt. Doubt and faith are two sides of the same thing. Faith will grow out of doubt, the real doubt. We don’t pray right because we evade doubt. And we evade it by regularity and by activism. It is in these two ways that we create a false identity, and these are also the two ways by which we justify the self-perpetuation of our institutions.
There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralises our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”
There have been many re-founding of orders and foundations. It is always a scary prospect to be involved in such enterprises. People become thoroughly invested in protecting their comfort zone … authority and power.
But sooner or later, life leads each one of us into the belly of the whale, into a place we can’t fix, control, explain, or understand. That’s where transformation most easily and deeply happens. That’s when we’re uniquely in the hands of God because we cannot “handle” it ourselves.
The kingdom of God lies within us; the glory of God bursting to shine out into our world. Are we getting in the Way as ‘protective gate-keepers’, not going through ourselves but becoming stumbling blocks to those the Master is calling?
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