Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 14, 2024 - Amos 7:12-15; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:7-13
So, a very strange list of things that Jesus tells the disciples not to take with them and even stranger instructions about what they are to take. “By the way, you are to wear sandals.” Well, wouldn’t you wear sandals if you were walking on the road? The thing is that, as you move from Matthew to Mark to Luke across the gospels, you find different things listed as stuff to take or not take. Especially, one gospel says they can’t take sandals. Another gospel says they can’t wear a second tunic. Another gospel says not to take a walking stick. So, what’s going on here?
Those who take the scripture literally find this to be a great crisis for them because if the word of scripture is, literally, the word of God, how can the word of God contradict the word of God? It is not a problem for Catholics who do not believe that scripture is literally the word of God but, rather, as defined by St. Peter in scripture, it’s the word of God in the words of men. And so, it’s like, in some ways, the game of telephone. As the stories about Jesus are passed on verbally from group to group to group before they’re ever written down, there are times when the stories are altered. There are also alterations made by each scripture writer. The Second Vatican Council taught us, doctrinally, that scripture is inspired at every step - the actual words and deeds of Jesus, their memory by those who observed them, their being passed on verbally, the first written accounts, the actual formal gospels and commentary on those gospels, are all equally inspired by the Holy Spirit. So, it’s not a problem for us.
The other interesting thing about the story is that Jesus gives them power over the unclean spirits. That’s all he says. But we find out that, not only did they expel demons, they also cured the sick and they preached the coming of the kingdom. They expanded on and were successful at Jesus’ original instructions. I tell you that because I’m going to tell you a story, then talk about what all this stuff means.
The first thing you have to understand is that almost all illnesses in Jesus’ time were considered to be the work of unclean spirits. Medical science was in its infancy. Moreover, whatever medical science there was, was mostly the possession of the elite classes in the Greek and Roman Empire, and not the common property of the ordinary person. And so, they assumed that, if you got sick, it was the work of some demon. In order to get cured, that demon had to somehow be driven out by prayer or exorcism, or something had to happen.
I’m going to preface my story with a caution. The seal of confession is absolutely inviolable. However, a priest can talk in general about the kinds of things that happen in confession, the kinds of sins that are heard in confession, and his own reaction to those things. Since my ordination, I’ve been assigned to five parishes and schools. And so, you cannot identify what parish this happened in. And I can assure you it’s not this one. I also don’t remember the person’s name - although I knew the person at the time - nor what they told me. So, this story is protected by the seal of confession still.
But I was in some parish, somewhere, where they had a parish mission. And you know what parish missions are like right. There’s a week for the men, a week for the women, and a week for the children. There’s a night when everybody goes to confession, and you have the priests from the mission hearing confessions. But, because there are several hundred people at the mission, you also have to have all the parish priests hear confessions. So, I was hearing confession. One person came into confession to me who was prominent in the parish. Within ninety seconds of the person’s coming in, they began to cry uncontrollably and finally were able to stammer out their sin. They had been carrying this around for the better part of twenty years. Mass those twenty years, this person was always active in their parish, faithful at Sunday Mass, raised wonderful children with a Catholic education, and worked tirelessly, not only for her family but in her occupation and for her parish and community. And yet, she secretly carried this burden.
Now, on the scale of moral evils - since I don’t even remember what it was - on the scale of moral evil, it was probably a weak four. And it certainly was not a sin I had not heard dozens and dozens of times before. And why she could be so upset over this is beyond understanding. But the fact is that she was. And she carried this with her as a terrible secret that had impinged on her ability to live a happy life and to do the things she was doing so well and so beautifully, with joy and contentment.
All of us are sent by Jesus to drive out demons, to cure the sick, and to preach the gospel. If you don’t think that’s true, all of you who are parents had that fateful night where, at two o’clock in the morning, some little person shook you awake and said, “Mommy I’m scared. There’s a monster under my bed.” “There is a monster in my closet.” A little demon that possessed a four-year-old, who needs to be comforted by the only people who can do it. Or your teenager came home from school, recounted a terrible tale of bullying and their defenselessness against it. And it was your job not only to comfort them, but to explain to them the evil that lurks everywhere in the dusty corners of society and how an ordinary human being confronts that maliciousness. Or in the place where you work, there was one person whose meddlesomeness constantly made it impossible or much more difficult to get anything meaningful done. Those are the demons that we are called upon to drive out.
And all of us have been healers and caregivers of one sort or another. Now we consign our actual illnesses, thank God, to well trained professionals, but we have the aftermath. The person who needs tending at home. The person who is always going to need help at home. The person who needs to be driven to their appointments. The person who needs to be consoled in their pain and comforted in their fear. That’s our job. That’s our part in the medical equation. So, we are always healing the sick. We don’t go wearing signs around our chest saying, “Watch me, I’m a Catholic.” But everybody that we’re closely associated with eventually finds out that we are Catholic and knows by the way that we comport ourselves around them whether or not we are the kind of Catholic that Jesus taught us to be.
When we do that stuff, we all do it burdened in some way. We carry secrets inside of ourselves that make it more difficult for us to do these things. Sometimes those burdens are actual sins, moral faults that cause us to feel that we are less adequate to the task at hand than we really are. More often, they are emotional burdens, things left over from childhood or a very painful encounter in adulthood, that left us shaken in some way and less secure about who we are as human beings. We carry those things as a secret burden.
And, despite those things, we attempt to do our very best. But we could do our very best a little bit better, a little bit easier, if we did not have those burdens to carry. And there are remedies for those burdens. If there is actual sin burdening you, that’s why we were given the sacrament of Reconciliation. To, once and for all, free ourselves from that secret that we are carrying. And, if it is an emotional burden that we are carrying, if it’s bad enough, there is professional help for us. And, if not, we have friends who are willing to listen. And there is prayer to a loving God, telling him how we feel and why we feel that way and asking to be relieved of that burden.
Jesus sends us out - every one of us, in the 21st century - to drive out demons, to heal the sick, and to preach the gospel. Jesus encourages us, as he did those first disciples, to travel light. Travel light.