Tuesday in the 29th Week of Ordinary Time, October 18, 2022

Luke 10, 1-9

The Lord Jesus appointed seventy-two disciples whom he sent ahead of him in pairs to every town and place he intended to visit. He said to them, “The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest. Go on your way; behold, I am sending you like lambs among wolves. Carry no money bag, no sack, no sandals; and greet no one along the way. Into whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace to this household.’ If a peaceful person lives there, your peace will rest on him; but if not, it will return to you. Stay in the same house and eat and drink what is offered to you, for the laborer deserves payment. Do not move about from one house to another. Whatever town you enter and they welcome you, eat what is set before you, cure the sick in it and say to them, ‘The Kingdom of God is at hand for you.’ ”

One reason the present Gospel Reading is used for the celebration of the Feast of St. Luke is that long ago it was thought that St. Luke was one of these seventy-two disciples.  However, even if had not been, the Reading fits him for as a preacher of the Gospel and sometime companion to St. Paul, he certainly lived and worked after this model.  We do know that he was born a Gentile, probably in Syria, and that he converted in the earliest age of the Apostolic Age.  From references in Paul’s letters we also know that he knew St. Mark, who also wrote a Gospel.  As an educated Greek speaker, his witness to the Gentiles would have made him very valuable in the spread of the Faith.  This witness was enhanced by his passion to know the Lord as much as he could through those who saw and heard him, which he communicated to others through his careful accounts of the Lords words and deeds.  As he himself said in the preface he wrote to his Gospel, he “investigated all things closely from the beginning, in order” (Luke 1, 3).  His diligent analysis of the witness testimony available to him, which evidently included speaking with the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Peter, and arranged it all in the best possible order, at times going against the order found in St. Matthew and St. Luke, who paid little attention to chronological order except when it came to the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of our Lord.  An early tradition tells us that Luke was unmarried and that after Paul’s death he preached in Dalmatia and in and around Greece.  The manner of his death is uncertain though he is accorded the color red at his Mass as also the other Apostles and Evangelists, who gave their lives for Christ in their work, and often in their martyrdom.

“The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest.”  The Lord says this to the disciples he is sending out, and to every generation of faithful since then.  A shortage of “laborers” has always exited in the Church — priests, religious, missionaries.  This shortage extends also to the devout laity whose prayers are so essential for the work of preaching and conversion.  The Lord says this so that those who are laboring will persevere and that those who are not will understand that they should, according to God’s place for them in his abundant field.  We also know that we should pray for more laborers, but let us not pray along the lines of, “O God, send us more priests and religious”, but rather, “”O God, grant the graces necessary for those you have called to answer you.”

“I am sending you like lambs among wolves.”  The Lord Jesus sends his laborers to those to whom he went first, to the wolves.  Their job is to convert the wolves and make them lambs, by the grace of God.  As a lamb, the missionary (whether here or abroad) is attractive to the wolf, but it is the wolf who is hunted, not the lamb, for while the wolf has fangs, the lamb has the power of Christ.  The “wolf” is the unbeliever who is even hostile to religion.  He has a false idea of his education and strength.  Through patient persistence in good example and charitable answers, he will fall prey before the representative of the Lord.

“Stay in the same house and eat and drink what is offered to you, for the laborer deserves payment.”  The field laborer of the time made a daily wage which sufficed for his existence for that day, with perhaps a little more.  It was certainly not enough to get wealthy on.  This allowed the missionary to live without allowing him the temptation of acquiring things which would prove impediments.  It should be noted that the disciples whom the Lord sent out were not equipped with written copies of the Scriptures.  These would have been found in the town’s synagogue, if it had one.  Otherwise, the disciple was to preach very simply, repeating what he had already heard the Lord preach.  Of great importance was that these disciples were to go as refugees rather than as lieutenants from a general.  This showed that the true Messiah had as much to do with the false image the Pharisees preached as the true Messiah’s emissaries had with the well-dressed, well-educated the Pharisees expected.

“The Kingdom of God is at hand for you.”  Literally, “has approached you.”  The Kingdom of God is not static like an earthly kingdom whose boundaries remain more or less fixed.  The Kingdom of God is said to “approach” in that the Son of God has become man and preached to us; that grace has entered the world; and that the Faith has spread to parts near and far: it approaches geographically.

We pray to know Christ so thoroughly in the Gospels that we can bring him before unbelievers so that they may see him too.