By the end of my first year of regency assignment in a Jesuit college a few years ago, there was a significant humiliating experience that I had to endure. Apart from teaching, my then rector wanted me to apply for a position of resident minister in the student residence through the campus ministry. Campus ministry considered me unworthy for the job and rejected my application. The reason was because I was too professorial and not cool enough to minister to the undergraduate students. Plus, they thought that I did not have a good inter-religious experience, despite the fact that I lived for twenty-eight years in the largest Muslim country in the world. To be honest, I was angry and felt humiliated. Nevertheless, I decided to move on and focused on my primary assignment of teaching and researching.
Jesus said, “whenever people don’t receive you, as you depart from the town, shake the dust from your feet as a sign against them.” When I prayed over this passage, I came to realize that this is one of the core aspects of our spirituality as Jesuits. St. Ignatius wanted to stay in Jerusalem but he was being kicked out by the Franciscans. After his rejection, he went back to Europe and started his studies. There was a Jesuit who once said that our Jesuit spirituality is the spirituality of the second chance as we can always learn and build success out of our rejection and failure.
When Jesus told his disciples to shake the dust from their feet, he calls them a witness, or the Greek term is martyrion. So in some way or another, Jesus calls his disciples to be martyrs. Later, the writer of the Gospel of Luke has this calling fulfilled in the narrative of Acts (13:51), “The Jews, however, incited the women of prominence who were worshipers and the leading men of the city, stirred up a persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and expelled them from their territory. So, they shook the dust from their feet in protest against them and went to Iconium.”
Not everybody will die a martyr, but, minimally, we can be a martyr in a small way, either being rejected in the workplace, at our ministry sites, our parish, or in the public. How do we respond to what Jesus says about shaking the dust from our feet? Hopefully, new opportunities will come out of times of rejection.