Homily for Tuesday, 6 July 2021– Ferial

Readings of the day: Genesis 32:23-33; Psalm 17:1b, 2-3, 6-7ab, 8b, 15; Matthew 9:32-38

Tuesday of the 14th week in Ordinary Time

Whenever I hear today’s Gospel reading, I am saddened somewhat by Matthew’s description of the crowds following Jesus about from village to village while he healed their “every disease and every sickness” as “like sheep without a shepherd.”

The question I ask myself when I hear this—the crowds were “like sheep without a shepherd”—is how Jesus responds to this situation of the crowds. One word stands out for me in this respect: Jesus responds to the situation of the crowds—lost, scattered, “harassed and helpless,” with their diseases and sicknesses in need of healing, their being like “like sheep without a shepherd”—with compassion. Jesus, Matthew says, “had compassion for them.”

True compassion is difficult. At least as Jesus, or Matthew, understand it, compassion is a full-person, body-and-soul experience. The word Matthew uses to describe Jesus compassion toward the crowds is rather graphic: Here, Jesus is (figuratively, we might hope) moved to his inmost depths for the people following him.

The other day, I was reading one of my favourite Catholic blogs, called “Where Peter Is.” This blog reported on a letter Pope Francis handwrote to Jesuit Fr. James Martin both to congratulate Fr. Martin’s nephew on his confirmation and to thank Fr. Martin for his ministry (which is controversial among many people) with LGBTQ+ Catholics. Pope Francis writes in his letter to Fr. Martin, “The Father’s ‘style’ has three features: Closeness, compassion, and tenderness.”

The “Where Peter Is” article points out that emphasis on compassion, connected to pastoral closeness and tenderness, is nothing new for Pope Francis. Compassion is a major focus of Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, which the “Where Peter Is” article calls “the programmatic text of [Francis’] pontificate.”

Evangelii Gaudium often connects compassion to attentive listening to the faithful in their concrete life situations. Listening with compassion, Pope Francis says in Evangelii Gaudium, helps us to hear “the outcry of the poor” and suffering. When sin is present, compassionate listening can help us “to correct others and to help them to grow on the basis of a recognition of the objective evil of their actions… but without making judgments about their responsibility and culpability.” Pope Francis goes so far as to say that “only thorough such respectful and compassionate listening can we enter on the paths of true growth and awaken a yearning for the Christian ideal: The desire to respond fully to God’s love and to bring to fruition what he has sown in our lives.”

I wonder if this may make compassion, together with attentive listening, closeness and tenderness, to seem easier than these are. I have experienced, as I am sure is true of anybody who is engaged in any pastoral ministry, that compassion, listening, closeness, and tenderness take constant practice. Compassion, the ability to be moved to our depths, so to speak, by another’s need, is a self-emptying experience. But I think its faithful and constant practice will help us to respond to all kinds of situations in which the faithful find themselves “like sheep without a shepherd,” whether it is in ministry to the poor, to the LGBTQ+ community (as in Fr. Martin’s ministry) or, for instance, the long process of compassion, penance, and reconciliation in light of our Church’s participation in the Indian Residential Schools in Canada.

May our ministry, our encounter with the People of God in their joys and also their needs and perhaps suffering, be a ministry of growth in compassion, in listening, closeness and tenderness in a way in which we empty ourselves; in ways in which we emulate Jesus who had compassion for the crowds who followed him.