He Stopped
They were not looking for him. They were just there. Crowds moving through the towns of Galilee, carrying the ordinary weight of the morning. No particular crisis. Just the pressure of living without anyone tending you. The shepherds of Israel had their rules and their titles. What they did not have was time for the people standing in front of them.
Then Jesus came through their town.
He had been going through every city, every village. Teaching. Preaching. Healing every disease and sickness. Dust on his feet. Crowds pressing in. He did not wait for the desperate to find him. He went.
When he saw the crowds, he stopped.
The people were “flayed and thrown down in the dirt.” An honest, brutal translation, harder than the “harassed and helpless” we usually read. Like sheep whose shepherd had stopped coming. Not sinful first. Just unguarded. Unprotected.
Something broke open in him.
He could not move past them.
He turned to his disciples: The harvest is plentiful. The workers are few. Pray to the Lord of the harvest for workers.
They prayed. And before the prayer had finished echoing, he answered. He called the twelve to him, gave them his own authority over sickness, over death, over every unclean thing, and sent them out.
Heal the sick. Raise the dead. Cleanse the lepers. Cast out demons.
They had asked God to send someone.
They were going.
He sent sheep to sheep.
These were not men who had outgrown their need for a shepherd. Peter, who would deny him before the night was over. One of them would hand Jesus over to his enemies before any of this was finished. Men still learning who he was, and still learning who they were. And into their unsteady hands he placed his own authority anyway: Go.
Freely you received. Freely give.
That is not a moral instruction. It is a description of reality. He says it at the end of commands that should be impossible, as if freely is the source of everything before it. It is. Nothing they carried into those villages began in them. It was given. The same compassion that broke him open now moves through their hands.
They had been in that dirt.
So are we.
The compassion that stopped Jesus has never stopped moving. It moves through people who are still being tended, into other unguarded lives, stopping at the sight of the flayed and the thrown down.
Somewhere right now, someone is about to be found who does not know they are lost.
These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached: