Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
/Dominica XVI per Annum B
21 July 2024
We have a rather brief Gospel passage today that draws upon prophecy from the Old Testament. The first reading from the Prophet Jeremiah gives us some insight into the background of the Gospel passage. The prophet Jeremiah speaks of wicked and sinful shepherds who mislead and scatter the flock. The sinfulness of their religious authorities, leads God’s people into idolatry and dissolves their proper identity. Ten of the twelve tribes of God’s people settle in the north and these ten tribes come to be called Israel. The remaining two tribes in the south come to be called Judah. Israel, the ten tribes in the north, pay the price for their idolatry when they are invaded by Assyria and taken away into exile. From there, they are scattered among the Gentile nations in the region, mixed in with other peoples, such that they are lost, their proper bloodline cannot be identified. Using the image from Jeremiah, the sheep have been scattered and driven away and bad shepherds have contributed to this. Jeremiah goes on to prophecy about God’s solution. God Himself will gather the remnant of the flock and he will appoint new shepherds over the people. This is to take place in the time of the Messiah, for Jeremiah says the promise that God Himself will do this will take place when a shoot is raised up from David. And then both Judah and Israel will be saved and will dwell in security.
In the Gospel we are in the time of the Messiah. Jesus is identified with the promise of a righteous shoot from David. Jesus is the priest, the prophet, and the king whose throne will last forever. He is also the shepherd who will fulfill what Jeremiah said. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, associates other shepherds with his work. He establishes a hierarchy in his kingdom. In the Gospel, we see that the Lord has sent the apostles out to begin their work as shepherds. In the Gospel passage they return to report to the Lord all that has taken place. And people are responding with great enthusiasm. In fact, the response to the proclamation of the Gospel is so great and exhausting that the apostles don’t even have time to eat and need to pull away to rest. The vast crowds pressing around Jesus and around the apostles call to mind the image hanging in the air from Jeremiah and other prophets regarding God’s people who had been scattered by past exile. The remnant sheep are indeed being gathered from distant places and brought to graze in good pasture where none shall be missing. The sheep are being gathered by Jesus himself, but also by other shepherds the Lord chooses to associate with this work.
When Jesus saw the vast crowd responding to this work his heart was moved with pity. What he does next, how he responds to this movement of pity is telling. The Gospel says that the Lord began to teach them many things. The Lord recognized that a deeper hunger and longing was drawing the crowds to respond. The people are leaving their homes and their work to come and hear the good news because they ultimately hunger for more than physical food. They hunger to know God, to know God’s love and to have salvation. They hunger to know truth.
I want to make two applications from this brief gospel passage. The Lord looks upon us with pity and compassion too. The spirit of the world, the spirit of this age, is marked by confusion about truth. In this sense, Pontius Pilate can serve as an example of the spirit of the world in his interrogation of Jesus before the crucifixion, when Pilate asks, “What is truth?” Just as there is the story of the Good News, the world also has its own secular narrative. Our modern means of communication help that narrative to be spread far and wide such that vast crowds accept the secular message. To the degree that the world’s narrative is lacking truth, or even downright false, souls in our age can be scattered in exile like sheep without a shepherd. But the Lord, the Good Shepherd, has pity on us. And so, he desires to teach us. He has established his Church and associated other shepherds with him so that we may be taught.
Thus, the first application of this Gospel is, we ourselves must be interested in being taught, so that we are fed with truth that comes from the Lord and is communicated in every age through his Church. We let the Lord teach us when we listen to his Church and study saving doctrine. We also let the Lord teach us when we take responsibility to study the Scriptures and the faith. We don’t have to become scholars or academics, but we should put forth some effort to be informed of sacred teaching and truth. To not study and know the teachings of Jesus will result in feeding on half-truths and lies, which leads to being shepherded more by the spirt of the world than by Jesus.
The second application is, we ourselves need to be willing to speak the truth to others. In this way, we are like the apostles who are sent out to other sheep. We have received saving teaching not only for ourselves, but to share. We need to respond with pity and compassion to people’s deeper hunger by speaking the truth. We should instruct our children properly and we should be willing to speak to others in our places of work, in social gatherings, in politics, and in encounters during our ordinary day. This is not always easy, but it is our duty. Our sharing of sacred teaching, of truth, may be rejected, but that does not absolve us from sharing first of all our living relationship with Jesus and the teaching that goes hand-in-hand with responding to the narrative of the Gospel.
We first need to have a living relationship with Jesus. And we must be interested both in knowing the truth and in sharing it with others so that the vast crowds of our day, like sheep without a shepherd, may experience the love of God and be saved.