TRANSLATION MATTHEW 9:35

Jesus travelled through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, announcing the joyful news of the Rule of God, and healing every disease and debility. Looking at the crowds, his guts were wrenched with compassion for them, because they were flayed and beaten, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his pupils, “The harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few. So beg the Master of the harvest to send out laborers to the harvesting.”

As crucial texts from the Hebrew Bible reveal, the shepherd is a frequent metaphor for King or Leader. In the 23rd Psalm and in Isaiah 40.this image is applied to Yahweh God, as also here, with the added implication that Jesus takes this role on God’s behalf.

Matthew wants to emphasise the extent of Jesus’ ministry, his outreach to the whole region of The Galilee. He teaches, announces the Rule of God and heals the sick. These activities remained in the ministry if the first Assemblies of Jesus, as they continued his work. The synagogues welcomed Jesus, appaently without any suspicion that he was other than a holy prophet of their faith.

Matthew states that he healed every sort of bodily ailment, but Audrey Dawson, a nedical consultant and bible scholar, has noted that he doesn’t seem to have dealt with cuts and broken limbs, which must have been common, then as now.. The language about Jesus and the crowds is passionate and any translation should reflect that the people are in a bad way, and that Jesus responded to their condition. Sheep that had no obvious owner were promiscuously sheared and abused.

In Scotland today, 30% of children are affected by poverty. In such a rich nation, this is a statistic which exposes a prevailing greed and carelessness. The potential harvest for the Rule of God is huge, but there are few laborers because apart from those obviously corrupt, so many believers are bound up with the increasingly desperate task of saving the churches, rather than the people who are flayed and beaten.

Jesus’ words to his pupils indicate the extent of his concern. if the Rule of God was to gather the poor, the needy and the faithful, then there was a huge number longing for that Rule, so huge that additional labour was urgently required. In countries with large poor and abused populations today, the figure of Jesus still arouses a response, which is often harvested by laborers in the pay of fundamentalist forces in the USA, and gathered for right -wing causes. These are not the kind of laborers for whom Jesus begged. God can’t do it on his but needs Jesus, who in turn can’t do it on his own, and needs people.