Thursday in the 26th Week of Ordinary Time, October 5, 2023

Luke 10, 1-12

Jesus appointed seventy-two other 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 his 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.’ Whatever town you enter and they do not receive you, go out into the streets and say, ‘The dust of your town that clings to our feet, even that we shake off against you.’ Yet know this: the Kingdom of God is at hand. I tell you, it will be more tolerable for Sodom on that day than for that town.”

“Jesus appointed seventy-two other disciples whom he sent ahead of him in pairs to every town and place he intended to visit.”  The verse that heads today’s Gospel Reading begins with, “And after all these things were proclaimed”, that is, the preceding verses in which the Lord called various people to follow him, or who offered to follow him, who would do so only under certain conditions that they would set.  After he finished speaking to these people, then, the Lord “appointed” a number of disciples separate from his Apostles to prepare the way for him in the towns and “places” — villages and settlements — that lay between him and Jerusalem.  These disciples would have been drawn from the crowd that followed him of their own accord and were not called as were the Apostles.  The future candidates to replace the dead Judas, Matthias and Joseph the Just, may have been chosen for this work since we know they had followed the Lord from the beginning (cf. Acts 1, 22).

“The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest.”  Presumably Jesus says this to the disciples whom he is sending out, but it sounds odd here.  St. Matthew writes that the Lord said this while looking at the crowds of people who came to him and noting that they were “like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9, 37).  Following this, Matthew says, Jesus sent out his Apostles to various towns to preach the Gospel.  Luke may have transposed this saying of Jesus as a flashback to that earlier event.  His purpose may have been to show that even between the work of the Twelve and now the work of the Seventy-Two, there will always be work to be done — towns and cities to evangelize.  That Luke does not confuse the sending out of the Apostles with  that of the disciples is quite clear from the fact that the Lord is shown giving power to exorcise and to heal to the Apostles, but not to the disciples.  The words themselves: “The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest”, recall for us the words of the Lord in a vision experienced by Isaiah: “Whom shall I send? and who shall go for us?” (Isaiah 6, 8).  The only human present witnessing the vision was Isaiah, but the Lord does not address him directly, as though to cause the future prophet to not merely acquiesce to God’s will but to actively step forward and grasping the call: “Lo, here I am! Send me!”  Jesus, then, is eliciting from the disciples their prayers that they might be the ones to labor in his vineyard.

“Go on your way; behold, I am sending you like lambs among wolves.”  On its face, this saying seems to warn the disciples of the great dangers that they will face in their capacity as the Lord’s messengers.  On another level we can see that the wolf is not attracted to lions but to sheep.  If a man wants to catch a wolf, he may use lambs as bait.  In this case, the Lord uses the disciples to draw out the wicked from their forest of sin and instead of destroying the disciples, the wicked one is converted by the Gospel they preach.  The Lord, then, is explaining his strategy to the disciples.

“Carry no money bag, no sack, no sandals; and greet no one along the way, etc.”  Here, St. Luke applies the words of the Lord to the Apostles to the disciples.  While it is possible the Lord used the same words to both groups, it seems less likely here, for the journey to Jerusalem from Galilee takes only a few days, and the Lord’s words seem to anticipate a stay of several days in the places to which he sent his Apostles.  Luke may be using the words the Lord spoke to the Apostles as a sort of filler because he did not know what he said on this occasion to the disciples, or that what he said to both groups was so similar that he simply quotes it here.  The main thrust of the words is to go to these towns as simple servants, not as princes, announcing the imminent arrival of the Servant who came to tell people how to get into heaven and to cure the sick.

“The Kingdom of God is at hand for you.”  Literally, “The Kingdom of God has drawn near to you.”  The Kingdom of God stands just outside your door, right in front of you.  It has come down from heaven because you cannot go up to it on your own.  It has come down so that you may enter it.  It is not surrounded by obstacles.  The only things holding you back from it come from within yourself.  Take a few steps and you will enter it.  You will be welcomed to the rejoicing of the angels and the saints of all the ages.  You shall not enter as a visitor but as a member, as one who belongs here.  You will be fed not the scraps of the world but the riches of your Host’s Body and Blood.  You will know love such as you never imagined it.  But step forward now while there is time for you to do so.

We see in this Reading how very much the Lord Jesus desires to be with us and to incorporate us into his plan of salvation so that we take a real part in it.  He need not have sent these seventy-two disciples to this towns and villages, but he did.  He wanted to share the work with them, sharing his life of service with them.  Let us take up whatever work he has called us to and to work hard in it.  The disciples prepared the way for the Lord to enter Jerusalem where he would suffer and die for us; you and I prepare the way for the Lord to return in glory to judge the living and the dead.