At first the sending forth in today’s gospel (Matthew 9:36-10:8) sounds doable: laborers for the harvest. There’s a certain novelty and delight in gathering the first lettuce or cherry tomatoes from the garden in June. But then Jesus ups the ante. As always, his expectations of us are startlingly high: cure the sick, raise the dead? Large order…
Not to dilute the call, but maybe to think of it from a slightly different angle. Health care workers by the thousands are laboring in hospitals, clinics, homes and offices to heal. Over and over, they show up without complaint, early in the morning, or for the night shift. For a fictional account of nurses working in ICUs during Covid, read Sacrament by Susan Straight, which I recently reviewed: https://uscatholic.org/articles/202606/sacrament-evokes-healthcare-workers-grace-and-heroism/. It shows dramatically the cost to nurses’ families when they had to work in isolation, always at high risk of becoming infected themselves. They rise to the occasion beautifully, becoming the healing hands of Christ to critically ill patients.
Raise the dead? Maybe not as dramatic as Lazarus, but my friend’s husband Tom died recently after a long illness during which she and her five children provided dedicated care. Even in their grief, they are now writing the obituary and eulogy, arranging the memorial service, handling countless details. In them and the eight grandchildren, Tom will resurrect—through a familiar facial expression or turn of phrase or way of thinking.
When Jesus asks us to do what seems preposterous, perhaps he means the ways that grace can make us our finest, bestest selves. Sometimes, after pulling off a task we dreaded, we say with surprise, “I handled that rather well…” We organize a closet, call a lonely friend or get ahead of a deadline. But Jesus isn’t at all surprised. He simply grins, “Knew you could do it!”
Kathy Coffey 