To Cure and Heal

Gospel: Luke 9: 1-6

Jesus sends out his disciples to undertake a simple mission - to cure people of their infirmities and heal them of diseases of all kinds.  The mission is the same one in which Jesus has been engaged, a mission that involves direct encounter with people in their homes, the marketplaces of villages, the fields and seashores where they work, and on the margins where outcasts are consigned.  In short, Jesus goes out and meets people wherever they are in order to heal and cure.  

In this work we have no permanent home and no possessions either.  We are to be utterly dependent on the hospitality of others and the providence of God.  Does all this resemble in any way the work of the modern church?  Nowadays the focus of "mission" is filling pews and financial coffers, and we have a great dependence on a vast array of possessions that we find necessary to complete the "mission."  We measure success of the mission in attendance data and financial reports.

This Gospel portion strikes the modern person as quaint.  We do not take it seriously at all.  Yet the original disciples and the early church did take it seriously, for it was the way Jesus himself lived and undertook his mission while on earth.  When we replace direct encounter with others with performative liturgy and mass media people become an abstraction and transactional agents rather than images of God and the neighbor we are called to be with in their hopes and fears, in their joys and sorrows.