MATTHEW 9:35 — 10:4
I DON'T GET OUT MUCH. And when I do, I don’t go to electronics stores. I especially don’t go to electronics stores two days before Christmas. But there I was at 1:00 on December 23rd, along with the whole wide world. I was there to get a new car radio for my hip Dodge Caravan, as our radio had died a sudden death a few weeks prior.
After I selected my Sony, I followed the young blue-shirted sales associate to the front of the store as he held my new radio (I was not allowed to touch it until I bought it). There he placed it on checkout #8, turned to me, and said, “Please go to the back of the line.” And off I went—to infinity and beyond. As I waited in line, I formed a few critical and condescending thoughts. I looked at the guy who escorted me to the front. There he was two aisles away, flirting with some coworker. He was probably thirty years old, had greased-back black hair, and was kind of frumpy looking. I thought to myself, “What’s he living for? I bet he lives at home, takes a class or two at the local community college to pacify his worried mother, works part-time at this store, and then spends most of his paycheck on video games, the latest electronic gadgets, fast food, and Friday night drinking binges with his buddies.”
Then I looked at the people in line with me. We were all roped in together—like sheep being led to slaughter. A woman was doing her best to corral us, prodding us to move along. Now remember, I had nothing in my hand. My radio—too valuable for my potently thieving hands to touch—was waiting patiently for me. But everyone around me had carts full of stuff— expensive electronic stuff. So I began to think, What is this world coming to?
And what are these people living for? Do they have enough money to buy all this (from the looks of them, they don’t)? And if they do, “What does it profit a man to gain a big-screen TV but to lose his soul? ” How long, O Lord, must the righteous wait for your deliverance? But then my pseudo-Christian thoughts of disgust turned into compassion. I now looked at them and thought, Has anyone ever taught you how to handle money? Has anyone ever taught you what to live for? Has anyone ever taught you the way of salvation? Out of compassion I wanted to round them all up, bring them to a Bible talk, and preach to them the meaning of Christmas—that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, that Jesus came to seek and save lost sheep.
Compassion for the Helpless
As we have been making our way through Matthew’s Gospel, we have seen in Jesus’ teaching ministry (especially in the Sermon on the Mount) and in his healing ministry, notably in chapters 8, 9, how our Lord has been like a good shepherd to Israel. He has healed and protected and led his flock in the way they should go. And yet as our Lord steadily marches toward his crucifixion, he knows that he will lay down his life for the sheep, the ultimate act of compassion. He also knows that he must first provide for the flock, leaving under-shepherds to continue to care, protect, and heal. However, before Jesus provides the Twelve with the means of mission (9:37—11:1), he first demonstrates the motive for mission. Christ’s compassion, described explicitly in 9:36, is not only the door that takes us from the last section (4:23—9:35) to the next section (9:37—11:1), it is also the cornerstone of the mission of the Ecclesia.
And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. (9:35, 36)
The Greek verb splanchnizomai—“to have compassion”—means literally, “to feel in the viscera” or bowels or entrails, if you prefer. We usually speak of feeling with our hearts: “She broke my heart.” Yet we are not completely unaccustomed to speaking of our emotions, especially those of hatred or disgust, as coming from our guts: “I hate him with all my guts!” Many years ago when I unintentionally (I assure you) drove over a raccoon and her five babies (true story: I was young; it was late; the road was dark; I swear I didn't see them until I saw them). I felt not only nauseous in my stomach but also deeply sad. At times our emotions—hatred, disgust, but also pity, love, and compassion—make their way down to our viscera.
So here in verse 36 Jesus feels for (the Greek sense of the word) and he suffers with (if I can add the Latin sense of it) the crowd. He has compassion because they were “harassed and helpless.” They were “harassed” physically perhaps some in that crowd were surely poor and sick and hungry (cp.
15:32) - but also spiritually. Here Jesus gives a subtle indictment on the Jewish religious leaders who were not only not properly feeding and protecting the flock, but these so-called spiritual shepherds were actually harassing or oppressing the flock. They were acting like wolves (cp. 7:15; Acts 20:29). In the words of Ezekiel, they were ruling “with force and harshness” (Ezekiel 14:4b), or in the words of Jesus, they “tie up heavy burdens... and lay them on people’s shoulders” (23:4).
Jesus also saw that they were “helpless.” They couldn’t lift or didn't know how to lift this scribal and Pharisaical yoke, all these un-Biblical burdens, from their backs—the ones Jesus attacked in the Sermon on the Mount and would attack throughout his ministry, and the ones Jesus promised to rid them of if they would come to him for rest (11:28). As the ultimate shepherd who has sought the lost, brought in those who have strayed, bound up the injured, and strengthened the weak, Jesus here feels (deep down) for this crowd.
Now, there are times in Jesus' ministry when he is grieved and upset with what he sees. Just a few chapters from now he will speak of that generation as “evil and adulterous” (12:39). But here in 9:36 there is no loathing, but only loving. Here he doesn't look out at the crowd and say, “What a lot you are! You are so sinful it makes me sick. You put the ‘total’ in ‘total depravity.’” Instead (I imagine whatever emotions stirred within him when he wept at Lazarus’s tomb, see John 11:33—38), here our Lord longs to roll away the stone that was rolled over the souls of these sheep.
So, what is the motive for mission? Compassion. Compassion is the cornerstone. Christian mission starts with compassion, the compassion of Christ seen and hopefully felt here.
I think we sometimes take this cornerstone for granted, like we can just kick it out and the whole edifice won't crumble, or we think that other religions share the same stone, the same basic structure. But that is simply not true. It is normal for us to say, as Scripture says, that “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16) and that we “love God” (Romans 8:28; 1 John 5:2)—for us to speak as Paul speaks in Galatians 2:20 of the Son of God “who loved me.” But ask a Muslim cleric if “God is love” in any kind of personal way. Then ask him if the second greatest commandment is “to love your neighbor as yourself,” which includes loving your enemies (those infidels!) as much as you love yourself. Or tell a Buddhist that benevolence has nothing to do with merit, and then watch him pretend not to have a desire to get mad at you. Or tell a Brahmin, a priest from the highest Hindu caste, to care for the sick and dying in Calcutta, those of a much lower, untouchable caste. Tell him to love the lowly the way that old European nun Mother Theresa did for decades, dressed in white and blue, dressed with Christian (not Hindu) compassion, with incarnational compassion, with loving-the-least compassion.
That “God is love” and that such a God of love, “because of the great love with which he loved us” (Ephesians 2:4), would so love the world that he would give his one and only Son to live, suffer, die and then take lowly fishermen, sinful tax collectors, adulterous women, even Gentiles and spread his compassion through them to the world is remarkable. That’s uniquely Christian compassion. Don’t take such compassion for granted.
Don't take the root of Christian compassion (Christ’s compassion) for granted, and don’t take the fruit of it for granted. In verse 35 Jesus taught and preached and healed. Following his lead, Christianity gave birth to universities (teaching) and churches (preaching) and hospitals (healing).
The next time you find yourself in the emergency room at a local hospital thank God for Christ, and thank God for Christ’s compassion, and thank God for the Christian doctors and donors who years ago took that call to compassion quite seriously. And the next time there is a local or international disaster (earthquake, famine, flood, genocide), notice the many Christian organizations that run to the rescue—Samaritan’s Purse, Operation Blessing, World Vision, and the Salvation Army, and perhaps more importantly, notice who doesn’t run to the rescue. Which religions stay at home? And the next time you think fondly on the glory days of a world-class American education or on our world-class Ivy League schools such as Harvard, Yale, Brown, or Columbia, thank God for Christ’s compassion and for the Christians who took that call to teach and preach compassion quite seriously. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and other universities began as seminaries that trained young men to preach the gospel. And do you know what the mottos of these schools still are? Columbia: “In Thy light shall we see the light.” Brown: “In God We Hope.” Princeton: “Under God’s power she flourishes.” Yale: “Light and truth.”
Harvard’s motto today is simply Veritas, which means “truth.” It's the perfect postmodern motto—just “truth” with nothing qualifying it. But Harvard’s original motto was Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae—“Truth for Christ and the Ecclesia.” And do you know what the original purpose of a Harvard education was? “Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is, to know God and which is eternal life, John 17:3 and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning.”
We take Christian compassion for granted—the root of it and the fruit of it - our schools, our hospitals, and our churches. But like Paul, who was compelled by "the love of Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:14) to reach the world, let us never forget our motive for mission, that the force pushing us forward and undergirding the feet that bring good news (through preaching/teaching/ healing) is compassion. Without compassion, we do not have Christianity; without compassion we do not have authentic Christian mission.
Prayer for Helpers
The motive for our mission is compassion. The means are prayer and people, as taught in verses 37, 38: "Then he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers [people] into his harvest.” We see here the need for prayer and the need for people, or the need for the Lord of the Harvest through our prayers to send out people—laborers, missionaries, gospel-workers.
When I taught on the book of Acts, I came up with an equation for Ecclesial growth. The equation is this: prayer + preaching + persecution = growth! That’s what we see in Acts, and that’s what we see in the first three centuries of the Ecclesia. That’s what we see throughout church history, wherever the church is genuinely growing. That’s what we see today in places like the Ukraine, Albania, and China. And that’s what we will see in the next chapter in our study of Matthew 10. The kingdom of God advances through persecution, preaching, and prayer.
When I was in college I took a class on the history of revivals. The class was primarily about American revivals, notably the First and Second Great Awakenings. But my professor began with “revivals” recorded in the Old and New Testaments, and he argued that most of the public manifestations of God’s renewal and revival—in both the Bible and Christian history—began with prayer. In the Bible you can think of Acts 1:14; 4:24-31; and 13:1-3 where Christian mission sprang from prayer meetings. In Christian history the most obvious and perhaps famous example would be the 1857 Prayer Revival.
In September 1857 Jeremiah Lamphier, a New York City businessman, decided to invite people to pray during the lunch hour one day a week. The first day he prayed alone for half an hour, but then was joined by six other men. The next week there were nearly forty people. With such a good turnout, they decided to pray daily. Soon there were 100 people. In less than six months, 6,000 people in 150 different locations throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan met daily to pray. Within the year these one hour lunchtime prayer meetings were being held in many cities, including Boston, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis, Savannah, and New Orleans. In June 1858 it was estimated that nearly 100,000 people had been converted, not through preaching or works of charity, but solely by listening to these Christians pray.
Oh, that we would see the day when every day at noon office cafeterias and break rooms are filled with Christians praying for gospel revival. Perhaps there is too much singing in our churches today. Perhaps there is too much doing. Perhaps there is too much eating. Perhaps there is even too much preaching and not enough praying—corporate and private—as Jesus taught us to pray: “Lord, raise up workers for the harvest... and Lord, even me.”
The Lord of the Harvest Helps
So the motive for Christian mission is compassion, and the means are (first) prayer and (second) people: “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers [people] into his harvest.” Prayer and people.
One of my favorite compliments I sometimes receive is when someone from my Ecclesia will come up to me after the talk and say, “I have known that Bible passage my whole life, but I never saw what you taught me today.” Implied in that word of encouragement is, “What you saw, is right, and it is right there to be seen.” In other words, I wasn't teaching something novel or heretical. This person just needed someone to point it out to him or her. And I merely pointed it out.
As I looked afresh at these famous verses (vv. 37, 38), I saw a few things I’d never seen before. As I read them, I said to myself, “Okay, so there’s this big harvest. Ah, but there’s a problem—not enough harvesters. Jesus’ solution is to pray for more people.” But I thought (perhaps cynically), Wait a minute, Lord. In chapters 8, 9 we have just watched you have authority over everything visible and invisible—madness, diseases, sin. You name it, you have power over it. So why not cut out the middleman? Why ask people to pray for more people to reach all these people? Why don't you as the Lord of the Harvest just do all the harvesting?
I have three answers to the above questions. First, God is a God of means. Because he is transcendent from us and yet compassionate (he desires to be near to us) he uses people and prayers. He uses even his own Son. God does not sit behind a thundercloud and zap all our sins and infirmities away. He sends his Son, to touch blind eyes, crippled legs, dead bodies, and sin-stained souls. So, it’s an attribute-of-God issue. It is part of who God is and how he has decided to work in this world.
Second, the plan of God involves means. Jesus’ mission is to live, suffer, die, rise again, ascend into Heaven, give the Holy Spirit, and rule from Heaven until he returns. In the meantime he will build his Ecclesia “on the foundation of the apostles” (Ephesians 2:20). Think of it this way: Jesus needs to build a bridge from his ministry to the ministry that will continue after him in his name, and right here in 10:1-4 we find the first plank on that necessary overpass. Those disciples who have been sitting on the sidelines watching the first siring do his thing now get some playing time, because in time they will teach and heal and lead God’s sheep.
Third, the work of God involves means. Whenever I hear this harvest text talked about, the message usually has either a self-aggrandizing feel to it (“If it’s going to be, it’s up to me!”) or negative, guilt-ridden weight attached to it (“If you won't pray for missionaries, if you won’t go yourself, then God’s hands are tied, and guess who’s responsible for this huge harvest that’s gonna spoil and rot? You!”).
This passage is preached like it’s all about the Ecclesia. It’s about us getting our missionary act together. But look afresh at the text. Who is doing the work here? The first laborers will get out into the field in chapter 10, but in our text it is “the Lord of the harvest.” I take this as a reference to Jesus, the one who will call himself “lord of the Sabbath” in 12:8 and who will describe himself as the one in charge of the gathering in the Parable of the Soils (13:41; cp. 24:31), in a similar manner in which John the Baptist describes him “winnowing” in 3:12. Isn’t it the Lord of the Harvest, the one who has “all authority in heaven and on earth” (28:18) and the one who will commission the Twelve at the end of our gospel and the beginning of Acts, who is the main worker here in our text?
In 9:38 Jesus says, “pray.” But before anyone has lifted a prayer, he gets to work. He calls and commissions the Twelve: “And he [Jesus] called to him his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every affliction” (10:1), which is what he just asked to be done and prayed for. Then it is Jesus who sends, instructs, and commands: “These twelve Jesus sent out, instructing them, ‘Go...’” (10:5). I’ll put it this way: Jesus was already at work before they were at work or at prayer. That’s the case here, and that’s the case always.
Often this text is preached as if Jesus wasn’t at work and as if we were in the same position as these twelve men (i.e., we have yet to harvest anything). But I think it is fair to say that the mustard seed has grown into a tree, the pearl has been found, the good fish caught, and the fields with hidden treasures bought many times over. The harvest is huge indeed! In the last 2,000 years Jesus through his Ecclesia has harvested millions of people. This prayer has been answered, is being answered, and will continue to be answered until the last hour.
In the apostles’ day there was a huge mission field and hardly any workers (twelve guys to bring in the harvest). By the end of the book of Acts there was still a huge mission field, but a few thousand workers had spread out their harvesting hands from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria and even all the way to Rome. Today there is still a huge mission field, but perhaps a million workers and counting, reaching the ends of the earth. Jesus has been quite busy, hasn’t he?
To me the parables of chapter 13, which we will look at in a few chapters, are the key that unlocks this theme. Those parables teach us that (a) the Ecclesia will grow despite serious opposition from the world, and (b) harvesting doesn’t mean everyone everywhere at all times becomes a Christian. The harvest is huge and universal, but it’s not universalistic. There will be wheat and weeds, good soil and bad soil (more bad soil than good). But from the good soil there will be fruit worth harvesting!
Even though the Lord of the Harvest has harvested, is harvesting, and will continue to harvest, this doesn’t mean that prayer and people aren’t the means by which he harvests. The Lord of the Harvest has chosen to use prayer and people to harvest the fields. So, are you feeling overwhelmed by the prospect that the harvest is too hard, too big, and too impossible for us? Don’t fret. Trust in the Lord and in the power of his might. But if you are feeling guilty about not praying and not being a gospel worker in this world, then you should feel that way. (Our mission is to pray and go!) So feel guilty, confess, then start praying or starting going or start praying as you start going.
Jesus has built his Ecclesia, is building his Ecclesia, and will build his Ecclesia, and all the powers of the grave shall not prevail against it. Jesus is at work. You might as well join the winning team, for the full and final harvest celebration is at hand. The jars of new wine are being filled, the fattened calf is being prepared, and the daughters of Miriam are ready and waiting to pound and shake their tambourines for one final, eternal victory dance.
(R. Kent Hughes. and Douglas Sean O'Donnell., 2013; edited Carl Hinton., 2020)