4 GO S P E L GR O W T H MOOR E M AT T E R S A U T U MN 2 0 2 2
The harvest is plentiful Kanishka D Raffel / Anglican Archbishop of Sydney
SYDNEY IS GROWING. FUTURE PLANNING BY THE GOVERNMENT IS BASED ON THE CONCEPT OF THREE CITY HUBS EVOLVING OVER THE NEXT FORTY YEARS.
‘C
entral River City’ will be based around Parramatta, ‘Eastern Harbour City’ around Sydney harbour and ‘Western Parkland City’ based around the new Nancy-Bird Walton Airport at Bradfield in Western Sydney. At the same time, the last two years of pandemic and the rise of ‘work from home’ has seen numbers of people opting for ‘tree changes’ and ‘sea changes’ to the mountains or the South Coast. The Diocese of Sydney spans all these geographic areas and we are bound under God, to prayerfully, sacrificially and with loving boldness seek to bring to communities across every part of the diocese the glorious gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is projected that by 2030 (just eight years away— two Olympics!) more than 50% of Greater Sydney’s population of 5.8 million people will live west of Parramatta. When I consider such figures, I cannot but hear the words of the gospel writers, who recorded that when Jesus ‘saw the crowds, he had compassion on them because they were harassed and helpless, like
sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”’ (Matthew 9:36-38) The biblical word ‘compassion’ is a metaphor. It refers to something akin to a ‘kick in the guts’. A deep feeling, not a mere sentimentality. A propulsive feeling that stirs one into action, not just a passive and fleeting emotion. When Jesus looks at the crowds with ‘compassion’ we are meant to understand that he has a longing and yearning for them, that will ultimately take him to the Cross. Similarly, the phrase ‘sheep without a shepherd’ has a long biblical pedigree. God is referred to as the Shepherd of his people in the Book of Genesis (eg. 48:15, 49:24), and as Moses approaches death, he prays that the Lord would not leave his people ‘like sheep without a shepherd’ but raise up a leader to succeed him. Jesus’s words to his disciples are striking for a couple of reasons. First, it is clear that Jesus means to involve his disciples in the work that is the response to his compassion for the crowds. He means to be the Shepherd to his people, but he will enlist ‘under-shepherds’ as his agents and emissaries. This was by no means the typical pattern of ancient rabbis, whose disciples followed them in order to learn from their wisdom.
