What do you see?

When we look at a crowd of people, we may see different things.

Sometimes we may see the crowd as an obstacle course we must traverse to get where we are going.

Sometimes we may see the crowd as a large number of people that make us uncomfortable. They may seem strange to us or to have obvious problems.

In today’s Gospel (Mt. 9:32-38), our Lord sees the crowds and is “moved with compassion for them.”

We need to see with the eyes of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ: looking upon the troubled multitudes around us and across the world with true compassion.

But Christ’s compassion is not an empty empathy (“I feel your pain. Bye-bye.”): Christ’s compassion is active and effective – as ours too should be.

How did Christ manifest his compassion? First, with prayer.

Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest,
that he will send forth labourers into his harvest.

Then, in the next two chapters, our Lord goes into action: he both gets others involved in the work and also immerses himself in the task

And it came to pass,
when Jesus
had made an end of commanding his twelve disciples,
he departed thence to teach and to preach in their cities.
(11:1)

So too when we encounter people in our lives – even crowds of people – with Christ’s help we need to look upon these people with compassion, lift them up in prayer, follow God’s will in meeting their needs, and get others to join us in doing Christ’s work.

The harvest is abundant...

Pray...