Reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Mark (6,7-13):
At that time, he called Jesus to the Twelve And he sent them out two by two, giving them authority over unclean spirits. He charged them to take a staff and nothing else on the journey; no bread, no bag, no loose money in their belts; they were to take sandals but no extra tunic. And he said, “Wherever you enter the house, stay there until you leave that place. And if any place does not welcome you or listen to you, shake the dust off your feet as you leave, as a testimony to their guilt.”
They went out to preach the conversionthey cast out many demons, anointed many with oil sick and the cured. Lord’s word.
With the story of the Mission of the Twelvehe gospel Today he wants to confront us with one of the distinctive notes of our Christian identity; the disciple of Jesus has been sent into the world to preach the God’s Kingdom: only in this way does it represent its Misterpreaching his gospel and acting in his place and with his power. By sending him out, Jesus turned his disciples into apostles, making them apprentices into messengers of the gospel. He must have had his reasons for not allowing them to stay all the time enjoying his presence, privileged witnesses of his teaching and his power; because the God’s Kingdom had to be preached, lived to the world as their personal representatives.
The Christians Today, unfortunately, we are becoming accustomed to considering our world, our society, the workplace and even our family, as realities that have little, if anything, to do with our faith and our God; after years of suffering the incomprehension of non-believers, subtly harassed in our days by their hostility, we are retreating into the world of our conscience; there, we believe, we will be able to live our faith and its demands in peace; there it is less painful to try to cultivate a more personal relationship. The result is that our world, our society, work and home, hear us speak little about God and almost never see us speak with Him; our efforts to live faith in intimacy are, without wanting it completely, but without realizing it, making faith more difficult for others… because we also know and we know it very well, that whoever silences God, who hides Him, who keeps Him to themselves, even if it is to defend Him from the contempt of others, is leaving without value in this world those who are worth little or mean nothing, the weakest and most defenseless. Because God is absent from our world, it is becoming less human, more inhospitable, more tense. And all this is the fruit of our silence: and we should not forget that it is not the atheists who deny God’s word today, who withdraw it from Him, but we believers, who having received the gospel prefer silence to its proclamation. God is gradually but visibly withdrawing from our world because we are abandoning Him as His representatives. Jesus did not abandon the world to its fate; He sent us His disciples to be His representatives in it through His gospel and with His power to resist evil.
The disciple of Jesushas reminded us of the gospelhas not been called to live his whole life with him, he should not presume to have him always within his reach or, as we would so often like, at our disposal for our exclusive service. We owe the world our faith and the joy it brings: the God in whom we believe, the Kingdom we await, constitute our capital as believers and it is our debt to the world in which we live. We cannot stay at home, however comfortable it may be to live the faith in intimacy and with those who already share it. Let us not forget that the Church, this Church that was born almost two thousand years ago, arose from a dozen apostles who went into the world with the mandate of Jesus as their only viaticum and with the power of Jesus as their only wealth. Jesus forbade his disciples precisely to bring provisions and prepare for welcomes; they had to give to all they met what they had learned while living with Jesus: the conviction that God is near, that he awaits us and lives longing for us. We do not need more to fulfill the will of Jesus, if we want to be his disciples; It is not necessary to be richer or more intelligent to be his apostles, it is enough to know that we are his messengers and his best signs and representatives. May God bring to completion in us the work that he has begun, calling us to follow Jesus and to proclaim his gospel.
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