Counting Passes

Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time — June 14, 2026 (Year A)

Ex 19:2-6a; Ps 100:1-2, 3, 5; Rom 5:6-11; Matt 9:36—10:8

Some years ago psychologists ran a famous experiment. They showed people a video of students passing basketballs and asked them to count the passes. Halfway through, a man in a gorilla suit walks straight through the scene, beats his chest and walks off. Half the viewers never see the gorilla. We often fail to see what is right in front of us because we’re focused on something else.

This past Thursday, at their assembly in Orlando, the bishops of the United States consecrated our nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus as our country marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. This consecration is not merely a devotional gesture; it is a call on the power of a loving God to transform our hearts. Today’s Gospel reveals to us what the Sacred Heart does.

“At the sight of the crowds, his heart was moved with pity for them, because they were troubled and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd.”

Most of us hear it and picture Jesus feeling sorry for suffering people. That’s part of it. But the image of sheep without a shepherd has deep biblical echoes. It offers a judgment on Israel’s leadership. Ezekiel thundered against leaders who fed themselves and let the sheep scatter. In the verse immediately before today’s passage, the Pharisees have just declared that Jesus works on behalf of the prince of demons. The shepherds of Israel have rejected the One sent to save the flock.

The Greek verb Matthew chooses is the strongest word for compassion in the entire New Testament. It’s something that hits you in the gut—the depths of your body.

That is the Sacred Heart, the heart of God made visible in a man, a heart that refuses to stay indifferent in front of lost and wounded humanity.

When our Lord showed his heart to St. Margaret Mary at Paray-le-Monial in the 1670s, the Church in France was sick with Jansenism, a rigorism that pictured God as distant and severe, a judge so exacting that ordinary sinners hardly dared approach the altar. People stayed away from Communion out of fear. To combat this, the Church turned to the image of a human heart, wounded and burning, the concrete expression of the depth of God’s love manifested in Christ.    The Sacred Heart devotion is a protest against the lie of an uncaring and distant God. 

Paul reminds of this: Christ died for us not when we were righteous but while we were still sinners. The Sacred Heart is not attracted by worthiness. It creates worthiness through love.

Our age also believes in compassion. It may be the last virtue everyone still salutes. But our culture has quietly redefined compassion as affirmation. To love someone now is to approve of whatever he does, and to question his choices is framed as violence. The prophet Jeremiah identified this type of leadership: (Jer 6:14) “They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” That was the sin of the false shepherds. Sentimental affirmation is shepherdlessness with a mickey mouse bandage on the wound. And there’s a half-truth in it. Jesus did eat with sinners while the respectable people muttered. But hear his answer to them, just a few verses before today’s Gospel: those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. A doctor is moved by your suffering. That is exactly why he will not call the disease health. The crowds in Matthew 9 are “troubled and abandoned” partly because nobody would tell them the truth. The same Jesus who is moved with compassion calls sinners to repentance, tells the forgiven woman to sin no more, drives merchants from the Temple and warns of judgment. 

Jesus never mistakes a wound for an identity. The compassion of Jesus is never mere acceptance and never mere correction. It is the union of truth and mercy. He loves people exactly where they are, but he loves them too much to leave them there.

For five chapters Matthew has shown us Jesus teaching, healing, forgiving sins, calming storms and casting out demons. His authority on display everywhere. Now He hands that same mission and authority to the twelve. He sends them to continue his own work. His compassion becomes the foundation of the Church’s mission.

The Church is not a human organization trying to keep itself alive. The Church is Christ’s answer to his own compassion. He looked at a shepherdless people and sent the Church. Everything else about her, the buildings, the budgets, the programs, is secondary to the mission.  The mission is not simply to accompany suffering. The mission is to remove what enslaves. 

“Without cost you have received, without cost you are to give.” The Twelve were called out of that same shepherdless crowd. The rescued become the laborers. There is a counterfeit charity that secretly needs the poor to stay poor, because the giver has grown attached to being needed. It feeds a man forever and never once asks him to stand. Jesus’ mercy doesn’t make dependents. It makes apostles.

We need to stop asking what the Church is doing for me. We are the Church. The real question is where Christ is sending us. We are called to see what Jesus sees. The lonely person everyone has learned to walk past. The family carrying a weight nobody knows about. The young person hunting for meaning, the old one wondering if anybody remembers her, the coworker who looks successful and is starving underneath. The mission of Christ always begins with the vision of Christ, seeing the gorllia and not just the passes..

The saints understood this. Mother Teresa looking at the dying in Calcutta, Francis kissing the leper, John Vianney sitting hour after hour in a dark confessional. None of them started from a strategy. They had simply learned to look at the world with his eyes.

To consecrate ourselves to the Sacred Heart is to request a transplant. Give us your heart, Lord. Teach our eyes to see what yours see, and let your compassion, rather than our opinions, decide what we do next. Heaven knows this country has no shortage of opinions. What it lacks is people whose hearts have been conformed to the heart of Christ.

As we continue this Eucharist celebration, we are asked to step personally into the consecration our bishops began. Ask Jesus for more than protection. Ask for his compassion and his vision, the heart he showed to Margaret Mary. When the heart of Christ beats in his disciples, the shepherdless finally meet their shepherd, and the Church becomes what she was made to be: the compassion of Jesus, moving through the world.