Matthew situates this passage at the end of a tour of all the towns and villages of Galilee (9:35) — teaching in synagogues, preaching the kingdom, healing every disease. The Greek behind “harassed and helpless” is stark: eskylmenoi (fatigued, lacerated, like a fleeced animal) and errimmenoi (thrown down, prostrated, abandoned). These are not spiritually neutral seekers. They are the wreckage of a system that did not care for them. Jesus tours these crowds and something breaks open in him.

From the writers we read together

Mother Teresa

Missionaries of Charity, founder (1910-1997), Nobel Peace Prize laureate

Mother Teresa worked among the harassed and helpless — the fatigued, the fleeced, the thrown-down — for nearly fifty years. Her theological basis was simple and radical: the person in front of her was not merely a needy human being but Jesus himself in disguise, citing Matthew 25 (“I was hungry and you fed me”). The splanchna Christ feels in 9:36 was, for Teresa, not something that stopped with the ascension. It was the ongoing visceral response of the Head of the Body to what happens to members of the Body, and she believed she was enrolled as one of the nerves that transmitted it.

“The laborers are few” is the sentence that should disturb every comfortable disciple. Jesus does not say the harvest is small; he says it is plentiful. The command is not “go immediately” but “pray first to the Lord of the harvest.” Teresa's method began the same way: she would not open a new house without praying the community through months of discernment. The gut-feeling of compassion that looks like Jesus's esplanchnisthē does not produce burnout when it begins in prayer directed at the Lord of the harvest. It produces a different kind of tiredness — the tiredness that comes from pouring yourself out for a cause that belongs to someone else and will outlast you.