For Sunday Proper 6A
Collect
Keep, O Lord, your household the Church in your steadfast faith and love, that through your grace we may proclaim your truth with boldness, and minister your justice with compassion; for the sake of our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
It was probably hard for the disciples trying to keep up with Jesus’s teachings, miracles, and everything else because Jesus keeps changing the game out from under them. At least that is what it might feel like. Whatever it was that they saw in him, when he called them from the fishing boats and collecting taxes and what have you, and the stories they’d been told about a coming Messiah no doubt painted a kind of picture for them that they thought was predictable. They didn’t think they’d know everything, of course, but they probably thought it would be kind of obvious.
And Jesus begins healing people and crowds are gathering and one of the people he heals is a gentile, which was not part of the program. When they cross the sea in a boat, and storms whip up, Jesus takes control of the weather — which was not part of the deal! — and then, as we read last week, a woman is healed just by touching his cloak as he raises a young girl from the dead. None of this stuff in Matthew 8 and 9 meets their expectations!
But then, Jesus has another whopper for them. He says its their turn to do what people don’t do, what tradition has no systems for, and their minds can barely comprehend. He intends to send them out into the world in pairs to do the very stuff he has been doing: proclaiming the good news and healing the sick.
He isn’t going to trick them into it. He tells them its going to be tough. That their work is important and could be dangerous. That they will, in the end, meet an untimely death by terrible forces who reject the mission of God. He isn’t going to hide that from them. But the point isn’t the glory or the suffering. They are doing God’s work and this is the outcome of messing with expectations. Of righting what has gone so wrong. Of offering love to a world that needs love. They get to participate in something beautiful and good and that has consequences for everyone.