Taking our Place in the Unbroken Chain of Witnesses, Fourteenth Sunday (C), July 7, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Holy Family Catholic Church, Te Atatu, New Zealand
Fourteenth Sunday in OT, C
July 7, 2019
Is 66:10-14, Ps 66, Gal 6:14-18, Lk 10:1-12,17-20

To listen to a recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

Increasing the Holy Family of the Lord

It is a wonderful joy for me to be here in New Zealand, where I’ve been invited to preach at next weekend’s Eucharistic Convention and to give some talks over the upcoming several days. I thank Fr. Jeremy Palman for his generosity in giving me the privilege to preach today. One of the great gifts of our Catholic faith is its very catholicity or universality. This morning I arrived at 5 am from the United States and four hours later I’m celebrating Mass. I live in Holy Family Parish in Manhattan and here I am at Holy Family Parish in Te Atatu in Auckland, welcomed so warmly because the Catholic Church is essentially a worldwide family of faith called to help each other grow in holiness. Today Jesus speaks to us about the way he wishes to increase and strengthen that family.

The meaning of the sending of the 72

Jesus appointed seventy-two of them and sent them out in pairs to share the Gospel he himself had been proclaiming to them. A short time earlier (cf. Lk 9:1-6), Jesus had sent out the twelve apostles, those who would become his first bishops and priests. But to share the Gospel was not meant to be the task of the clergy alone. So he appointed 72 — probably the twelve apostles and 60 of whom we would call today lay people — and sent them out to the neighboring towns and villages. “The harvest is abundant,” he said, “but the laborers are few.” Jesus not only instructed them to pray to God the Father to send more laborers, but was showing them one way the Father responds to that prayer, by sending themout as laborers for his harvest of souls. I’ve always thought that the 72 was more than a symbolic number, but probably implies that the Lord basically sent out everyone who was a willing, consistent follower. He wanted all hands on deck.

And just as that was the situation 2,000 years ago, so it remains today. Jesus wants each of us to grasp that he wants us to pray for harvesters and, in so doing, to recognize that we are praying not just for others but for ourselves, that each of us will hear the call and respond to the Lord’s help, whether clergy, religious,or lay, whether young or old, male or female, a cradle Catholic or a recent convert, to share the treasure of the faith. Just over six years ago, Pope Francis and Pope-emeritus Benedict published an encyclical written, as Pope Francis said, with “four hands.” It was about the light of faith and how we’re called to pass that light on, like one candle is lit from another at the Easter Vigil. They wrote, “Those who have opened their hearts to God’s love, heard his voice and received his light, cannot keep this gift to themselves. … The word, once accepted, becomes a response, a confession of faith, which spreads to others and invites them to believe.” The twelve apostles and sixty other disciples sent out weren’t doing simply as a duty or a command. They wanted to share with others the gift they had received, aware that the more they give it, they more deeply they receive it. And it’s because of their response that we’re hear today. They preached and others heard and responded, and these in turn did the same, all the way across the centuries to those who have shared the Gospel with us, in our homes, in our parishes, in our schools and workplaces, on television and radio, through books and now social media. Popes Francis and Benedict said, “It is through an unbroken chain of witnesses that we come to see the face of Jesus.” That chain goes all the way back to the scene in today’s Gospel! And we are part of that beautiful chain, and Jesus intends that others will be linked to it through responding to Jesus today as the 72 did in the beginning.

For us to be effective, we need to learn a few of the perennial lessons from today’s Gospel.

The primacy of prayer

The first is about prayer. Evangelization always begins with the praying to the Harvest Master not only for laborers but for those who will be part of the harvest, receiving the seed of the Word of God on good soil and bearing fruit. We can’t by ourselves win others for God. They are always a gift. The same Holy Spirit who speaks through us prepares others to learn. The antidote to secularizing trends in our culture and in many drifting from the practice of the faith is not just slick campaigns inviting them to come home. It begins by prayer. It always begins by prayer.

The message given

Second, there is a message. Jesus placed words on the lips of the 72 as he sent them out: He said that they were to wish their listeners “Peace” and to say that “the kingdom of God is at hand!” The two are intrinsically connected. The “peace” they were to announce was precisely the peace that Jesus had been preaching — peace with God through the forgiveness of the sins by which human beings cut themselves off from God. The way to enter into that peace is to enter into God’s kingdom, to allow the Lord to become the king of one’s thoughts and actions, the king of one’s time and possessions, ultimately the king of one’s whole life. Jesus wanted them to be heralds of the joy that comes from peace and reconciliation with God, which has an enormous potential to attract others who are so obviously not at peace with God and others. It’s important for us to grasp that this was the message of a true revolution. We have heard the words, “The kingdom of God is among you!” so many times that perhaps they no longer startle us. We need to think back to the context. The seventy-two were sent to proclaim this kingdom at one of the times of greatest strength in the Roman empire, an empire that didn’t take well any challenges to its authority and could be more brutal against insurrectionists than a pack of wolves against injured animals. In the midst of Roman dominion, the seventy-two ordinary disciples of Christ like us were commissioned as ambassadors of a different kingdom, a different type of allegiance — the kingdom of God. The two kingdoms did not necessarily conflict, as Jesus himself pointed to when he said, “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and give to God the things that are God’s” (Mt 22:21). But he also said that when there was a conflict, we were to “seek first the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness” (Mt 6:33). Likewise Jesus’ disciples in every age are sent out to proclaim the priority of the Kingdom of God, a priority we are supposed to be modeling and not merely mouthing, a kingdom that brings us the peace for which our hearts long and our families, societies and indeed world so much need.

The packaging for the proclamation

Third, Jesus sends them out with a certain “packaging” for that message. They were being sent out as “lambs in the midst of wolves,” not wolves in the midst of lambs. They were sent to proposethe Gospel in a compelling way to others’ freedom, not to imposeanything. They were not called to proclaim it with force of weapons or the power of threats, but with with humble, meek, confidence, with the persuasive power of their faith, goodness and holiness. That was why Jesus instructed them to go out with no purse, no bag, no sandals, just as he himself did. How could they possibly proclaim effectively that the kingdom of God is at hand if they were trying to increase the size of their purse and build an earthly kingdom of their own — or if others even suspected them of doing so? How could they proclaim a trust in God’s providence if they didn’t live by that trust and seemed rather to rely on mammon? Jesus went on to tell them that if they were welcomed, they were to stay in that house, lest they ever start to look for a “better deal.” They were sent out two-by-two — even though they could have covered twice as much ground if they had been sent out individually — in order to show through their interaction with each other the mutual love and forgiveness that is at the heart of the Gospel. Even the way Jesus prepared them to handle rejection — by wiping the dust off their feet as a witness of their rejection rather that carry the pain of their rejection with them to another town — shows that they were to carry only Jesus’ message rather than one of resentment. This was all meant to be a fruit of their prayer to God the Harvest Master. This was all part of the packaging to reinforce the proclamation of the peace of the kingdom.

What about us today? Are we supposed to go out walking two-by-two proclaiming “Peace be to this home!” and “The Kingdom of God is among you,” with no suitcases, wallets, automobiles, or change of clothes? Some Catholic groups actually do this today in the United States and elsewhere — like members of the Neocatechumenal Way on missionary journeys — and it really strikes people. But Jesus does not require us to act on these words in a literalistic way, but to live by the principles that are contained there. I’d like to get practical, briefly, about some of the contexts in which we’re called to be Missionaries today.

Proclaiming two-by-two in marriage

The first is in marriage. The vast majority of those who are sent out two-by-two by Jesus do so with rings on joined hands. Jesus sends out married couples to evangelize each other, to evangelize their children and grandchildren, and, as a family, to evangelize many other families through a witness to God present in the home. Back in 1975, when Saint Pope Paul VI wrote his great exhortation on Evangelization called Evangelii Nuntiandi, he gave us a beautiful passage that refers basically to the way the Gospel was brought to many parts of Africa in the last 140 years when there were nowhere near the amount of priest and religious missionaries necessary to spread the faith. The missionaries would just ask for a volunteer family to go to one village, and another to a second, and so on, and just to live out their faith. They did so to such a degree that so many people came to be attracted to what made them different that they started asking questions, questions that led them to Christ. Listen to Pope Paul VI:  “Above all the Gospel must be proclaimed by witness. Take a Christian or a handful of Christians who, in the midst of their own community, show their capacity for understanding and acceptance, their sharing of life and destiny with other people, their solidarity with the efforts of all for whatever is noble and good. … Through this wordless witness these Christians stir up irresistible questions in the hearts of those who see how they live: Why are they like this? Why do they live in this way? What or who is it that inspires them? Why are they in our midst? Such a witness is already a silent proclamation of the Good News and a very powerful and effective one. Here we have an initial act of evangelization. … Other questions will arise, deeper and more demanding ones, questions evoked by this witness. … All Christians are called to this witness, and in this way they can be real evangelizers” (EN 21).

Proclaiming through friendship

The second is through friendship. When we look at the way Jesus spread the faith, sometimes he did it with vast homilies and miracles before the masses, but much of his work was done one-on-one, as he did in calling the apostles, or interacting Nicodemus, Zacchaeus, the Samaritan woman, Simon the Pharisee, his friends in Bethany and more. Saint Paul VI asked, “In the long run, is there any other way of handing on the Gospel than by transmitting to another person one’s personal experience of faith?”Many times today, Catholics, rather than being witnesses, behave, as the bishop who ordained me twenty years ago, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, has famously said, as if they’re in the witness protection program. Very often we act as if we’re Catholics by accident rather than by conviction. Our faith is supposed to have an impact on our friends, our family members, neighbors, coworkers, fellow students, teammates, and fellow citizens. Our living of the Good News with joy is meant to show them what the Good News really is and how they need it just as much as we do. God sent Isaiah out in the first reading with a message of comfort greater than the comfort a mother gives to her beloved children; we’re sent out with the Gospel to comfort others with the comfort we have received in Christ and through the peace of his kingdom.

Proclaiming through suffering

The third context I want to mention is through suffering. St. Paul in today’s second reading intimates a little what he was enduring for Christ. He said he was being crucified, crucified to the world and the world to him. We know he was scourged, stoned, attacked, shipwrecked and so much more out of witness to Christ, but Jesus used that for the proclamation of the Gospel.

In fact, when you look at the spread of Christianity through the first centuries, it was precisely through two sources, charity and martyrdom. The charity was legendary: the new Christians were selling their property and laying the proceeds at the feet of the apostles to share with whoever in their new family of faith needed it. This was just one expression of their loving communion. The love that existed among them was so strong that people were busting down the doors of their house churches to enter, despite the fact that to be a Christian entailed in some places persecution and even death.

That leads to the second main driver of conversions in the early Church: martyrdom. There were 13 organized waves of ferocious anti-Christian persecution in the Roman empire, but, rather than extinguishing the Church, they expanded it. People saw that Christians, with sanity and joy, were not afraid to die for the Jesus they knew had died out of love for them. If after his brutal and ignominious crucifixion, he was raised from the dead 40 hours later; that made the first Christians courageous in the face of the prospect of torture and death: they knew it would be just the pains of labor before being born into eternity. Their very suffering became their most powerful pulpit to proclaim the Gospel and draw people to God through the Church. Tertullian quipped 1800 years ago, Sanguis martyrum semen Christianorum, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of Christians.” We’re living at a time in which Christians in many parts of the world are still being martyred and suffering fierce anti-Christian persecution for the faith. But even in supposedly enlightened secular societies, like the United States and New Zealand, Christians suffer because of our faithfulness, for example, to Jesus’ and his Church’s teachings about every person’s being made in the image and likeness of God and therefore the sanctity of every human life, about the meaning of human sexuality, marriage and family in the divine plan, about solicitude for migrants and refugees, about care for our common home, and many other social and political issues with deep moral roots. But this type of soft persecution, in which Christians are called haters for loving truly as Jesus loves, and even banished from certain professions and social circles, is likewise an opportunity for us to give witness to the faith contrary to the spirit of the age. How many converts have entered the Church, for example, because of our witness to the inviolability of life and care for pregnant moms, or for our teaching on the indissolubility of the covenant of marriage when so many other even Christian denominations were selling out to the zeitgeist?

But there’s another form of suffering that God also uses to put us in circumstances to preach the faith. It’s physical suffering. In an age that runs from pain and is addicted to pleasure, that pushes for the so-called right to die that always metamorphoses into a right to kill — as we’re seeing sadly play out these days in the case of Vincent Lambert in France, for whom we pray — the way Christians suffer is so powerful. We recognize that suffering is a time in which real love can be unleashed, when, if we’re suffering, we can pray powerfully in the body and show our total trust in God’s providential care, and when if we’re caring for those who are suffering, we can be transformed more and more into the image of Christ the Good Samaritan. I’ll share just one example, a young girl I met eight years ago in Texas when she was five. She’s a truly special kid whom God has blessed with many spiritual gifts. I met her when she took 41 pages of notes — at the age of five — at a talk I gave on John Paul II. She’s had many mystical experiences. But she suffers from a physical malady that the top doctors at the Houston Medical Center haven’t been able to diagnose, when her pulse can suddenly drop to dangerously low levels over night. Once she wrote me a letter in which she described what happened once at the hospital. She was being probed by needles everywhere in vain trying to take blood. She said she was able to endure it because she was thinking about what it was like for Jesus to have the much bigger needles of the nails and lance piercing his hands, feet and side. When her Chinese doctor asked her if she was in pain, she replied that, yes, she was in a lot of pain. He asked why doesn’t she say anything about the pain, not to mention not cry or scream. She replied, “Doctor, I am offering all of this pain praying that one day you will become Catholic!” The doctor was floored at the faith and love of this young girl. She recognized that her frequent hospitalizations were opportunities for her to evangelize her caregivers. Suffering provides a powerful place for us to give witness to our faith and to pray to the Harvest Master.

Responding to Jesus’ summons

Jesus is sending us, all “72” of us, to proclaim that God’s kingdom has come, that Jesus is among us and wants to give us life to the full. Like Isaiah, who heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, who will go for us?” and stood up saying, “Here I am; send me!” (Is 6:8), so each of us needs to stand up today and say, “Here I am, God; send me!” The Lord trusted the 72 so much that he sent them out with the message and mission God the Father gave him. That same Christ trusts us that much to give us this mission today. Some might respond to the apostolate as if it’s a great burden, but it’s really a tremendous privilege, to share in Jesus’ mission of the salvation of the world. We have an important role in the unbroken chain of witnesses stretching all the way back to Jesus.

At the end of today’s Gospel, the 72 disciples returned rejoicing at the power of Jesus they experienced as they were carrying out the task of evangelization. There was much joy in sharing the faith. Jesus replied that what they should be most happy about is that their “names are written in heaven.” None of us is a number. We’re all a beloved name to God and to the saints — given to us in Baptism — just as those to whom God sends us are beloved as well. But God wants more than our and their names being written in heaven. He wants us all to experience the eternal peace of his kingdom of which we’re able to have a small foretaste here on earth. Let’s ask the same Jesus who commissions us anew today to strengthen us by his body and blood, so that we might live in communion with him, experience the power that comes from that bond, go out with courage to bring others into that same life-saving union, and so that we and they both may experience all that God has in store. The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few. That’s why God has chosen us. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel LK 10:1-12, 17-20 

At that time the Lord appointed seventy-two others
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.”

The seventy-two returned rejoicing, and said,
“Lord, even the demons are subject to us because of your name.”
Jesus said, “I have observed Satan fall like lightning from the sky.
Behold, I have given you the power to ‘tread upon serpents’ and  scorpions
and upon the full force of the enemy and nothing will harm you.

Nevertheless, do not rejoice because the spirits are subject to you,
but rejoice because your names are written in heaven.”