- 2 Kings 5:1-14 and Psalm 30 •
- Isaiah 66:10-14 and Psalm 66:1-9 •
- Galatians 6:(1-6), 7-16 •
- Luke 10:1-11, 16-20
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| 'L'homme et desert' -- Jean Hugo (1894-1984) |
The Gospel for this week is one of those passages that
modern readers find it hard to relate to, and the condemnatory verses the
Lectionary omits make it even harder. Taken as a whole, it is difficult not to
see Jesus as encouraging a kind of fanaticism in the simple people he recruits
to his cause, and playing to their primitive beliefs about demons, Satan and
paradise. This is the passage that the snake handlers of the Appalachians used
to appeal to, and that fact too confirms the thought that the world depicted in this week's Gospel is very
far from ours.
Still, if we believe in the Incarnation, we have to accept that it was into a world very different
from ours that the eternal God chose to be born, a reality that we must try to understand. Two features of this
Gospel episode strike me as especially important. Jesus chose a large number of
very ordinary people to spread the word of God’s kingdom on earth. These are
‘simple folk’, and in the verses that follow the lectionary extract, he underlines
that point. Secondly, Jesus gives them the power to do some very remarkable
things. This is in sharp contrast to their normal powerlessness within the
prevailing social and political structures. No wonder they return from their
excursions ‘with joy’.
Yet at the very height of their delight, he tells them NOT
to rejoice in their new found power. It is not these astonishing abilities that
matter, but the fact that their names are ‘enrolled in heaven’. In other words,
they have been entrusted with a status denied to far more sophisticated people.
They have the ability to see what ‘what many prophets and kings wished to see,
yet never saw’ (v 24), and thus to tell others that ‘the Kingdom of God is near
you’.
In the Epistle, Paul identifies very precisely the special danger
confronting those who find themselves possessed of special spiritual gifts. So he warns the Galatians: ‘If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap
corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal
life from the Spirit’.
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