One of the penalties of being religious is to be mocked and ridiculed. If Our Lord submitted Himself to the ribald humour of a degenerate Tetrarch, we may be sure that we, His followers, will not escape. The more Divine a religion is, the more the world will ridicule you, for the spirit of the world is the enemy of Christ
Fulton
Sheen, Characters of the Passion, 1946: 56
St
Luke was a physician by profession and having learned to cure the body, he met
Him who could cure both body and soul, his Gospel is filled with healing
miracles, here is a God who cares for the weak, the marginalised, the vulnerable.
It also fulfils prophesy, such as that of Isaiah, who looks forward to the
coming of the Messiah as a time of healing, this is a God who keeps his
promise, who restores his people. It
reminds us that true peace and healing are the gift of God, and a sign of his
love. It is a love shown in its fullness in the person and life of Jesus
Christ; it is His suffering and death which bring us peace beyond our
understanding.
In this morning’s Gospel we see something of the
early spread of the Gospel, people are sent out by Jesus to prepare the way for
Him, they are to be prophets, heralds, announcing the nearness of the Kingdom
of God. They are sent out ‘as
lambs in the midst of wolves’ it
sounds risky and vulnerable, it’s
not easy or comfortable, it doesn’t
make sense, but that’s the point: only then can we be like
the Lamb of God, and proclaim his message of healing and reconciliation. If we’re concerned about the shortage of
labourers in the Lord’s
vineyard, then we need to pray, to ask God to provide, to trust and rely upon
Him, and in His strength alone. Only then are we looking at things the right
way: if we trust ourselves, our strength and abilities, we will surely fail.
But if we trust in God, all things are possible. It’s a hard lesson, and in two thousand
years we haven’t managed to learn it and completely
put it into practice, but we can, however, keep trying, as ours is a God of
love, of mercy, compassion, and forgiveness.
The heralds of the kingdom travel
light, unlike most of us nowadays: they are unencumbered by stuff, and instead
they are reliant upon others to provide what they do not have. They are
dependent upon the charity of others – they
rely upon God and his people. They live out a faith which stresses our
interconnectedness, our reliance upon those other than ourselves. It’s quite strange for us to hear, we’re used to being told that it’s all about me: what I am, what I can
do, what I have. These are the values and ideas of the world; those of the
kingdom are entirely different. The interesting thing is that the seventy
(which includes St Luke) listen to what Jesus tells them, they obey Him, and
when they return they have done what He asked them to do. Their obedience bears
fruit amidst the disobedience of the world, of selfishness and sin - they are
sent out like lambs in the midst of wolves so that they can trust in God and
not in themselves, and through their reliance upon Him and not their own
efforts or strength they bear fruit for the glory of his kingdom. Here then is
the pattern for our lives, Christ calls us to follow in the
footsteps of the seventy, to fashion our lives after their example, so that we
too might be heralds of the Kingdom, who rely upon God rather than humanity. So
that we can say with the Apostle Paul in his Letter to the Galatians: ‘But far be it from me to boast except
in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to
me, and I to the world’ (Gal
6:14).
Such is the power of the Cross: this
instrument of humiliation and torture displays God’s glory and saving love to the world.
That is why we are here today to see the continuation of that sacrifice enacted
in front of our very eyes, so that we are able to eat Christ’s Body and drink His Blood, so that
our human nature may be transformed by His Grace, we are fed by God, with God,
strengthened to live out our faith in our lives, to walk in the light of this
faith, as heralds of the Kingdom, proclaiming the Gospel of repentance, of
healing and reconciliation, brought about by Christ on the Cross, so that the
world may share in the new life of Easter, filled with the Holy Spirit.
It is not an easy task, or indeed a
pleasant one, the world will mock us, as it mocked Him. It will tell us that we
are irrelevant and turn its back on us, just us it ignored Him. Let us trust in
Him, proclaiming His peace and mercy, so that the world may believe and may be
healed and be transformed and give glory to God the Father, God the Son, and
God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just all might,
majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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