Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

What is unique about today’s gospel from Luke is the number seventy-two.  The other evangelists speak of Jesus sending out his twelve apostles to preach.  It’s only Luke who has this story of Jesus sending out seventy-two disciples.  The number is significant.  In the book of Genesis, Noah’s descendants numbered seventy-two, and the Bible says that after the flood seventy-two people started to spread all over the earth.  So the number seventy-two came to represent all the nations.  Thus in his gospel, Luke is saying that in choosing the seventy-two Jesus is sending his disciples not only to Israel, but to the whole world.

So, as we heard, he sends them out two by two, just like the Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses, who knock at our doors.  Speaking of which, when I was living in a community house with students back in my campus ministry days, there was a knock at our front door.  It was pouring rain outside.  Vince opened the door and there were two Mormons shivering in the rain.  They asked if they could come inside.  Well, he just couldn’t leave them standing there, so he brought them into the living room and offered them a couch.  They were quiet for a long time, so Vince asked, “What happens now?”  The older one said, “We don’t know.  We never got this far before.”

Anyway, as you heard, the disciples came back jubilant at their success but they were caught up short when Jesus told them not to be so happy that spirits were subject to them, but rather because their names were written in heaven.  That is to say, they should rejoice because they made a difference to someone beyond themselves, they were part of something larger.  And that, in the most profound sense, is the Christian formula for success.  It’s a simple teaching and yet it is as far as you can get from the world’s criteria of success, which is having for oneself lots of money, position, consuming a lot, being an army of one.

That’s why it’s troubling that a new study indicates that young adults today are more narcissistic and ego-driven than the previous generation.  Some suggest causes such as permissive parenting or increased materialism.  Certainly there’s the almost total immersion in the self-centered world of cell phones, iPods, and other solitary electronic games making a new generation less interested in giving their time to others or being a part of something bigger.  I remember asking a former parishioner why she wasn’t going to work with the Jesuit Volunteers in a poverty situation like her older brother, and she said, “Because he went to the slums of Los Angeles and it totally destroyed his life.  When he came back he wasn’t the same person.  He changed the course of his life and upset everybody.”  Well, that was the best reason I ever heard for actually going.

Early in the history of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, their founder urged her sisters to “Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in here the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.  Go out quickly.  The poor need help now.”  Today we hear the same cry from Pope Francis: “I see clearly that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful.  I see the church as a field hospital after battle.  You have to heal the wounds.  Then we can talk about everything else.  Heal the wounds.  Heal the wounds.”

Has your life at this stage transcended itself and become a part of something bigger than your needs?  Have you, have I, a sense of mission, of being chosen and sent?  This gospel raises this very question and so, as usual, it turns out to be more subversive than we think.  To hear God’s word is a heavy responsibility.  “Rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”

Paul A. Magnano

Pastor