Ask the Master of the Harvest to Send out Laborers for his Harvest

In in the readings for the Fourteenth Sunday in ordinary time we see Jesus send out 72 of his disciples on a ministry trip. It seems clear that this was a type of practicum, or work experience training in their formation as Jesus’ disciples.

We might ask, what does this passage mean to me today?

If we ask someone about his or her profession, “Are you an accountant? or “Are you a sales representative for this drug company? They would easily reply, “Yes, I am.” They would have no trouble explaining what they do in the day-to-day life of their profession.

A problem arises, however, when we asks someone, “Are you a disciple of Jesus?” Although disciple is an extremely common word in the Bible, many Catholics do not have a clear idea of what it means to be a disciple. We are not used to someone asking us if we are a disciple. With hesitation we might say, “Yes, I am a disciple of Jesus.”

If an unchurched person, asked us to explain what a disciple is, perhaps we would say that being a disciple is not like a profession, but it is a volunteer activity, which involves joining a group with a minimum commitment of one hour per week, and occasional volunteer work.

The problem is, this is not at all what a disciple is in the Bible. The word disciple (Gr. mathētēs) comes from the verb ‘to learn.’[i]  I'll warn you though, that this gives entirely the wrong impression when we think of this today. Disciple is not a special religious or Jewish word. Greek philosophers also had disciples. A disciple was a follower of a master, or in the Jewish world a rabbi.

Unlike the way we conduct modern education, discipleship was much more of an apprenticeship. Disciples did received the master’s teaching and passed it down to later disciples. The teaching was most often oral. While this teaching was essential, the most important part of the process was to follow or imitate the master to see how this teaching was lived in the walk or life of the master.

For Jewish rabbis, the disciple was expected to demonstrate shimmush, “attending upon and coming under the influence of” the teacher.[ii] They were required to imitate the halakhah (or the walk of the rabbi). The walk of the rabbi demonstrated the application of the Law to life.

How did the early Christians understand discipleship? St. Paul writes to the Corinthians, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ. I praise you because you remember me in everything and hold fast to the traditions, just as I handed them on to you” (1 Cor. 11:1-2). Earlier in this letter, St Paul writes writes,

Therefore, I urge you, be imitators of me. For this reason I am sending you Timothy, who is my beloved and faithful son in the Lord; he will remind you of my ways in Christ [Jesus], just as I teach them everywhere in every church (1 Cor. 4:16-17).

Paul is able to say I want you to imitate Jesus by imitating me—so I am sending you Timothy. Because of the notion of discipleship, one is able to imitate Paul by imitating Timothy. As St. Paul’s disciple, Timothy is a perfect living embodiment of Paul.

Being a disciple is not an added extra for some Christians, all Christians are disciples.

Pope Francis has reminded us, all Christians are missionary disciples. “In virtue of their baptism, all the members of the People of God have become missionary disciples (cf. Mt 28:19)” (Evangelii Gaudium 120). 

While we do not need to imitate the specific cultural details in our Gospel passage, Jesus words still apply to each one of us today. Jesus’ urgent appeal in our Gospel is directed to each one of us, “The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest” (Luke 10:2).

Today, some Catholics have tried to adjust Jesus' mandate to preach the Gospel, by quoting a saying falsely attributed to St. Francis, “Preach the Gospel at all times, use words if necessary.” St. Francis never said this, and when we look at the life of Francis, he definitely preach the Gospel also using words. 

Perhaps our intuition is correct, however, that many unchurched people do not read the Gospels, but instead read the life of Christians. If Christians are hypocritical and poor examples of what a disciple is, then the message of the Gospel is undermined. At the same time, clearly the Gospel is more than merely being nice.

Loving people and demonstrating the Gospel with our life is crucial, but it is not enough. If we are disciples, we must also proclaim the saving truth of the Gospel in its fullness. The Gospel message must be an invitation to surrender your life to Jesus and follow him.

Each one of us need to make a personal decision to follow Jesus. We have a duty to invite others to do this.

For those of us baptized as children, St. Pope John Paul II reminds us that each of us also needs to say ‘Yes’ to Jesus Christ. We must surrender to the Word of God and endeavor to know the profound meaning of this Word better and better (Catechesi tradendae 20). Infused by the Holy Spirit, we are lead to exercise faith and repentance, and to surrender to God’s will and to enjoy personal relationship with him.

Pope Paul VI reminds us that the evangelical message must have the “capacity of piercing the conscience of each individual, of implanting itself in his heart as though he were the only person being addressed, with all his most individual and personal qualities, and evoke an entirely personal adherence and commitment” (Evangelii Nuntiandi, 45).

With this in mind, Pope Francis makes the following impassioned plea,

I invite all Christians, everywhere, at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them; I ask all of you to do this unfailingly each day. No one should think that this invitation is not meant for him or her, since “no one is excluded from the joy brought by the Lord” (EG, 3).

What would happen in our families and parish if each one of us responded to Jesus' call personally and then shared this joyful hope both with our life and with our words?

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[i] Michael J. Wilkins, Following the Master: A Biblical Theology of Discipleship. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan/HarperCollins, 1992. Esp. p. 25-34.

[ii] Michael Griffiths, The Example of Jesus, p.  24.

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I will Follow You Wherever You Go

In a certain way, all of the readings for this Sunday are concerned with the vocation to discipleship.

In the broadest sense, we all have the vocation as human beings to be God’s children created in the image and likeness of God. He created us to be happy.

True happiness is the fulfillment of what it means to be genuinely human. We know this intuitively, though many times we do not reflect deeply on this truth. If you search our calendar, you will not find any special days celebrating cowards, liars, or those who betray the trust of others. We do not celebrate these behaviors because we all know instinctively that these behaviors lead to hurt and shame.

Unfortunately, our natural intuition for happiness no longer works as God intended. Sin has left us wounded and broken. Each one of us needs to restoration and healing in Christ, to return to the happiness that God intended.

Yet as St. Paul reminds us in our reading from Galatians, this ‘happiness” in not found in the pursuit of what he calls the “yoke of slavery” to our passions.

In our modern world, we often see people trying to pursue happiness in various pleasures, and entertainments, and in pursuit of the wealth and honor needed to obtain them. For many people happiness is “living the dream.” We also see the exaltation of freedom in our modern culture. “I should be free to do whatever I want.” “Happiness is doing my own thing.”

Again, St. Paul reminds the Galatians, “For you were called for freedom, brothers. But do not use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh; rather, serve one another through love” (Galatians 5:13).

While God created the things of this world to be good, at a minimum, our enjoyment of these goods requires wisdom in order to lead us to genuine happiness.

As Christians we a called to a deeper wisdom and restoration. By virtue of our Baptism, we are a new creation in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17) and we live by the Spirit as we heard in our reading from Galatians (Galatians 5:13-18). Building on our natural desire for happiness, God purifies our desires and leads us by the Spirit.

Our vocation to happiness is also a common vocation to holiness. Every Christian, regardless of their state in life, is called to a life of holiness. Lay Christians live this calling in the midst of the world, both in our daily family life and in our secular vocations. Each one of us is called to be a disciple. This is our primary vocation as Christians.

In our gospel, Jesus wants to remind us that he came to reveal the mercy and love of the Father to our broken world. This is the Good News. Jesus invites us to follow him and to experience God’s mercy.

In our Gospel, we learn that a certain village of Samaritans has rejected Jesus. Perhaps we should note that St. Luke describes other Samaritans positively and that Jesus deliberately enters Samaria to share God’s mercy with them.

In imitation of Elijah the prophet (2 Kings 1:10), the apostles James and John want to call down a fiery judgment upon this village, but Jesus rebukes them. The gospel message is not carried out violently or in vengeance but through mercy. God reveals his power through weakness, apparent defeat, suffering, and death. Echoing Jesus (Matthew 6: 14-15), the Letter of James reminds us, “For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy; yet mercy triumphs over judgment” (James 2:13).

Yet, because we often perceive mercy a something soft, many people seem to think that God desires to offer us an easy path here on earth. A merciful God will not be too demanding. He will always understand and forgive us, so we don’t need to try to hard. Perhaps the idea that we may need to suffer or struggle on this path even offends out modern notion of freedom.

In imitation of Jesus our master, our motto as his disciples should be, “Speak Lord your servant is listening.” For many people however, the idea of obeying someone else sounds repressive.

Although Jesus’ message of mercy is the genuine path to happiness, those who hear the gospel message, often reject it. Perhaps they think, obedience is something for children. The idea of being docile offends our modern sense of freedom.

We need to realize that Jesus deliberately chose the path of suffering to accomplish his mission. Jesus tells all his disciples, they also need to take up their cross and follow him (Luke 9:23).

The path of Christian discipleship often involves suffering and rejection. It requires our complete commitment. We need to place Jesus at the center of our life, above all other commitments and desires.

Jesus encounter with three potential disciples highlights this. As Jesus is passing by, one man says,

“I will follow you wherever you go.”

Jesus answered him,

“Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.”

I do not know if you have ever thought about this, but Jesus is like a homeless person. As a disciple of Jesus we may be called to give up even normally comforts, for the kingdom of God. This was certainly true if you were literally following him at the time of Jesus. For many disciples, this is still true today.

Jesus then invites another man to “follow him.” The man very reasonably says in reply, “Lord, let me go first and bury my father.” Jesus reply seems harsh, “Let the dead bury their dead But you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

Respect for our parents, and the charitable duty of caring for the deceased, are indeed high values, but there is a higher value to honor God above all things. The commitment to discipleship must have a higher priority even than family considerations. Jesus response may simply be hyperbole to make a point. The kingdom of God is the highest priority. Some interpreters, however, have questioned if perhaps there is more to the situation.

According to Jewish custom if a man had been in contact with a dead body he would be ritually defiled and unable to walk about and interact with Jesus (Numbers 19:11). Perhaps the man’s father was not yet dead. Could this be a clever excuse? “Jesus I would follow you right now, but I am too busy with life right now.”

In fact, Jesus response, “Let the dead bury their dead” may imply, not actual death but spiritual death. Those who have rejected the Gospel, often interfere with its reception by others.

Jesus’ final encounter is similar. A man volunteers, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to my family at home.” Jesus replies, “No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Few modern people have had actual experience with a plow, but you need to stay focused, especially if you are plowing with animals. You cannot take time to look back.

The prophet Elijah granted Elisha’s request to go back and kiss his father goodbye (1 Kings 19:20), so the man’s request sounds very reasonable, even biblical. The decision to follow Jesus, however, has an urgency, which demands action. If Christ is passing by, and if we have felt the call to follow him, we should not delay.

In Revelation, Jesus has a word for each one of us. He says,

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me” (Revelation 3:20).

Each morning the daily office begins by reciting from Psalm 95 (cf. Hebrews 3:15),

Today, listen to the voice of Lord:

Do not grow stubborn, as your fathers did the wilderness…

In every Mass, Christ is literally passing by. Imagine what would happen today, if each one of us opened the door and allowed him into our hearts. What would happen in our families and in our parish if we truly followed him from our hearts and allowed him to be the center of our life?

Today I invite you to consider carefully what this means, and then to personally say to Jesus, “I will follow you wherever you go.”

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The Most Holy Trinity: The central mystery of Christian faith and life

When I look back at my own childhood, perhaps it is inevitable that it looks normal to me. Yet at least compared to the average person in the Midwest, I had some unusual experiences. I literally grew up in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. I was backpacking for weeklong trips in the wilderness in grade school, and in middle school, treks through the mountain wilderness were part of my school curriculum.

One time after climbing to the very top of a mountain, we began to make lunch using tiny naphtha powered stoves. We put water on to boil, but to my amazement, the water boiled in only a few short minutes.

One of the adults told us that we would be unlikely to get the water all the way to normal boiling temperature. Water boils at 212 ºF at sea level, but the entire National Park was about 4500 feet above sea level, and we had just climbed a mountain. I am guessing we were likely more than 7000 feet above sea level. At this altitude, water boils at 198.5 ºF. An experienced mountain climber would know this, but to me this was extremely amazing.

I tell this story because one of the common beliefs in our culture is that everything should be simple and something we can easily figure out for ourselves. Knowledge should be intuitive, and something we easily get. It should not be complicated. I want to ask you though, is this true? 

Is life not sometimes complicated and full of surprises?

Of course, we recognize that some things are hard to understand. I doubt anyone would think spatial anomalies called black holes, were simple. Yet, for most of us, unless we are especially curious, if something is complicated we do not try too hard to figure it out. If I cannot understand something with a quick google search, I will put it in the "too hard pile," and ignore it. At one level, perhaps this behavior is understandable!

The problem is that many people also apply this thinking to their faith. They want to keep their faith very simple. They might say, “As long as I am basically a good person, and that I act in a loving manner toward other people, this is all that really matters” They might think that there is no need to understand a bunch of complicated doctrines about the faith. Someone might say, “I don’t need theology or doctrine, I just need Jesus.” We might sing the 1960’s Beatles hit song, “All you need is love,” and think we have it figured out.

What could go wrong with this thinking?

In a recent survey of Christians including Catholics, who apparently attend Mass weekly, revealed an astounding 57 % of Catholics agreed with the statement “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.”

Some things we believe are so essential that we cannot have faith without them. What would be the consequences of believing that Jesus is not God, or believing that he did not die to make satisfaction for our sins, or believing that he did not rise from the dead to bring us new life? If this were the case, St. Paul tells us, both our preaching and our faith would be “in vain” and “futile” and God would not have forgiven our sins. (1 Corinthians 15: 7-14).

A mere human being, no matter how good or admirable they might seem to be, cannot make the necessary satisfaction for our sins. Only God can do this. If Jesus is not God, then we are still in our sins, and we are still alienated from God.

I think the reason that some people do not understand this truth is because they think they will earn their own salvation by being good. The Bible (Ephesians 2:8-9) and 2000 years of Tradition (Trent, Justification, Can. 1; First Decree, V), teach us that this is a false and presumptuous hope (CCC 2092).

This is Trinity Sunday. We believe that God is one. “We do not confess three Gods, but one God in three persons, the ‘consubstantial Trinity’” (CCC 253). We also believe that there are three distinct divine persons in the Godhead. They are not simply different forms or modalities of one God but are really “distinct from one another in their relations of origin: ‘It is the Father who generates, the Son who is begotten, and the Holy Spirit who proceeds’” (CCC 254). Yet these origins do not begin in time. The Son is “eternally begotten” and the Spirit “eternally proceeds.”

If we follow the intuition to keep it simple, we might understand the Trinity to be something too complicated to understand, and too detached from our daily life to be concerned with it. After all, 1+1 +1 does not normally equal 1. This is not intuitive.

For many people, a favorite way to describe the Trinity is to say that it is a mystery. By 'mystery' they mean it is too hard for the average person to understand. The Trinity might be true, but it beyond my comprehension. This is not, however, what we mean by a 'mystery' in our faith. We can distinguish ordinary mysteries (those things we do not understand) from the “mysteries of faith.” The Catechism notes,

“The Trinity is a mystery of faith in the strict sense, one of the “mysteries that are hidden in God, which can never be known unless they are revealed by God” [Dei Filius 4: DS 3015] (CCC 237).

Once God has revealed the truth of a particular mystery, this truth can be known by each of us, at least to the extent that God has revealed it. In Romans, St. Paul describes, "the revelation of the mystery kept secret for long ages but now manifested" (Romans 16:25–26). In Ephesians we learn that God “has made known to us the mystery of his will in accord with his favor” (Ephesians 1:9) or “the plan of the mystery hidden from ages past in God who created all things, so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church” (Ephesians 3:3–6).

Someone might still say, “Fair enough, the Trinity is a revealed truth which we must believe, but it is still hard to understand. Surely this belief is not too important in my daily life.” I fully understand that intuitively this seems to be the case. Yet why do we begin every prayer “In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit?” And why is it crucial to be baptized, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit?”

In fact, Catechism describes “The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity” as “the central mystery of Christian faith and life.”(CCC 234). Notice that the Catechism says, “faith and life.”

How can the Trinity be important to our daily life?

Ultimately, this relates to the love of God, which the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit eternally exchange between themselves. It was God’s eternal desire that his divine mercy and love would be revealed to us, so that we could enter a relationship with him. Nothing can be more practical than to experience the love of God in the midst of every aspect of our life.

One of the distinctions between the different persons of the godhead are the missions which each of the divine person undertakes. The Father sends the Son. The Son makes known the mercy and love of the Father. As Jesus tells us in our Gospel reading, the Father shares everything with the Son and then the Son declares it to us (John 16:15).

The Son also makes the mercy and love of the Father present to us through his earthly preaching and healing miracles. Finally, Christ’s sacrifice on the cross becomes for us the most complete revelation of the mercy and of love of the Father. “But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).

Returning to the Father at his Ascension, the Father and Son send the Holy Spirit to transform us from within by the Spirit of truth. It is the mission of the Holy Spirit to apply the fruit of Christ’s divine sacrifice, so that through faith and repentance our hearts may be made right with him. This happens first through the sacraments but also continues in our life of prayer.

The mission of the Spirit continues and completes this work of love, by releasing God’s desire within us. St. Paul tells us, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5). Applying the love of God from within our souls, the Holy Spirit enables us to behold “the glory of the Lord” and to be “changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). We literally become new creatures in Christ Jesus through the action of the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 5:17).

God continuously grounds his every action in the eternal love of the Most Holy Trinity. Because of God’s eternal unity, St. Paul refers to the Spirit within us as the Spirit of Christ (CCC 743). He admonishes us, “let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts” (Col 3:15) and “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Col 3:16). So that, “… whatever you do, in word or deed” we might “do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col 3:17).

Sent by the Father, we have recently journeyed with Christ through his passion and Resurrection. We have remembered his Ascension into heaven, and the sending of the Holy Spirit by the Father and the Son, at Pentecost. Let us therefore pray, “Lord transform our daily lives now, as you accompany us into the world in the name of the Father, the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

More thoughts:

Five things we need to know about the Most Holy Trinity

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