Matthew 9:35-10:8
June 14, 2026
Robert Peary was an American explorer and United States Navy officer who made several expeditions to the Arctic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. On one of his expeditions to the North Pole, he stopped at the end of the day to get his bearings and he was surprised to discover that he was actually farther south than he had been at the start of the day. Later he discovered that he had been traveling on a gigantic floating piece of ice and the ocean currents were pulling this piece of ice south faster than he was traveling north. In other words, he thought he was going in the right direction, but he was actually moving farther away from his goal.
When we look at our nation today it may feel like we are in a similar situation. We appear to be moving in many different directions, seeking different ways to bring down the cost of living, trying different approaches to raise awareness of the value of life and the pain of discrimination, and attempting different strategies to help us live together with a sense of peace and harmony, but all the while getting further and further away from the goal Jesus gave to us that we should love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
When God saw the sin that infected His perfect creation and how it destroyed the life He had created, He sent His Son, Jesus, to this world to save all people so we could live with Him forever. And our Gospel lesson tells us that when Jesus traveled from place to place to preach, teach, and heal people, He saw the devastating effects of sin. In verse 36 it says, “He had compassion on the crowds of people He saw, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” In other words, people were not living in peace and harmony. People were not loving their neighbors as themselves. So when Jesus had compassion on the crowds, He showed them what it meant that God loves us. As He taught, preached, healed people, and forgave sins, He showed them and all of us God’s love.
Jesus is the one who shows us very dramatically what God’s love is like. It is a forgiving, accepting, caring, merciful, compassionate, and sacrificial love which allowed God’s only son to be killed on a cross so that our relationship with God could be restored. That love of God is certainly seen through Jesus and the cross, but it is also to be seen today through all of us.
As Jesus looks at this crowd, at this harvest you could say, that is hurting and doesn’t know His Word or His love, He realizes that the harvest is huge, but the workers are few. Therefore, in Matthew 10, Jesus prepares to send out His 12 disciples to do the challenging work with Him of teaching, healing, and sharing His love with people. But despite the work of those disciples and all followers of Jesus who have faithfully gone before us, when we look at our world today it may feel like we are farther away from the goal of having all people know Jesus as their Savior as the harvest is greater than it has ever been. There are millions of people in our country and billions of people around the world who do not know Jesus and His love.
So what should we do? In verse 38 Jesus says, “Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.” He calls on us to pray. But surprisingly, He does not ask us to pray for the lost, for those who don’t know Him, He asks us to pray for workers to go out and do the work of ministry. And when we offer such prayers, it needs to be with the understanding that God may make us the answers to our prayers. It is a high privilege to pray for this work, to support this work, and to be involved in doing this work. The disciples took these words to heart as I’m sure they prayed for workers, and the Lord’s first way of answering their prayer was to send them out into the spiritual harvest fields. Whenever we pray for those who don’t know Jesus, who are suffering, and even for our enemies, we should want God to use us to spread the good news about Jesus, to alleviate suffering, and to win over our enemies through kindness and love. So the challenge Jesus faces in His work is not with the size of the harvest, but with the lack of workers.
Therefore, as followers of Jesus, I believe we are all sent to do the work of sharing His Word and living His love with others. But how do we do that? Where do we begin? I think the main way Jesus demonstrated for us how to do this and where to begin was through relationships with people right where you are. And one of the stories He told that I think is helpful for us to remember as we seek to establish relationships with people in a divided nation is the story of the Good Samaritan found in Luke 10.
This story involves a lawyer asking Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” And what the lawyer was really trying to do by asking that question was to limit the number of people he needed to love as himself. In other words, the man’s question suggests that loving everyone is rather unrealistic. But Jesus is not going to let the man limit the number of people he needed to love, so in response to the question Jesus says, “3 men came upon a man who was robbed, stripped of his clothes, beaten, and left for dead. Of these 3, a priest and a Levite both saw the man, but did not stop to help.” Both of these men represented respectable and honorable positions, the kind the lawyer would have been eager to include among his neighbors. Now, why didn’t the priest or the Levite, fellow Jews, just like the man who was beaten, stop to help him? We don’t know, but whatever reason they had would never be acceptable.
I’m sure the lawyer was very surprised that Jesus would portray these “religious people” as being so unkind, but he was probably even more surprised when Jesus said that a Samaritan came by and the Samaritan was the one who stopped to help. The Jews and Samaritans hated each other and in the lawyer’s mind, the Samaritan would have had a good reason to pass by, after all, this man in the ditch was a Jew, “Why should I help him?” But instead of making excuses, the Samaritan cleaned and bandaged the man’s wounds, took him to an inn, and paid for his stay. Jesus then asks, “Which of these 3 proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among robbers?” And the lawyer responds, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus ends the story by telling the man and all of us, “Now go and do likewise.”
In a world filled with conflict and hardship, I think Jesus shows us 3 things in the relationship between the Samaritan and the beaten man that we need to see and understand in order to reach people in a divided nation. First, place yourself in someone’s pain. Sharing someone’s pain allows us to see what God did for us when He came as a human being to this world to endure the cross. When we choose to experience what someone else is going through, we can then show that person true compassion. Second, sacrifice your plans and position. The Samaritan invested his time, his money, and his resources into saving the hurting man, just as Jesus surrendered Himself to the cross so that we could have abundant life. Sacrificial love costs us something, but the return is healing, forgiveness, and stronger relationships. Third, take specific action. The Samaritan showed the Jewish man that he cared by taking care of him. It was that decision that led to the restoration of that man’s life. In the same way, we must be willing to repeatedly act in ways that demonstrate humility, love, and grace. Compassion, in order to be effective, has to lead to action. It has been said many times, “The world will never care how much you know until they know how much we care.” We will never care for people the way Jesus cared for them, until we see people the way Jesus saw them.
The Good Samaritan in the story sacrificed his time and money to help a beaten man, but Jesus sacrificed everything for you and me. He is truly the Good Samaritan in the story of our lives. So when we see what Jesus saw: people who have been beaten by their sin, we will feel what Jeus felt, we will love as Jesus loved, and we will go as Jesus went, and the harvest will be great.
