On the Gospel of Luke (10:38-42)

The Gospel for this 16th Sunday of ordinary time presents us with the story of the visit of Jesus to the home of the sisters Martha and Mary. Martha is a kind and caring host who, we are told, welcomes Jesus into her home. She then gets herself into a frenzy of activity preparing everything for the Lord. By contrast, Martha’s sister Mary sits at the Lords feet, savouring his presence among them and listening attentively to what he has to say. Is it any wonder that Martha complains bitterly to the Lord about the apparent inactivity of her sister? “Please tell her to help me”, Martha demand of Jesus. In response Jesus gently tells Martha not to fret over so many things. Instead be like Mary who has chosen the better part. That’s all very well we might ask. But such an attitude will not prepare the food or get the house clean and indeed there is truth in this. But perhaps it would be better to say that if we did this all the time then nothing would get done. But that is not what Jesus is saying to Martha and to us.

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On the Gospel of Luke (10:1-9)

In today’ gospel  (Luke 10:1-9) we see the Lord appointing his disciples to go ahead of him to preach the gospel to all peoples and thus pass on the gift of faith which they had already received from Him.

The desire to pass on our faith is one of the essential aspects of being a Christian and one which motivated St. Dominic to found the Order of Preachers. Now, as in St. Dominic’s time, there is great need to preach Christian values to a culture which has largely forgotten the gospel and is increasingly influenced by forms of Gnosticism and of New Age Spirituality which are incompatible with Christ’s teaching and implicitly deny that Jesus Christ is the Saviour of the world.

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In countries where the great feast of Corpus Christi is moved to the Sunday, as in Ireland, the Gospel is taken from Luke 9:11-17.

The first line that struck me is “Send the crowd away […] for we are here in a lonely place” (Luk 9:12 RSV). It is not because it is specifically striking on itself, but because it is often used in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke when Jesus is going to a place to be alone with God. Strictly speaking the word (ἔρημος) means ‘dessert place’ or ‘uninhabited place’, and it is clear that it is not a ‘lonely place’ in the strict sense as “there were about five thousand men”  (Luk 9:14 RSV).

But as it unfolds it might maybe not be a silent place Jesus often went to in order to pray to the Father, it became defiantly a place of an intimate encounter with God. It is an ‘ordinary’ encounter, as it is an ordinary setting and it involves basic human needs as bread and fish. But it it is also an extraordinary encounter, both because Jesus miraculously multiplies the five loaves and two fish, apparently without anybody being initially consciously aware of it, but also because it foreshadows the extraordinary encounter being made available to us by the Holy Eucharist.

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John said to him, “Teacher, we saw a man casting out demons in your name, and we forbade him, because he was not following us.” (Mar 9:38 RSV)