Jesus sends out seventy-two disciples to better prepare each town he intends to visit, and he gives these disciples his famous instructions about shaking the dust from their feet (Gospel).
Last week he used tough language (“Let the dead bury their dead”). Now he is giving army-like directions about how the seventy-two are to act when they journey to the villages (“Carry no money bag, no sack, no sandals …”).
These instructions have always raised interesting questions. One of them would be this: what could motivate disciples to follow such tough commands? Is this going to be the shape of Jesus’ message? I want to suggest an answer.
To begin with, the First Reading shows just how much God is willing to do in order to love us and share our lives. It is a beautiful “welcome home” to the exiled people who were returning to Jerusalem, leaving the foreign land where they had hung up their harps in captivity because they couldn’t sing anymore.
God tells them to
suck
fully
of the milk of [Jerusalem’s] comfort, that you may nurse with delight at her abundant breasts! … As nurslings, you shall be carried in her arms, and fondled in her lap; as a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you.
Maternal images, immediate, utterly compelling. If people can insert their wild and wooly lives into the perspective of God’s mothering they will be calmed and grateful. I would be. What would be your response?
Gratitude.
This leads to a first tentative hypothesis:
Gratitude is the key to growth and action.
When we are truly grateful, we are aware that there is a giver. So often we forget this. And it leads to an important desire, the wish to give back. How about gratitude as a reason why the disciples followed Jesus’ difficult instructions?
Let us test this hypothesis on the most thoroughly human being we know of, Jesus.
He was nurtured at Mary’s breast. She bore him and she raised him. The Holy Spirit had engendered him and was with him in all things. His divine nature was fulfilled, always, in the tender union that is the Trinity.
So let us assume that gratitude was primary in his life. But suddenly he threw out his arms on the cross, and asked the very God who suckled him that most terrible of all questions. “Why have you forsaken me?”
Forsaken? Forsaken? How could the son of God be forsaken by God?
We do not know, really, but here is another hypothesis:
God’s intimate presence within each of us can become mute, so still that we cannot hear it above our own confusion and terror.
Could this also be what happened to Jesus? Maybe he had to merely remember the love he had known, instead of having it as an answer. Maybe, and note this, his rough commands this week were motivated by his resolve to face terrible, unbearable rejection.*
You and me: We too can dis-remember the fond love God has for our wriggling, snotty, merely childlike selves. We too, in our own hard times, can rely on wanting to remember that love is still there, as Jesus remembered, even if we cannot feel it.
Humans have to wait when things are bad, wait for ourselves to get over whatever terror is blocking our sight.
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*We are reading Luke’s Gospel. Matthew, Mark, and Luke seem to highlight the human side of Jesus, his struggles. The Gospel of John approaches Jesus’ story more from side of the divine nature, saying that Jesus went to Jerusalem and the cross already accepting all that would happen to him.
John Foley, S. J.
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