Think like missionaries

What I basically gather from today's Gospel is that the Church's mission is fundamentally one of healing rather than of preaching. The heart of the entire gospel is Christ's compassion for the people who were like sheep without a shepherd.

But, frankly, the image of 'sheep without a shepherd' sounds rather strange given that, from what we know about the Jews from the Old Testament up to the time of Jesus, they do not really seem to have lacked leaders and masters who exercised authority over them in all sorts of ways. Yet Jesus pitied them because they were 'harassed and dejected'.

All this should say a lot even about us today, about the image of the Church we are projecting, and about the way authority functions within our Church structures. Jesus practically substitutes the political and religious powers that dominated the people with the Twelve, meant to be a new generation of shepherds and to whom he gave authority "over unclean spirits with power to cast them out and to cure all kinds of diseases and sickness".

This is the mission Jesus gave his Apostles: to cast out unclean spirits and to heal all kinds of sickness.

Already the first reading from Exodus speaks of a people carried "on eagles' wings", a consecrated nation, a kingdom of priests. Exodus is speaking of a people whom the Lord liberated from the slavery of Egypt and who in the wilderness, facing the mountain, pitched their camp.

The significance of all this is that it was in the wilderness, in the 'provisional', that the people were to pitch their camp. They were to face the mountain to remain focussed on God and not feel settled once for all.

It reminds me of what Hans Kung once wrote: A Church which pitches its tents without constantly looking out for new horizons is being untrue to its calling. The Church in our time needs to understand afresh that Jesus meant things to be radically different from the way they were in his time.

From the time of Jesus and throughout its long history down to the Second Vatican Council, which inaugurated new times for the Church, the major temptation was always for the Church to become entrapped within the pyramids of power that seem to provide the needed assurance to the whole Church edifice.

But in all this, the new people of God as a kingdom of priests has always been a forgotten truth. And we always go back to the old ways where priests are placed over people and where clericalism sets the tone and the scene. Fifty years after Vatican II, we are tired of structures that at times do not care about people's needs but seem to care mostly about their self-preservation.

As missionaries, we need to ask: What is good news to our people? What are the existential issues people are grappling with before God? What does the Church look like to so many people? The answers to these questions may give us clues as to what we need to communicate first to the people and what we need to be for them in the first place.

If we miss in our congregations the touch with the rich complexity of the everyday experiences and beliefs, struggles and triumphs of our people, then we reduce the Church to an organisation and not to a living organism. If we were to think like missionaries, we would spend more time listening to our patients. But we seem to be infected by an organisational spirit that renders connection with the real feelings of people and diminishes the capacity of the Church to facilitate connection with God. I wonder what the feeling of Jesus today would be if he were again to look at the crowds.