In this passage, we get a picture of how the love of Christ works. When Jesus saw the crowds, he saw their pain. Truly seeing requires more attention than most of us give.
He sees them as three things: harassed, helpless and like sheep without a shepherd. They were harassed and troubled by life, poverty, oppression and disease. They were helpless against this suffering, and entirely without outside help to address it.
Unlike Jesus, we tend to wear blinders to suffering. When we pull up next to someone begging on a street corner, we tend to look straight ahead and hope the light changes. In our information age, we can get “disaster fatigue” as the sheer amount of data about suffering can numb us to it. We become so overwhelmed with what we can’t do that we can ignore the little that we can do.
In Luke, Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan as an example of seeing suffering and responding to it. Christ’s very presence on earth, through the incarnation, was a living example of compassion for humanity.
This love led him to respond in three ways listed here. He taught the people who God was. He called people into his kingdom, and he brought physical healing and fullness to the sick and broken.
We are called to both proclaim the love of God, and to be the mechanism of God’s love in this world.
But Jesus does not stop there. He sees the suffering, responds in compassion to alleviate that suffering, but then closes this section by bringing others into this process. This is God’s plan – for us to bring others into the active love of God. We are not called to be silent about what we are doing, but rather to bring more people into it.
There are many on need – “the harvest is plenty” – but too few who respond in the radical love of Christ.
Our focus should be on the wholeness of people, both physical and spiritual. There are three practical ways we can do this.
The first is through our affluence. Most of us in America are fantastically wealthy in a the global context. We can share this with those doing good work.
We can use our influence, in various different ways, whether on behalf of people or directly into their lives.
And finally, we can give our time.
At Advent, we celebrate the coming of God to restore humanity, and we seek to answer His call to join Him in that restoration: pointing people to Him, meeting their needs directly, and bringing others into this cycle of love.
– Sermon Notes, Jeff Krabach, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA, December 17, 2017
Matthew 9:35-38
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