Jesus formed a poor Church to make him present for all ages – Luke 9:1-6

Daily Mass at Holy Cross parish; Wednesday of Week 25.

“Modern people listen more willingly to witnesses than teachers and, if they listen to teachers, it’s because they’re witnesses.”  It was in 1974 that Pope Paul VI said that.  I think the word ‘modern’ could probably be elided from that famous quote and it could be uttered in any year.  Certainly, Jesus seems to be very aware of its truth when he sends the twelve out in today’s reading.  He sends out not teachers, but powerful healers, proclaimers of the kingdom, impoverished witnesses: witnesses to trust in God’s care rather than in their own strength to provide for themselves; witnesses to the God who made Himself poor that we might be rich in grace.

God wants to be present to all people at all times, in as tangible a way as we can bear.  Most powerfully that self-presentation happened in the person of Jesus Christ.  But his life was, in itself, limited to a short time and a few locales.  God’s self-revelation is not limited.  The Christ event ripples outwards and our name for those ripples is Church.

We’ve read together some of Luke’s accounts of Jesus’ miracles and the consistent disapproval and even growing animosity they receive from Israel’s leadership.  Jesus had no desire to leave his people leader-less, because he knew that authentic leadership can be a powerful way to make God known to the ends of the earth and through all generations.  So, here he begins to form a new leadership, leaders who are witnesses.  Impoverishing himself is so fundamental to what God did in Christ that authentic leadership, authentic living out of one’s baptismal calling, must entail at the very least freedom from possessiveness.  The precise details of what the twelve could and couldn’t bring are not norms for all times and places (Jesus himself will make that point in 13 chapters’ time at the last supper), so we do need to translate these instructions prayerfully to find what God might be calling us to, but we can’t translate them away into something entirely disembodied.

Our Holy Cross Constitutions tell us to “stand with the poor and the afflicted because only from there can we appeal as Jesus did for the conversion and deliverance of all.”  Only from there.  This is the gift and the challenge of the Gospel.  We rejoice to belong to a Church in which God makes present what He did for us in Christ, through authentic witness.  But the evangelized must become envangelizers.  Urged on by that grace, the challenge is to follow in our Master’s footsteps and seek to be a part of that making present.