Disciples of Compassion
Dennis Ryle - 18/06/2023
Readings - Matthew 9:35-10:8, (9-23)
This is an extremely robust text.
Its almost as if Jesus has selected a crack commando squad.
There’s a job to do. A mission to accomplish. Territory to be gained.
There is an enemy to be conquered. Opposition to face down.
Stay focused. Travel light. In fact, take nothing with you!
Don’t allow anyone to distract you! Stay with your own. Ignore the stranger.
If you are captured, hang in until the end.
What triggers this burst of activity?
Why did Jesus send his raw recruits out in pairs to cover the towns and villages and hamlets so urgently?
When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest." Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness.
I usually look at Susan Guthrie’s page, At the Edge of Enclosure, for contemplative insight. She had come to the same conclusion that I had with how such a passage might be read following the fire and wind of Pentecost celebrations.
There is something about how the seasons affect our reading of texts that are in danger of becoming over familiar.
A typical reading of Matthew’s gospel highlights the imperative of mission, the careful discernment of keeping and opening the boundaries of traditional ways, and the transformation that is necessary so that new wineskins can contain and serve new wine.
There are at least three simple imaginative ways we can read our sacred texts.
1. In the time the text is set – Ignatian. We become one of the disciples and use all five senses in our imagination to become one of the pairs going out to fulfil the mission placed on us. Who is the partner that we are paired with. Where is the first village on our itinerary. What are my thoughts as I arrive there? Where am I going to go? The group of beggars at the gate? The market square where public announcements are made? The leader of the synagogue? I’ve been equipped with something that will be greatly valued by people in need. How do I dispense it? What happens? How am I received? Where does opposition come from? How do I handle it?
2. We could again read the text in the way that Matthew’s community might have heard it, one whole generation later. This time we are part of a Messianic Jewish household working out how to be the Community of Shalom guided by the spirit of the departed Messiah. We are in exile, probably in Antioch, from a now destroyed Jerusalem and ravaged Judean countryside. Leaders of Matthew’s community are part of the movement to renew a Judaism that can accommodate its new reality – no Temple, no sacrifices, but desiring to stay true to the precious Torah, the Writings and the Prophets. Our text highlights the focus and values that our household clings to in the hope of being transformed into a community that the Spirit of the Messiah can work through. Distinctiveness and Service in Christ’s name are important. What is it like to be a member of this community? How can I be part of a catalyst for change?
3. Finally, we can read the text into our “here and now.” My own context is best understood having engaged one or both of the first two. What is the nature of the urgency? What are the boundaries? How well am I equipped?
Bruce Prewer dynamically translates Jesus’s mandate this way:
Travel lightly,
lest under the weight of status and possessions we come to a standstill.
Travel boldly,
for we are apostles of a Christ who has overcome the worst the world can give.
Travel humbly,
for as friends of Jesus no service is too menial, and no person is unworthy of help.
Travel joyfully,
for when the road is rough and the night dark, we shall never travel on our own.
Further insight is possible if we attempt all three, and not discount, in the fading light of Pentecost celebrations, the insights the Holy Spirit may open to us. It’s not unusual to encounter some ambiguity in our understanding of just how the Spirit moves amongst us.
For some it is like Antigonish by Hughes Mearns
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd go away...
When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn't see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don't you come back anymore!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door... (slam!)
Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away...
Enter the strange world of the Spirit, the presence of a Christ, who as incarnated in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, is physically absent, but alive and well in the body of believers he left to accomplish his purpose.
When laid alongside the missing verses from last week’s text, we are offered both an answer and a further question about the urgency of the sending out of the disciples.
14Then the disciples of John came to him, saying, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but your disciples do not fast?” 15And Jesus said to them, “The wedding guests cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.
Jesus, seeing the vast need in the throng surrounding him, then equips his disciples and sends them out in rapid deployment to find and bring home the lost sheep of Israel. Later and consistent with Matthew’s design, Jesus’ encounter with the Syrophoenician woman seeking help for her sick daughter broadens the mission to include the Gentile world. The disciples must feast and interact while the bridegroom is with them.
Soon, he will be taken away and then they will fast. 
But then, Pentecost! The fast is over. The bridegroom is back in another form, filling the body of believers in Christ’s way.
And we begin to understand the motive behind Jesus’s energetic and urgent activity when he was present in the flesh. It is the same as what the Spirit of Christ awakens within us.
Compassion – splagchnizomai – a deep movement of the innards, specifically heart, liver and kidneys. It is visceral!
Guthrie hints that it is the post-Pentecost timing that allowed this phrase to stand out: Seeing the crowds he had compassion for them... And suddenly she saw Jesus, like the Holy Spirit, conferring compassion upon the disciples and sending them out. Or, perhaps, sending them out, so that compassion might challenge them, widen, expand, break open, spill out, teach them how hardened or vulnerable they are. Teach them to what extent they fall short of love. Compassion offers an unending and plentiful harvest as love melts boundaries and prejudices.
So let us continue with some reflections on this word that we Christ bearers are now inspired to carry into each new day – Compassion (word association?)
First, how do we tune into the voices from those around us to listen with the deep stirring compassion of Jesus? Can we keep listening when those voices challenge us? How do we bring compassionate listening to the many voices on the Voice to Parliament, the topic of the coming referendum.
Voices of anguish, voices of hope, voices of confusion, voices of fear, voices of deception? What measure of compassion do we bring to each of these? Yes, even those that hold hidden, even not so hidden agendas? Never forget that Jesus’ anger expressed to his opponents was born of compassion. His dying breath prayed for their forgiveness.
Last week I listened to a voice that objected to the bridegroom imagery. The whole structure of traditional marriage had been a negative experience for the owner of this voice. The voice was seeking a more fitting expression beyond the implicit patriarchy of bride and bridegroom language – the typical biblical metaphor for the most intimate of human and divine relationship, even and fully exemplified in the beautiful poetry of the Song of Songs.
In an era when gender diversity is coming more to the fore, how do we respond to these voices with the soul stirring compassion of Jesus, the epitome of the highest love of all.
Listening to the voices around us has prompted the action of prominent Christian activists through the ages, sometimes at great costs to themselves.
The second invitation to reflection occurs on this point, how do we continue to act from heart stirring compassion when we ourselves are under extraordinary pressure.
Dorothy Day, The Reckless Way of Love
Whenever I groan within myself and think how hard it is to keep writing about love in these times of tension and strife, which may at any moment become for us all a time of terror, I think to myself, "What else is the world interested in?" What else do we all want, each one of us, except to love and be loved, in our families, in our work, in all our relationships? God is love. Love casts out fear. Even the most ardent revolutionist, seeking to change the world, to overturn the tables of the money changers, is trying to make a world where it is easier for people to love, to stand in that relationship to each other. We want with all our hearts to love, to be loved. And not just in the family but to look upon all as our mothers, sisters, brothers, children. It is when we love the most intensely and most humanly that we can recognize how tepid is our love for others.
The keenness and intensity of love brings with it suffering, of course, but joy too, because it is a foretaste of heaven.
The third invitation is to reflect on how the compassion of Jesus is central to our journey to integration, becoming whole, who we are ultimately called to be. What the bible calls salvation.
"Mr. Tayer," by Jean Houston
When I was about fourteen, I was seized by enormous waves of grief over my parents’ breakup. I had read somewhere that running would help dispel anguish, so I began to run to school every day down Park Avenue in New York City. I was a great big overgrown girl (5 feet eleven by the age of eleven) and one day I ran into a rather frail old gentleman in his seventies and knocked the wind out of him. He laughed as I helped him to his feet and asked me in French-accented speech, “Are you planning to run like that for the rest of your life?”
“Yes, sir" I replied. “It looks that way."
“Well, Bon Voyage!” he said.
“Bon Voyage!” I answered and sped on my way.
About a week later I was walking down Park Avenue with my fox terrier, Champ, and again I met the old gentleman.
“Ah." he greeted me, “my friend the runner, and with a fox terrier. I knew one like that years ago in France. Where are you going?"
“Well, sir." I replied, “I’m taking Champ to Central Park."
“I will go with you." he informed me. “I will take my constitutional."
And thereafter, for about a year or so, the old gentleman and I would meet and walk together often several times a week in Central Park. He had a long French name but asked me to call him by the first part of it, which was “Mr. Tayer" as far as I could make out.
The walks were magical and full of delight. Not only did Mr. Tayer seem to have absolutely no self-consciousness, but he was always being seized by wonder and astonishment over the simplest things. He was constantly and literally falling into love. I remember one time when he suddenly fell on his knees, his long Gallic nose raking the ground, and exclaimed to me, “Jeanne, look at the caterpillar. Ahhhh!” I joined him on the ground to see what had evoked so profound a response that he was seized by the essence of caterpillar. “How beautiful it is", he remarked, “this little green being with its wonderful funny little feet. Exquisite! Little furry body, little green feet on the road to metamorphosis." He then regarded me with equal delight. “Jeanne, can you feel yourself to be a caterpillar?”
“Oh yes." I replied with the baleful knowing of a gangly, pimply faced teenager.
“Then think of your own metamorphosis." he suggested. “What will you be when you become a butterfly, une papillon, eh? What is the butterfly of Jeanne?” (What a great question for a fourteen-year-old girl!) His long, gothic, comic-tragic face would nod with wonder. “Eh, Jeanne, look at the clouds! God’s calligraphy in the sky! All that transforming, moving, changing, dissolving, becoming. Jeanne, become a cloud and become all the forms that ever were."
Or there was the time that Mr. Tayer and I leaned into the strong wind that suddenly whipped through Central Park, and he told me, “Jeanne, sniff the wind." I joined him in taking great snorts of wind. “The same wind may once have been sniffed by Jesus Christ (sniff). by Alexander the Great (sniff), by Napoleon (sniff), by Voltaire (sniff), by Marie Antoinette (sniff)!” (There seemed to be a lot of French people in that wind.) “Now sniff this next gust of wind in very deeply for it contains. Jeanne d’Arc! Sniff the wind once sniffed by Jeanne d’Arc. Be filled with the winds of history."
It was wonderful. People of all ages followed us around, laughing—not at us but with us. Old Mr. Tayer was truly diaphanous to every moment and being with him was like being in attendance at God’s own party, a continuous celebration of life and its mysteries. But mostly Mr. Tayer was so full of vital sap and juice that he seemed to flow with everything. Always he saw the interconnections between things—the way that everything in the universe, from fox terriers to tree bark to somebody’s red hat to the mind of God, was related to everything else and was very, very good.
He wasn’t merely a great appreciator, engaged by all his senses. He was truly penetrated by the reality that was yearning for him as much as he was yearning for it. He talked to the trees, to the wind, to the rocks as dear friends, as beloved even. ‘Ah, my friend, the mica schist layer, do you remember when...?” And I would swear that the mica schist would begin to glitter back. I mean, mica schist will do that, but on a cloudy day?! Everything was treated as personal, as sentient, as “thou." And everything that was thou was ensouled with being. and it thou-ed back to him. So, when I walked with him, I felt as though a spotlight was following us, bringing radiance and light everywhere. And I was constantly seized by astonishment in the presence of this infinitely beautiful man, who radiated such sweetness, such kindness.
I remember one occasion when he was quietly watching a very old woman watching a young boy play a game. “Madame", he suddenly addressed her. She looked up, surprised that a stranger in Central Park would speak to her. “Madame,” he repeated, “why are you so fascinated by what that little boy is doing?” The old woman was startled by the question, but the kindly face of Mr. Tayer seemed to allay her fears and evoke her memories. “Well, sir,” she replied in an ancient but pensive voice, “the game that boy is playing is like one I played in this park around 1880, only it’s a mite different." We noticed that the boy was listening, so Mr. Tayer promptly included him in the conversation. “Young fellow, would you like to learn the game as it was played so many years ago?”
“Well. . .yeah. sure, why not?” the boy replied. And soon the young boy and the old woman were making friends and sharing old and new variations on the game—as unlikely an incident to occur in Central Park as could be imagined.
But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Mr. Tayer was the way that he would suddenly look at you. He looked at you with wonder and astonishment joined to unconditional love joined to a whimsical regarding of you as the cluttered house that hides the holy one. I felt myself primed to the depths by such seeing. I felt evolutionary forces wake up in me by such seeing, every cell and thought and potential palpably changed. I was yeasted, greened, awakened by such seeing, and the defeats and denigrations of adolescence redeemed. I would go home and tell my mother, who was a little sceptical about my walking with an old man in the park so often, “Mother, I was with my old man again, and when I am with him, I leave my littleness behind." That deeply moved her. You could not be stuck in littleness and be in the radiant field of Mr. Tayer.
The last time that I ever saw him was the Thursday before Easter Sunday, 1955. I brought him the shell of a snail. “Ah. Escargot." he exclaimed and then proceeded to wax ecstatic for the better part of an hour. Snail shells, and galaxies, and the convolutions in the brain, the whorl of flowers and the meanderings of rivers were taken up into a great hymn to the spiralling evolution of spirit and matter. When he had finished, his voice dropped, and he whispered almost in prayer, “Omega ...omega. . .omega..." Finally, he looked up and said to me quietly, "Au revoir, Jeanne”.
“Au revoir, Mr. Tayer,” I replied, “I’ll meet you at the same time next Tuesday."
For some reason. Champ, my fox terrier didn’t want to budge, and when I pulled him along, he whimpered, looking back at Mr.Tayer, his tail between his legs. The following Tuesday I was there waiting where we always met at the corner of Park Avenue and 83rd Street. He didn’t come. The following Thursday I waited again. Still, he didn’t come. The dog looked up at me sadly. For the next eight weeks I continued to wait, but he never came again. It turned out that he had suddenly died that Easter Sunday, but I didn’t find that out for years.
Some years later, someone handed me a book without a cover which was titled The Phenomenon of Man. As I read the book, I found it strangely familiar in its concepts. Occasional words and expressions loomed up as echoes from my past. When, later in the book, I came across the concept of the “Omega point." I was certain. I asked to see the jacket of the book, looked at the author’s picture, and, of course, recognized him at once. There was no forgetting or mistaking that face. Mr. Tayer was Teilhard de Chardin, the great priest-scientist, poet and mystic, and during that lovely and luminous year I had been meeting him outside the Jesuit rectory of St. Ignatius where he was living most of the time.
I have often wondered if it was my simplicity and innocence that allowed the fullness of Teilhard’s being to be revealed. To me he was never the great priest-palaeontologist Pere Teilhard. He was old Mr. Tayer. Why did he always come and walk with me every Tuesday and Thursday, even though I’m sure he had better things to do? Was it that in seeing me so completely, he himself could be completely seen at a time when his writings, his work, were proscribed by the Church, when he was not permitted to teach, or even to talk about his ideas? As I later found out, he was undergoing at that time the most excruciating agony that there is—the agony of utter disempowerment and psychological crucifixion. And yet to me he was always so present—whimsical, engaging, empowering. How could that be?
I think it was because Teilhard had what few Church officials did—the power and grace of the Love that passes all understanding. He could write about love being the evolutionary force, the Omega point, that lures the world and us into becoming, because he experienced that love in a piece of rock, in the wag of a dog’s tail, in the eyes of a child. He was so in love with everything that he talked in great particularity, even to me as an adolescent, about the desire atoms have for each other, the yearning of molecules, of organisms, of bodies, of planets, of galaxies, all of creation longing for that radiant bonding, for joining, for the deepening of their condition, for becoming more by virtue of yearning for and finding the other. He knew about the search for the Beloved. His model was Christ. For Teilhard de Chardin, Christ was the Beloved of the soul.
Years later, while addressing some Jesuits, a very old Jesuit came up to me. He was a friend of Teilhard’s—and he told me how Teilhard used to talk of his encounters in the park with a girl called Jeanne.
Jean Houston
Pomona, New York