16th Sunday in Ordinary Time

A young and very successful executive was travelling down a suburban street in his brand new black Jaguar. Suddenly a brick was thrown from the sidewalk, thumping into the side of the car. Brakes slammed! Gears ground into reverse, and tires madly spun the Jaguar back to the spot from where the brick had been thrown. The driver jumped out, grabbed the kid who had thrown the brick and pushed him up against a parked car. “What was that all about?!” he screamed. “That’s my new Jag, that brick you threw is gonna cost you a lot of money!” “Please, mister, please …. I’m sorry! I didn’t know what else to do!” pleaded the youngster. “I threw the brick because no one else would stop!” Tears were dripping down the boy’s chin as he pointed around the parked car. “It’s my brother, mister,” he said. “He rolled off the curb and fell out of his wheelchair and I can’t lift him up.” Sobbing, the boy asked the executive, “Would you please help me get him back into his wheelchair? He’s hurt and he’s too heavy for me.” The mood was transformed in a moment as the young executive realised what had occurred. He lifted the young man into the wheelchair and took out his handkerchief and wiped the scrapes and cuts. He then watched as the younger brother pushed him down the sidewalk toward their home. The young executive never did fix the dented side door of his Jaguar. He kept the dent to remind him not to go through life so fast that someone has to throw a brick at him to get his attention.

In today’s gospel, we see Jesus and his disciples trying to escape the incessant comings and goings of the crowds that flock to hear him teach, be healed and seek counsel. They try and escape by boat, but the crowds, divining where they are going, head off in the same direction on foot and beat them there. As escape vehicles go, a fishing boat is a pretty pathetic one. I wonder if Jesus had had a speed boat if this would have been a different story. A speed boat like a sleek black Jaguar would have enabled Jesus to outpace the clinging crowds and actually find some much needed rest for himself and his disciples.

Each one of us, I’m sure, to a lesser or greater extent has some part of our lives where we give of ourselves to others in selfless service. This act is what brings out the best in us and makes us most authentically human. However, our reserves of energy for selfless service are not inexhaustible, and so I’m willing to bet that most of us also know the feeling of having to run on empty. We have given and given and the demands just keep on coming. We all know the feeling of having come to the end of our “generousity tether” and we just have no more bandwidth left to cope with another request, another plea for help, another demand on our time and generosity. This is the situation that Jesus and his disciples found themselves in and why they so badly needed a rest.

Now of course, even though Jesus and his apostles had never heard of burn-out syndrome and did not have the benefit of all the psychological and mental health research that has emphasized the importance of rest for us, Jesus knew the value of rest. This is precisely why we see him drawing his disciples away to a desolate place in order for them to escape the crowds. We are told that they were so busy they did not even have the time to eat. In the professions that place a person in a position of leadership and responsibility for the physical, psychological and spiritual welfare of others, the importance of drawing boundaries is emphasized, precisely to avoid burn out syndrome. You cannot simply keep on giving otherwise there will only be an empty shell at the end of the day. Jesus would have been well within his rights to draw a boundary line and simply send the crowds away and say, “Look we’ve been non-stop 24-7 for the past month, we need a bit of a break so just give us a bit of a breather.” But he didn’t, and surely that has got to give us pause to think.

Perhaps some of us aspire to the ideal of being able to control our lives to the extent that we are able to draw the perfect boundaries that give us the exact amount of rest that we need in order to carry on serving people and being good at our jobs. I think most of us would admit that we are not able to attain this ideal that we aspire to, and consequently spend a lot of our lives frustrated and tired. But perhaps, like the executive in his shiny sleek new Jaguar, we have to realize that the neatness of perfectly drawn boundaries is perhaps not something we should be aspiring to. Like the executive, we all need a reminder that life is messy, and if we draw our boundaries too neatly we end up cutting ourselves off from the shepherdless sheep who need our help.

Like the executive’s dented Jaguar, we do have a very powerful reminder of this in every Eucharist that we attend, at the moment of the fraction of the host, the breaking of the Body of Christ by the priest during the Agus Dei. I once knew a priest who would completely destroy the power of this symbol by taking the pattern and using it to cut a straight line right down the middle of the large host, dividing the Body of Christ into two perfectly equal halves. If the host is broken by the priest with just his bare hands, it results in a host with jagged edges, a Body of Christ that does not have the neat and perfect lines we usually associate with the divine. This is because Christ allows his body to be broken and become jagged by the needs of the people who he serves. People who come at unexpected times, demands that come when you are running on empty. Mother Teresa put it another way when she once said to her sisters as she counselled them on how to respond to the incessant needs of the poor they cared for: “Let them eat you.”

“So alright,” I hear you say, “where do I get the energy to run on empty then?” I think we might get a clue from today’s gospel, where we are given a rare insight into Jesus’ emotional landscape. We are told that Jesus was moved with pity for the crowds who are like sheep without a shepherd. The word used in Greek to translate the emotional state of Jesus is the same word that Luke uses in his gospel to describe the way the Good Samaritan felt towards the man who had been robbed and beaten up by brigands. It is the Greek word splagchnízomai which denotes an emotion so powerful that you feel it in your guts. Our emotions are powerful drivers of our actions and can often give us a second wind. Take the example of a young man or woman who is in love and how they suddenly seem to be able to draw on inexhaustible reserves of energy. Or take the example of when someone gives you a compliment, how the pride that ensues from that compliment gives you an extra boost and you find the energy to complete a task that has evaded you for weeks. Compassion can also be a very strong energizing emotion, and this is the emotion that enables Jesus to continue teaching the crowds even though he is on empty. It is also this same emotion of compassion that completely flips the young executive’s mood from one of irritation to that of helpfulness. Perhaps the invitation of today’s gospel is to allow ourselves to be guided by our compassion and let this emotion be the motor of our actions as we seek to find the reserves of energy we need to serve others. Questions for reflection:

1. What are the boundaries that you have drawn in your life in order to get the rest you need to function well? How hard and fast are these boundaries?
2. When was the last time you felt your guts wrenching in compassion for the suffering of another person? Did this emotion lead you to action?
3. What kind of a person do you become when you have come to the end of your “generosity tether”?