10 September 2019
Tuesday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time
In our Gospel today Jesus chooses twelve men to be His closest friends and followers; these men will one day hear the words “As the Father has sent me, so I send you,” (John 20:21) and thus today Jesus is choosing the very men with whom He intends to share His mission, a way in which no other disciple will share it. Yet another thing separates the apostles from the rest of Our Lord’s disciples: as they are given much, they will sacrifice much.
On Sunday we were told that in order to follow Jesus we must take up our cross, rejecting any worldly thing that might come between us and Jesus. Perhaps He saw in each of these men the potential to do just that; already these men had abandoned their former ways as fishermen, tax collectors, zealots, and the like to follow Jesus. And notice it mentions that Judas Iscariot “became” a traitor: he did not begin as one. What life might he have walked away from to follow Jesus?
These twelve men then went with Jesus down the mountainside and onto the plain, witnessing the miraculous deeds Jesus then performed on the sick and the possessed. All in the crowd sought to touch Jesus, to receive healing from Him as it radiated from His Body. Yet these twelve men, clearly, had touched Jesus in an entirely different way by the sacrifices they made to follow Him. Throughout the next three years these men would witness incredible things, things they could never have imagined: everything they had given up to follow Jesus paled in comparison to what they would receive, and it began here at the foot of the mountain.
At your Baptism the very same Jesus called you by name, as He did the apostles, and for the same reason: to be sent into the world as He was sent into the world. So many, however, fail to heed that summons, to live out that call; perhaps it is because many of us are baptized as infants, and we do not make that founding sacrifice as the apostles did. Hence why Jesus said we must take up our Cross, turning away from the world and toward Him, following Him in His death that we might follow Him into His eternal life. Not all of us are called to abandon our lives as radically as the apostles, but we are all called to a deeper conversion of heart, to strive against sin, to love Jesus more and more exclusively, to live not merely as people who go to this, that, or the other church on Sunday but to live as His friends and followers: the world should notice the difference.
But we fear letting go, we fear sailing out into the deeper water, further from shore. We fear trusting Jesus when He invites us to consider another career, to be more charitable with our time or money, to be more dedicated to Him in our prayer and Mass attendance. We fear letting our faith become a more visible and important part of our lives: what will others say or think? In such moments we do well to “Consider how he endured such opposition from sinners, in order that you may not grow weary and lose heart. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood,” (Hebrews 12:3-4). Jesus suffered tremendously for you and died for you; will you suffer, even a little, for Him, in gratitude for such a gift? Is there something in your life He is inviting you to surrender, that you might possess Him more fully? The apostles made their sacrifice on blind faith, but your faith is not blind; they followed Jesus not knowing what was to come, but you know what is to come: the Cross, death, and life everlasting for those who follow Him the entire way. What have we, really, to fear?