FOURTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

[cappie]

A key theme of today's Gospel and last Sunday's Gospel is discipleship—its challenges, its difficulties, and its rewards. Sharing in the mission of Jesus is difficult, but everyone is called to do it, not just some professionals trained for ministry. Even for us today, the harvest is plentiful. We should pray to the master of the harvest to send out workers for his harvest.

Today Jesus appoints 72 people to go ahead of him to every town and place he plans to visit, proclaiming that the Kingdom of God is at hand. He sends them in pairs. In the Law of Moses two witnesses were needed for a testimony to be credible. It was probably also a safer way to travel.

We say these were the first clergy. In this we are both right and wrong. We are right that among those called and sent were those who would be pastors, preachers, celebrants of the sacraments, those who led emerging Christian communities. We are wrong if we think that all those called and sent filled that description. Those called and sent today, as then, are not merely the ordained, but rather they are the baptized.  

The gospel tells two things about every baptized Christian here today. The first is that the task of telling the Good News to others is given to us all. We may achieve that task in many different ways, quietly or spectacularly, verbally or by our loving care for others, but the task of showing Jesus to others is one of the chief reasons why we exist. That is not an exaggeration. We have to grasp the idea that each of us has been created, was born, for a purpose, and that purpose is in the mind of God and is more important than any other purpose we may take on.

The second truth the gospel tells us is that we have been “empowered” so to do. That’s an assurance and a challenge. We tend to absolve our passivity by muttering things like, “I’m an introvert,” “It’s not in my nature,” “I get embarrassed.”

The Gospel assures us  – and Luke later stresses this at the beginning of Acts – that we are all empowered to witness in the world and that empowerment is not the same as natural talent.

Imagine that you find yourself by a sick bed. Everything in you tells you to cut and run. You are extremely uncomfortable, don’t know what to say, feeling inadequate and close to panic. Yet you stay, maybe holding a hand and just sitting there. That action comforts and cheers the sick person. You have used not your talent, but the power given to you in baptism and reinforced every time you receive Holy Communion.

Perhaps you are in line at a store; an irate customer is yelling at the sales assistant. It’s not her fault. She is close to tears. When you get to her, your notice her name, speak it to her, smile and offer her silent comfort. In so doing you use the grace given to you in baptism. Jesus, present among us today, continues to call us, send us, and empower us. We all have a vocation to ministry. 

Reflecting on the teaching of Vatican 2 Lumen gentium and Gaudium et Spes, Pope Francis says those documents state that lay people “participate, in their own way, in the priestly, prophetic, and royal function of Christ himself. The Council, therefore, does not look at lay people as if they were ‘second class’ members, at the service of the hierarchy and only executors of orders from on high,” states the pope. “But as disciples of Christ who, by force of their baptism are called to animate every space, every activity, every human relation according to the spirit of the Gospel.”

We can take a cue as evangelizers in the world today from Christ as St. Francis did. Even if we’re not formal missionaries, we’re sent out from each Eucharist into the world. We carry a message of peace. Let’s seek the good wherever God has planted it.