11th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
Exodus 19:2-6a
Psalm 100:1-3, 5
Romans 5:6-11
Matthew 9:36–10:8
Mud-pit, dustbowl, wasteland, wonderland, zoo for every last variety of large machinery imaginable — depending on the day, any of these terms could accurately describe the 360-degree radius surrounding my current abode.
I am the “Last of the Mohicans” on the original campus of Saint Francis de Sales Seminary, which, as many of you know and have generously made possible, is undergoing a historic renovation. Although I was able to ride out the school year in the building on our grounds set apart for the first-year seminarians, the warmer weather has expanded the project’s scope from an interior renovation of the main building to an overhaul of the campus roads. I now step out of my door each day into varying depths of gravel and mud pits and exit at my own risk. It’s actually kind of fun.
All this, due not only to the fact that our ante-bellum campus reached an existential crossroads structurally but also the fact that our numbers keep growing. We simply need more space to house, feed and form the seminarians knocking on our doors. This past year, we had 75 men in our program. Next year, we’re slated to have 80, from twelve different dioceses spanning from Spokane to Albany.
“The harvest is abundant, but the laborers are few,” our Lord said, “moved with pity … at the sight of the crowds … because they were troubled and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd.” (Matthew 9:36-37) Do our swelling numbers indicate that the labor shortage Jesus diagnosed is now over?
Au contraire. Though a wonderful sign of the hopeful renewal going on in seemingly every corner of our archdiocese at the moment, a swell in the numbers of those exploring a call to the ministerial priesthood is really only the beginning of the greater swell still needed in the whole people of God’s hearty embrace of the royal priesthood bestowed on us in Baptism. The former stands at the service of the latter. The latter still, over sixty years after the Second Vatican Council, can tend to get lost in the shuffle or outsourced to the “priests,” as if no one can pray or offer witness in the public square but them.
“You shall be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation,” God said to Moses on Mount Sinai as he gave Israel their original vocation. (Exodus 19:6a) It was to be a restoration of the royal priesthood bestowed on Adam and Eve, and thus to all humanity, as they were called to “have dominion” over all the earth — royal language — and “till and keep” (“cultivate and guard”) the garden — priestly language. (cf. Gen 1:26; 2:15; Num 3:7) Lost at the Fall, God restored this original call to a chosen people whom he would draw close to him on Mount Sinai so that they might draw all the nations back to God’s holy mountain, only to have them fall from that grace almost immediately, just like Adam and Eve, in the apostasy of the golden calf.
As our Gospel recounts, our Lord definitively restores this royal priesthood of Adam in his very person, and appoints 12 apostles (“messengers,” “ones sent”) to cultivate and spread the good news of it. Though those 12 are given a unique share in our Lord’s authority to “cultivate and guard” the Church by virtue of their eventual ordination, their “apostolic” charism is said to mark not just them in an exclusive way but the whole Church.
As the Catechism puts it, “The whole Church is apostolic, in that she remains, through the successors of St. Peter and the other apostles, in communion of faith and life with her origin: and in that she is ‘sent out’ into the whole world. All members of the Church share in this mission, though in various ways. ‘The Christian vocation is, of its nature, a vocation to the apostolate as well.’ Indeed, we call an apostolate ‘every activity of the Mystical Body’ that aims ‘to spread the Kingdom of Christ over all the earth.’” (CCC 863; quoting Apostolicam actuositatem, 2)
This proliferation of God’s kingdom is not limited to parish Bible studies and outreach programs, though these play essential, even foundational, roles in its propagation. The “renovation” is meant to expand outside the limits of our Church structures-proper, into an overhaul of every road, highway and byway over the face of the earth. This is the priestly mission of God’s people!
As Vatican II puts it, “by their competence in secular training and by their activity, elevated from within by the grace of Christ, let [the laity] vigorously contribute their effort, so that created goods may be perfected by human labor, technical skill, and civic culture for the benefit of all … according to the design of the Creator and the light of His Word.” (Lumen Gentium 36 § 2) What this looks like in practice is butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, lawyers and doctors and soldiers, Door Dash drivers and students and trash collectors, breathing life into their coworkers and area of competence with Christian charity and verity, perhaps offering up their day’s labor for different intentions, cultivating by their work not only their own sanctification, but the sanctification of every nook and cranny of this beautiful flying space-rock that we have been given to occupy.
We are not called to wander troubled and abandoned, as sheep without a shepherd. We have been sanctified by our Good Shepherd and sent to share and cultivate this sanctification with every soul we encounter in every environment imaginable. Let’s get after it; it’s actually kind of fun.
