In the corridor after, one man came up to me and said this: “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but it would be good to acknowledge that there was Someone other than you coming through those words you spoke. It was the Holy Spirit and that Spirit was speaking from a depth much deeper than your own.”

Perhaps not his exact words, but his thought was right on the mark. What good we do in ministry is rooted in a place deeper than our own roots.

Isn’t that what Jesus is saying to his puffed up and strutting disciples in Luke’s 10th chapter. “Do not rejoice because the spirits are subject to you. But rejoice because your names are written in heaven.” In other words, those followers are grounded in a soil that runs much deeper than their own, the undergirding presence of The Lord’s Father, coming through His Holy Spirit.

Perhaps too detailed an example, but the point is there. When we act (minister) in Jesus’ name, there’s more at work in that scene than our own selves. There’s God’s own Self coming through what it is we do and say. There’s the echo of God’s voice sounding ever so deeply within our own voices.

Jesus is refocusing the disciple’s awareness onto the innermost source of their effectiveness: God’s own Self, undergirding any efforts we make. And this is a truth that has a way of slipping from our awareness — as in my “successful’ homily that Sunday.

“No one knows the Father except the Son — and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal the Father.” At the root of our own roots lives the ever deepening presence of God the Father, coming in Jesus, and through His Holy Spirit.

In a letter he wrote in 1642, Vincent stresses this very point. “His divine goodness asks that we never do good in any place to make ourselves look important. But that we always consider Him directly, immediately, and without intermediary in all our actions.”
(Vol 2, p 315, to Bernard Codoing)