Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), July 12, 2015 – Am 7, 12-15; Eph 1, 3-14; Mk 6, 7-13
Sealed in Christ with the Holy Spirit (Eph 1, 13)
Jesus seeks first the kingdom and righteousness of God. His disciples prove themselves by doing the same.
The first disciples immediately leave their occupation to follow Jesus. They make it known that they do not put anything ahead of him.
Their readiness and willingness show likewise that they do not follow him to assure themselves some profit. Nor do they need to be disciples to make a living.
Amos does not have to be a prophet either to eat his daily bread. Called by God, this shepherd and dresser of sycamores in the southern kingdom left everything to prophesy in the northern kingdom. There he anathematizes the king, the wealthy, the judges, for their acts of injustice and their indifference to the poor, for their unfaithfulness to the Lord who has chosen them as his heritage. The prophetic judgments trouble greatly the person who is in-charge of the royal and national shrine.
If Amos and the first disciples serve as good models for Christians, Amaziah represents what we ought not to be. The deportation order addressed to the prophet reveals an understanding of religious ministry as a means of livelihood or gain.
Cannot this priest, beholden to the king, be counted perhaps among the “religious authorities who reserve for themselves the sacred place, prophets and officials of the temple who make a living from it, because they do not know anything else to devote themselves to, and who protect their livelihood even at the expense of the Gospel (“Comentarios,” first reading), or of prophecy? Raymond E. Brown cautioned us in 1970 that inevitably those installed in seats of religious authority would tend to become too rigid and too confining, and the impression would thereby be given that the Holy Spirit works only through them, from the top down and never from the bottom up (cf Priest and Bishop).
Those sent by Jesus do not refuse to leave their native place nor do they forbid the stranger to enter. They go and make disciples of all nations. They go through towns and villages. They are not sedentary. Their vocation, in St. Vincent de Paul’s words, “is to go, not just to one parish, not just to one diocese, but all over the world” (SV.FR XII:262).
Those chosen by Jesus also make their own his simple lifestyle. They rid themselves of the superfluous; they do not let themselves be slowed down by unnecessarily heavy baggage.
Moreover, missionaries evangelize with urgency, but without obsessing (EG 35). They do not impose insistently, lest they waste time or foster worse polarization rather than peace.
And since they receive without cost Christ’s body and blood, without cost they give themselves up for others, doing the same as Jesus.
Lord, grant us to communicate the joy of the Gospel.
Ross Reyes Dizon
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