Word to the Wise
Saturday, October 18, 2008 - St. Luke, evangelist
[2 Timothy 4:10-17B and Luke 10:1-9]The Lord Jesus appointed seventy-two disciples whom he sent ahead of him in pairs to every town and place he intended to visit.........
According to recent statistics, there are about one billion Catholics in the world! Add to that figure the estimates for Orthodox Christianity and Protestantism, and one has quite a number of faithful! The United States has about 60 million Catholics of that one billion! One of the realities that the Second Vatican Council brought home to many people for the first time that the Catholic Church is truly an international body and that we American Catholics are not the measure of it all! I mention this because the Gospel of Luke is very much an international document (especially since it is really Volume One of Luke-Acts!). However, "international" to the people of that time would have been as much as was known from the Greek conquests of Alexander the Great and the conquests of the Roman Empire. The figure of "seventy-two" seems to be a reference to Genesis 10:2-31 where there is a list of seventy-two "countries" that was thought to be the extent of the geographic world at that time! The world of Luke was much larger and, of course, we are now GLOBAL and beyond that! Anywhere the Lukan missionaries went would be a place that Jesus "intended to visit....!" Yet, there are still places where no one has heard of Jesus Christ! The thrust of missionary work has changed considerably from my days as a student. The goal has become less that of multiplying baptisms and actually converting people to Catholicism as it is to making the gospel known by word and example. Conversions will happen when they happen, and nowadays that can be as dangerous as it was in the time of St. Luke, as our brothers and sisters in the faith in India or Iraq and other locales have experienced. The Lord gives some basic training. In fact, any one of us can do what he says to his disciples in our own neighborhoods! Anytime we think that being a missionary is something that "other" people do and requires going out of the USA, we are mistaken and we lose an oppportunity to make it possible for Jesus to visit another place! Read this gospel passage closely and think about how it might be something you should be doing! I remember well during my undergraduate days (1960-64) a bright hot Sunday morning in New Orleans. I was visiting a friend whose yard was open to the street and we were sitting out in the sun. A middle-aged, chubby, gentleman sweating profusely wearing a white shirt and loosened tie and with his jacket over his arm and his hat slanted back on his head came across the yard. He had some papers in his hands and offered a copy of a magazine. He turned out to be from the Jehovah's Witnesses. We said, "Thanks but no thanks!" politely and he went off to the next house. My friend turned to me and said, "We should be out doing that today!" All I can say is AMEN!
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