Wednesday in the Fourteenth Week of Ordinary Time, July 7, 2021

Matthew 10:1-7

Jesus summoned his Twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits to drive them out and to cure every disease and every illness. The names of the Twelve Apostles are these: first, Simon called Peter, and his brother Andrew; James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John; Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James, the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus; Simon the Cananean, and Judas Iscariot who betrayed Jesus. Jesus sent out these Twelve after instructing them thus, “Do not go into pagan territory or enter a Samaritan town. Go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, make this proclamation: ‘The Kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ ”

“Jesus summoned his Twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits to drive them out and to cure every disease and every illness.”  St. Matthew says that Jesus gave them authority to cure “every disease”.  The Greek can mean both “every type” of disease as well as “every incidence” of disease.  Not only could they cure leprosy, but also fever.  “Every illness” actually means “every weakness” or “softness”, alluding to the contemporary idea that a person became paralyzed through a softening of his leg muscles caused by an imbalance of the four humors.  

We might wonder why the Lord gave his Apostles this authority and power.  He gave it to them, power much like his own because derived from his own, in order to help them understand their place as his chosen and named followers, to prepare them for the work they would do after Pentecost, and to show the greatness of his own power, so that he could give it to others.  This confirms his identity as the Son of God: his power did not come and go as needed, but abided permanently within him.  Beyond these reasons, it was also his will to cure the sick and raise up the crippled, out of his love for each of them.  This outpouring of love and power would have the effect of manifesting that the Kingdom of heaven had come to earth, leading to conversions.

“Do not go into pagan territory or enter a Samaritan town.”  Matthew intends to show how the Lord avoided going outside the land of the Jews, except for two very specific and briefly mentioned occasions, and he instructs his disciples not to go to the Gentiles at this time.  “Go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  One of the big questions asked by the Jewish Christians in the first years after the Lord’s Ascension was, Why did not the whole Jewish nation follow him?  The answer that Matthew insists upon and proves is that it was not for lack of the Lord’s will and effort.  For three solid years he moved almost exclusively throughout Galilee and Judea, preaching and performing miracles that astounded their witnesses.  It was not as if he had traveled the Roman world extensively and rarely came back to his own land.  The case was that the bulk of the Jews simply chose not to believe, in spite of all that the Lord did.