The Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

“Jesus summoned the Twelve and began to send them out ….” Mk 6,7

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

In posing this provocative question, the poet, Mary Oliver, summons each of us in a way similar to Jesus in today’s Gospel.
However, “summon” is not a word we commonly use in today’s world. And when it is used, “summon” is most often seen as an authoritative demand. In our criminal justice system, for example, a judge “summons” people to court.

And we are not “summoned” to only believe in the reality of God in today’s world. We are also “sent out” … the second action Jesus asks of each of us.

Perhaps the word “call” would better describe what Jesus is doing to each of us today.  

Jesus is “calling” us to be missionaries in the little world we each live in. We are called to realize that we have been granted the secret of what God intends for the life we have been so graciously given.  

We are “called” to be carriers of God’s Word. And not just “carriers” but teachers, even apostles. The word “apostle” means “one who has been sent with a message.” It’s interesting that the word “post,” as in “post office” and “postal,” is the core of that same word – “apostle.”

We are to be “messengers” of Jesus Christ.

Today’s gospel also says that Jesus sent the apostles out in pairs, not as solidary individuals. We are not summoned to live in solitude, but in community. And so we gather in community to eat the food of life and drink the blood of salvation.

So, as a community of “apostles” that has been fed the body and blood of Christ, what is it we are called to do, not just as individuals, but as a church?

Jesus answers these questions in what one writer called “the church’s first catechism: the Beatitudes as found in the Sermon on the Mount and the Last Judgment scene.”

These biblical passages contain the heart and soul of Jesus’ plan to create a new kind of world. They also demonstrate what is wrong, untrue, and a danger to human life and dignity.

Our true vocation as Jesus followers and “apostles,” then, is to participate as fully as we can in doing what Jesus did – imitating God’s initiatives of seeking justice and peace, and overturning the violence and discord so common in the world we live in.

The gospel message of Jesus Christ calls us to go deeper into our faith, to stop all the busyness of our lives and listen more carefully to the “catechism” provided in the Sermon on the Mount and the Last Judgment scene. These divine sources include all we need to know about who God is and the kind of world God wants to see flourish.

Jesus’ consistent message of love and repentance requires, for example, that we end the hideous racial divide that so poisons the world we live in today. In its place, Jesus wants us to do all that we can to enhance the quality of our relationships with the poor and the vulnerable and the marginal and the invisible – all those people who have been left out and left alone in our world.

Admittedly, this is a lot to ask of us in the little worlds you and I live in. But Frodo sums up well what we are called to do in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, when he puts these almost biblical words in the mouth of Gandalf:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Jesus makes it clear in today’s Gospel precisely what it is we are to do “with the time that is given us.”

We are “summoned” and “sent” to be people who feed the hungry, who house the homeless, who reach out to the imprisoned, who protect the defenseless, who view our planet earth as a sacred gift, who allow full protection to vulnerable women and men, children and families.

Jesus calls each of us to search our hearts to find how, as individuals, we can respond to the apostolic call to be “sent.”
Mary Oliver’s challenging question makes it even more personal when she asks:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.