READINGS

1. Luke 10:1-12
2. Luke 10:17-20

HOMILY

Today we start the 10th chapter of St Luke's Gospel and it's a direct continuation of last Sunday's Gospel where he was giving instructions of following.

Remember his face had turned towards Jerusalem.

And, at this stage, after he's turned towards Jerusalem, the Lord appoints 70 others.

Some old texts say 72, most people think it's probably 70 because it's a reference to the nations.

Originally the angels were put over all the nations, so 70 was the number of the nations.

It's a symbolic way of referring to the wider world of the Gentiles.

And it's in contrast to the 12 disciples, then apostles, whom Jesus had sent out earlier.

So here we have 70 going out in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go, suggesting that he had quite a path on his way to Jerusalem.

Though it would be curious because, at the end, he upgrades a couple of local cities that were very close to where he was starting from in Galilee, Chorazin and Bethsaida, which are both very close to Capernaum where he started from.

He rebukes Capernaum as well. So is he sending them into the area that he's just left?

If it says the places where he himself intended to go, does that mean that he, in some sense, thinks that in sending them he himself is going there?

It's not clear the meaning may be more mysterious than it seems. Or it may mean simply that he's getting people to prepare for him to come.

But to judge by the tenor of this section it's not so much that he's coming necessarily on a personal visit, but that he's coming as the crisis, as the judgment point, which will reveal what is really going on.

But he starts by saying; he says to them: The harvest is plentiful, but the labour is a few.

In other words, people are really ripe for the understanding, for the good news that I am going to be bringing to you and that I am asking you, the preachers, to take.

The understanding that the Kingdom of God is near is something for which people have a hunger, have a thirst to be able to understand that something has been done already and that you're only going in to reap the fruits of it.

That should be a fairly attractive package, but of course, actually, very few people want to go and reap the harvest, even though someone else has planted it and made it already.

The  waves are ready for you to surf as it were.

So he says: Therefore, ask the Lord of the harvest - so the one who has made everything   brought it to this point - to send out labourers into his harvest.

Except that the Greek verb here that translates as to send out, ekbalē, normally means 'cast out' suggesting that actually the kind of labourers who might best affect the harvest or might  best surf the waves are those who have some experience of being cast out.

That's going to be their way of being able to inhabit. That is going to be how they are able to bring the news. So it says: Go on your way.

See, I'm sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves.

So again, just in case you thought that the throwing out or casting out or the hostile violent language was just my invention, here it is: he's sending him out like lambs among the wolves.

They're going to be very precarious during this mission.

And it's their precariousness that is going to be essential to the acts of power that they're going to be able to operate.

Carry no bag, no purse - so don't arrive with a bag of money.

No bag, the kind of bag was used to carry food, so you will be dependent on people for your sustenance. 

Greet no one on the road - this appears to be a quote from an account when the prophet Elijah sent his servant Gehazi to perform a miracle and told him to not to meet anybody on the road.

And why would meeting someone on the road?

Well maybe it would be receiving gossip, knowledge, or forewarning; it would darken your imagination as to what the place you're coming from or going to would be.

Part of your precariousness is arriving there innocently, not full of gossip, not pre-prepared  with caution as to what's going on, and not having any conspiracy theories about what you're going to find.

So just go straight there whatever house you enter first say 'Peace to this house', and if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person.

So there's no question here this is what we would call a charismatic sense of a person's  peace.

It's understood that Jesus has enabled his disciples, those who he has chosen, to dwell in a certain peace and that they are to extend that peace to someone.

They're there to indicate that they're not there as a threat, they arrive as people who are under, who are in need of hospitality, who are in need of help.

And therefore their presence is only going to open up things starting from peace.

And if anyone is there who shares in peace - that's to say for whom the presence of an outsider is already not a threat but maybe something welcome - if anyone shares your peace, your peace will rest on that person.

In other words, you will actually start sharing a way of being together and being at home,   because there will be no violence, no threat, no precaution, no conspiracy theory, no 'is this a   spy?'.

But, if not, it will return to you. In other words, they will reject you, they will say: No, not here, we don't want you, I've frightened of you.

But you will be able to rest in the peace of knowing you have been completely innocent of whatever it is that they hold against you.

So imagining you're remaining in the house, remain in the same house eating and drinking whatever they provide.

And this is one which makes always curious: why remain in the same house?

I guess it's because if you're the guest there you might be tempted to think: Oh, this is getting really quite well, maybe I can get better digs, maybe there's a richer host somewhere in town or maybe if I hear a gossip about my host, I should have moved somewhere else.

You think: No, stay there. There's certain stability that goes with peace that's refusing to be run by gossip, by rivalry, by ambition in the place you are.

There's a certain peacefulness there that's to do with staying.

Remain in the same house eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the labourer   deserves to be paid.

In other words, you are doing something and they will provide for you.

Do not move from house to house.

So bringing out that point: there's a certain importance to stability.

Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you.

So you don't make a fuss, not be a special person, just accept with delight with pleasure the generosity of people. 

You're going to be utterly dependent on them. 

And it's as such a weak presence that you will be able to cure the sick who are there and say to them: the Kingdom of God has come near to you.

If you are able to survive as this weak presence in the midst of potentially hostile situations, that will be a sign that they are close to the Kingdom of God because they have been able to recognize and receive you.

But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome, you go out onto the streets and say: Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet we wipe off in protest against you.

Yet know this: the Kingdom of God has come near.

In other words, the same message is either the announcement of a good thing - for those who are able to recognize the peace, the vulnerability of the ones who are coming in, or it's an act of judgment.

We'll hear that word - krísis - judgment, discernment. It's the act of judgment. 

The same reaction that they have to you will determine whether what they are undergoing is   the arrival of the Kingdom of God or their rejection of the Kingdom of God.

I tell you on that day it will be more tolerable for Sodom than for that town.

And this indeed brings out something of what Jesus is doing.

As in the Genesis story where God arrives with - or rather God sends a couple of his  messengers - so here we have the pairs to every town, so it is in a sense like the visitation: is this a town that is capable of receiving or is it a town that is going to gang up and throw out?

That was, after all, what happened at Sodom: God went down to visit to see whether the cries  that had risen up from the city were true or not.

Were they receiving people, were they treating vulnerable people, precarious people well?

Or were they rejecting them? He sent out his messengers to Sodom. Lot took them in.

The kingdom of God came close to him. And the others tried to expel them, tried to torture them.

I tell you: on that day it'll be more tolerable for Sodom than for that town.

And in fact, here he's using Sodom in the traditional Jewish prophetic sense of a kind of a mirror of something from a mythical past that was something terrible, a terrible failure of hospitality, a terrible failure to respect God.

But he's saying: It'll be worse for you, a small town in Galilee, or small town in the northern part of Israel - it'll be worse for you than on the day of judgment.

In other words, Sodom is a mirror by comparison with which you are worse. That's the standard use of Sodom in Jewish teaching.

And then he goes on: Woe to you Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! - To very small villages not very far from Capernaum which is where he'd been based.

For if the deeds of pardoning you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago sitting in sackcloth and ashes.

So Tyre and Sidon - again two very powerful, very rich cities that in the prophetic literature,  specifically Isaiah but also other prophets, are constantly being railed against as examples of everything that is wrong with pagan cities.

He's saying: these tiny little villages, it's worse than Tyre and Sidon.

In other words, what's he doing with all this hyperbolic imagery of these terrible cities?

He's saying: the judgment arrives actually in very small things, very small domestic things.  

And it arrives through vulnerable people. 

But it's exactly the same judgment as the judgment of God that was made manifest against  Sodom and against Tyre and Sidon.

The presence, the weak presence if you like of God, the vulnerable - that is the crisis of judgment. 

But at the judgment it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon than for you.

And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? - No, you will be brought down to Hades.

Then he backs up what he's been saying to the seventy: Whoever listens to you, listens to me. And whoever rejects you, rejects me. And whoever rejects me, rejects the one who sent me.

So yet again: when it said before he sent them to every place where he himself intended to go, perhaps this is more of the sense that they are the sacramental presence of himself. 

And, in as far as the people, the local people receive them they are receiving him, and in as   far as they are receiving him they are receiving God, because God has made himself known in this weak presence who will later reveal himself to be the crucified One.

So after they've had this trip to the local places, the 70 returned with joy saying: Lord, in your name, you being there in person, even the demons submit to us.

In other words, by entering these places with a weak presence, actually, they've been able to undo some of the terrible fake forms of power that had possessed and bound people, some  of the terrible forms of vibration.

It only needed people to be able to be present and weak without fearing being run out for demons and all the structures of possession which depend on throwing out in order to make good.

They submitted to them. The power of God comes in weakness.

And then Jesus says this wonderful line: I watched  Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning.

This is a key verse in Luke which appears again in the Book of the Apocalypse in a slightly different form.

The notion that Jesus is present as weak in the world as one about to occupy the place of   shame of death, of violence, the one who's about to be thrown out - his strong occupation of that is the same thing as the de-transcendentalizing of evil.

Evil ceases to be a celestial form, it now becomes an anthropological form, wriggling about on the earth whose structure and whose working is known.

It can be defeated by people who are happy to remain weak because they know they are held by God, who are not tempted to react with violence and anger, and strength thinking that that makes them better warriors against this thing.

So evil has lost its transcendence.

See, I've given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy.

And this may refer to actual snakes and scorpions which do exist in that part of the world.

It may also refer to the constellations which had names of snakes and scorpions and which were thought to be signs of the heavenly powers, of these semi-demonic powers that control things, but in a closing-down way.

So again Jesus is saying it's the actual whole power of transcendence, even the heavens, are of being undone because I can see that the power I have given you works.

Jesus rejoices, they rejoice. 

Then he says: Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this that the spirits submit to you.

In other words, it's not merely your achievements that are the key thing, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.

And this is wonderful sense proper to the Hebrew world that who you really are is being given to you from on high, it's being as it were unfurled in your life.

And if you are able to occupy this space of weakness, of precariousness, it's because you're being held in place by heaven, your name has been written there, it is inscribed. 

This is part of the new reality that is coming in. You are going to be a sign of that new reality coming in.

So the name being inscribed in heaven is not a reference to someone with a pen, it's a   reference to the reality of your being as it were already held elsewhere and starting to unfold   in this world as you make a witness to what it's really like.

This weak presence that is at the same time a liberating force, but also - when it's rejected - a terrible sort of judgment.

SUMMARY

a) Jesus sends 70 or 72 disciples to evangelize.

The harvest is plentiful, but the labour is a few.

Therefore, ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest.

Their precariousness is going to be essential to the acts of power that they're going to be able to operate.

Part of the precariousness is arriving there innocently, not full of gossip, not pre-prepared with caution as to what's going on.

There's a certain stability that goes with peace that's refusing to be run by gossip.

If you are able to survive as this weak presence in the midst of potentially hostile situations that will be a sign that they are close to the Kingdom of God, because they have been able to recognize and receive you.

The judgement arrives actually in very small things, very small domestic things. And it arrives through vulnerable people. But it's exactly the same judgment as the judgment of God that was made manifest against Sodom, Tyre and Sidon.

The weak presence of God (the vulnerable) is the crisis of judgment.

The power of God comes in weakness.

b) I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning.

The notion that Jesus is present as weak in the world as one about to occupy the place of shame and death, of violence, the one who's about to be thrown out - his strong occupation of that is the same thing as the de-transcendentalizing of evil.

Evil ceases to be a celestial form, and it now becomes an antropological form, wriggling about on the earth, whose structure and whose working is known.

It can be defeated by people who are happy to remain weak because they know they are held by God, who are not tempted to react with violence and anger and strength, thinking that this makes them better warriors.