Homily for the 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A, 14 June 2026
Exodus 19:2–6; Romans 5:6–11; Matthew 9:36–10:8
H O M I L Y
The account we have read in the first reading takes place barely three months after the people of Israel had left Egypt and arrived at the foot of Mount Sinai, where the encounter between Moses and God was to take place. Moses sets out to climb up to God, and God calls to him from the top of the mountain. The message received, however, is not for Moses alone; it is for the whole people with whom God wishes to make a Covenant and to whom he entrusts a collective mission: ‘You shall be for me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation’.
Forty years later, shortly before entering the Promised Land, Moses, knowing that his death is near, begs God to give him a successor “so that the people may not be like sheep without a shepherd” (Numbers 27:17). It is this very same expression that is taken up by Matthew at the beginning of today’s Gospel, when he says that Jesus sends his disciples to the crowds, because of the compassion he has for these crowds “weary and downcast like sheep without a shepherd”. Between these two texts, the whole life of Moses is evoked, which sheds a very clear light on both the mission of Jesus and that of his Church.
The rabbis of Jesus’s time surrounded themselves with a few disciples, with whom they lived in a school or at the gates of a town. Jesus chose a completely different approach. He was an itinerant rabbi who did not wait for disciples to come to him but instead went out to meet them. He did not train his disciples through long discourses, but simply involved them in his missionary journeys and sent them out on missions as well. He did not follow in the footsteps of the priests of his time (who were preoccupied with sacrifices and the people’s money), nor did he follow in those of the Pharisees (a haughty elite); rather, he followed in the footsteps of the great prophets and, beyond them, in the footsteps of Moses himself.
The Evangelist Matthew does not describe the institution of the Twelve. In his Gospel, in place of this institution, we find the ‘Beatitudes’, in which Jesus establishes the Law of the New Covenant and through which he consequently founds his Church, the new Israel. The text first speaks of the ‘twelve disciples’, who are mentioned here for the first time and who represent the whole People of Israel, composed of twelve tribes. To this people, represented by the twelve, he gives the power to do all that he himself has done: to cast out evil spirits and to heal every disease and every infirmity. The text then goes on to give these twelve disciples the title of apostles. The mission referred to here is therefore a mission entrusted to his entire new people, to his Church, to all of us. All are called to have the same compassion as he
These twelve disciples – or twelve apostles – whom Jesus chose to send out on mission are as diverse a group as one could imagine. First there is Simon, called Peter, his brother Andrew, then James and his brother John. Of the other seven we know almost nothing (if we exclude what is recounted in the apocryphal Gospels or other late accounts of a similar nature). And the list ends with the one who would betray him.
If we had been in Jesus’s shoes, we would no doubt have chosen more qualified helpers and made sure they had everything they needed to carry out a task as difficult as casting out evil spirits! Jesus chose a motley crew; he chose all of us, knowing full well that, like Moses with his people, he would find it very difficult to make his immediate disciples—and even more so all of us—understand the meaning of his mission, which is rooted in compassion for those who suffer and lack direction.
We know our limitations and our weaknesses; and the mission entrusted to us is greater than we are. The One who entrusted it to us is always there to comfort and nourish us, as he will do in this Eucharist.
And let us not forget the final short sentence of our Gospel, which reminds us that everything we are and everything we have received, we have received freely. It is therefore freely that we must fulfil our mission as Christians, knowing that this vocation to the Gospel is not a privilege we should guard jealously, but a grace to be shared.
Armand VEILLEUX