Today’s readings: Isaiah 66, 10-14; Galatians 6, 14-18; Luke 10, 1-12.17-20.

Discipleship as portrayed in the gospels is not strictly speaking a call to belong to a Church or to a community, but a call to go forth in the little worlds we inhabit and with the right perspective. There is a deep sense of radicalism in the challenge as proposed by Jesus to let go of one’s shelter and set off without provisions.

That rings out as quite a challenge today for a Church encumbered by structures and frames of mind that weigh heavily on the message we received and distort the vision of what Christian living should be about.

One of the major tasks of the Christian community in this day and age is precisely to help reimagining the task of discipleship. In a recent book You Are What You Love, James K. A. Smith writes that “Discipleship is more a matter of hungering and thirsting than of knowing and believing”. Discipleship is about aligning our loves and longings with those of the Lord, with owning his own perspective.

Reading today’s gospel and taking it seriously makes us think immediately of the need we have, as church and individually, to realign ourselves and our vision of reality, even of undergoing a radical change in mentality and in the way we’ve always thought and presented the gospel’s demands.

This realignment, seen in the context of today’s gospel narrating the first mission experiences of the apostles, makes us realise that it is not what we do that matters for the world around us, but who we are. Jesus says: “Do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you; rejoice rather that your names are written in heaven.”

Jesus gives clear instructions to his disciples and seems to be under no illusion about their task ahead. In his instructions, Jesus sounded very clear mainly about three things: the radical lifestyle they were to embrace, that they were to bring peace and blessings to the households and, finally, that they were to expect resistance.

We may all agree on the factors and symptoms of crisis that characterise our times and the world we live in. Yet today’s readings make us focus more on the crisis within rather than on the crisis out there. Things now have become too complicated even for the Church itself. We are encumbered by a vision of the Church itself and of the Christian life which obfuscates God’s vision of reality and makes the gospel itself lose its allure.

The prophet Isaiah himself in the first reading realigns his vision and sees Jerusalem, many a time devastated and devastating, as a source of comfort and consolation. This is an invitation for all of us to look onto the world from the perspective of God’s infinite love and mercy. That is the only right perspective, it is what Paul writes about in Galatians saying that “The only thing I can boast about is the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ”.

Both Isaiah and Paul went through their respective conversions in mentality and frame of mind and in the way they judged the territories they were expected and sent to evangelise.

The change in perspective they experienced provided them with a new vision, seeing as an opportunity what previously was a blockage in their way. For Isaiah Jerusalem became a reason to rejoice, for Paul it did not matter any longer if a person was circumcised or not.

Of course, there is so much we experience and behold around us that belies what we basically believe, namely that the world has been redeemed by the cross of the Lord Jesus. Giving in to negativity or to helplessness is easier. Yet it is not the right vision of things.

Our task ahead rests not on the way we may see things, but on the power we have received and we constantly receive “to tread underfoot serpents and scorpions and the whole strength of the enemy”.

The world was always made up of lambs and wolves living alongside each other. We can focus more on what is negative and become disheartened. Instead, the Lord is still sending us to go forth in a world hungering for peace, justice, and healing and where, on the strength of our true vision and with boldness, we can still make the big difference.

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