Readings of the day: 1 Timothy 6:2c-12; Psalm 49:6-7, 8-10, 17-18, 19-20; Luke 8:1-3
Friday of the Twenty-fourth week in Ordinary Time
Today’s Gospel reading from Luke is a noticeably brief transitional passage between lengthier and more detailed episodes in Jesus’ Galilean ministry. It is preceded by the meal scene at the home of Simon the Pharisee, the woman who washes and anoints Jesus’ feet, and Jesus’ parable of the two debtors, which we heard in yesterday’s Gospel reading. Today’s passage is followed in Luke by the parable of the sower.
For its brevity, though, today’s Gospel reading says a lot to us about the diversity yet unity of the earliest Church, the first disciples of Jesus, across longstanding social and religious distinctions. Of course, Luke says, “the twelve were with Jesus”; the twelve Apostles are reminiscent of the twelve Old Testament tribes united as one nation of Israel. But then Luke, alone among the four Gospels, includes today’s detail about various women who followed Jesus: “Mary Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many [unnamed] others.”
What is a common trait among these diverse women and earliest disciples of Jesus? Luke says that they “provided for Jesus and the twelve out of their resources.” This is to say that, out of their diversity of resources—not only monetary but the particular gifts each brought to the community of disciples of Jesus—they worked to ensure the unity of these disciples in Christ. I think we can presume that the twelve; the women; all these earliest disciples of Jesus were diverse, if we only consider their personal backgrounds and material wealth, let alone other points of diversity. With her connections to the royal court of Herod, Joanna may have had some wealth. Mary Magdalene is often portrayed as wealthy. The Gospel says little about Susanna besides her name, and less still about several unnamed disciples of Jesus at the time.
We may know that, in terms of the Church’s liturgy, for weekday Masses in Ordinary Time the central theme of the first reading does not purposely fit together with that of the Gospel. Yet (please allow me to break this mostly unwritten rule of preaching here) I cannot help but see a point in common between the women in Luke’s Gospel who provide for Jesus and the twelve “out of their resources” and the caution to Timothy in our first reading today that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”
Money and other forms of material wealth are not in themselves evil, as long as they are used most justly, to ensure that nobody lacks at least the necessities of life. It is the individualistic “love of money”; the love of and selfish focus to excess on one’s individual rights when this negates the basic rights of others and the common good, that is evil. The author of 1 Timothy essentially urges Timothy and his Christian community (and us) to live their discipleship and dispense their gifts and wealth in the way the women in our Gospel do: With ultimate care for our unity in Christ, in imitation of him.
It is also appropriate today (I am not sure this happens on any other day of the year) that we celebrate the memory of two saintly Doctors of the Church, Sts. Hildegard of Bingen and Robert Bellarmine, on the same day. To be a Doctor of the Church is to be a saint recognized, as only thirty-six people in the Church’s history have, for outstanding teaching of our faith. But Hildegard, Benedictine abbess and mystic of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the 1100s, and Robert, Jesuit entrusted with doctrinal interpretation and implementation of the Council of Trent in the 1500s and early 1600s, could not have been more different.
Perhaps our celebration of Sts. Hildegard of Bingen and Robert Bellarmine is yet another invitation to us to provide out of our diverse sets of resources and gifts for the common good and salvation of all.
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