Throughout
the Fall, the Daily Mass lectionary takes us passage by passage through Luke’s
account of Jesus’ earthly ministry.
Sometimes, a feast day will come up that leads us to depart for a day
from this continuous reading and instead incorporate into our Mass a reading
more closely linked with the feast. When
that happens, as it has the last couple of days, we end up skipping some of the
continuous reading. It’s like changing
the channel to check a sports score and then going back to your movie. Today, we switch back to our continuous
reading of Luke and, if it were a movie, we’d notice that the scene has
suddenly shifted. Up until this point,
we’ve spent almost five weeks reading about Jesus’ ministry in Galilee, his
home territory. We turn away for two
days, and he’s started moving: he’s turned his face to Jerusalem and begun the
journey that will take us the next seven weeks to read about. And that’s important background, because it
matters to remember that all we’re about to read is being spoken by a man who
knows he’s walking to his death, who’s willing to do this out of love for us,
who’s inaugurating the pilgrimage we now walk, through death to
everlasting life. When he sends out the
seventy-two on a difficult journey, he knows what he’s asking.
This
is an intensification of the mission on which he sent the Twelve just one chapter
earlier. The mission has grown: there
are more of them and now they’re not just preaching in familiar Galilee, but in
hostile Samaritan country. Once more, he
sends them out ill-equipped for their journey.
By going out without proper provisions, without adequate defense, to
proclaim peace in a land where peace is too often scorned, their very travel
becomes an act of proclamation: they are witnesses to trust in the God who
provides. They bear witness to not
trusting in one’s own strength, to not retaliating when rejected, but simply
shaking off the dust and moving on.
Preparing the way for their Lord, they make present God’s act of
self-denial in taking on the limitations of flesh in Christ, of being a
homeless person reliant on the help of others, of being offered like a lamb on
the cross by the wolves he came to save, and forgiving them as he hung there.
Jesus
asks the seventy-two to give up their possessions and trust in God, in order
that they might make present the God who gave up His only son, who never
compels anyone to respond, but trusts that some of His people will respond with
faith to the offer of grace. Bl. Pope
John XXIII once said, “the secret of everything is to let yourself be carried
by God and so carry others to Him.”
The seventy-two can be called laborers of the harvest not because they
trust in their own capacity for work.
No, their witness will bear fruit precisely because they don’t trust in
their own power, but let themselves be carried by God. God carries others to Him through our consent
to being carried.
In
this Eucharist, our deepest needs are provided for by God, and then we are to
go and announce the Gospel of the Lord.
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