Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time - Cycle A

Ex 19:2-6a
Rom 5:6-11
Mt 9:36 - 10:8

Jesus as Shepherd, and the need for “laborers for the harvest,” are familiar themes. What is helpful to emphasize about those themes today, in particular, is that the sheep are “troubled and abandoned.” God is saying that what the laborers have to do is to gather the people in (like the harvest) because, as the Lord said in today’s first reading, they are to be “my special possession.” As the psalm says, “He made us; his we are.”

This is the basis for Jesus giving the authority to cure disease and expel demons. Diseases and demons are ravaging people who belong to God. They are, in a sense, stealing God’s possession away from him.

And that’s exactly what abortion does, some 4000 times a day in the United States alone. At the heart of the debate is not primarily the question, “When does life begin?”. Rather, it is the question, “To whom do we belong?” Dr. James McMahon was an abortionist in Southern California and performed partial-birth abortions. When asked by the American Medical Association news how he justified doing it, he admitted that the baby was a child, but then said there was a more important question, “Who owns the child? It’s got to be the mother,” he explained.

Intervening for the child, advocating that the child belongs to God, is an aspect of gathering in the flock who are abandoned; inspiring hope and strength in the mother and father to say “Yes” to life is an aspect of helping the flock who are troubled. (In this, fathers have a particular role.) It is also a fulfillment of the command in today’s Gospel to “raise the dead.” We may wrestle with this one. In what sense do we fulfill this command of Jesus? Was it only for the apostles? Does it only refer to those dead “in spirit,” whom we can rouse to life-giving repentance? Or perhaps does it also mean that those who are tottering at the brink of death, that is, children in the womb scheduled to be aborted, can be brought back from death by those who speak up for them and who reach out to their parents with alternatives and assistance?