We often gloss over today’s Gospel as simply Jesus choosing the twelve apostles. Special and anointed Men set apart to do God’s will. But really how special was each and every one of them? Most of us know that some of them were uneducated fishermen, we know of a tax collector, zealot and so on. It was Jesus who set them apart and anointed them. He changed them from within and they became more like Him. They surrendered everything took up their cross and followed Him.
Jesus is doing the very same thing today for you and me. He is setting us apart, He has anointed us through our baptism and confirmation, and we are sent into the world to be powerful instruments of His grace. How many of us are living out our call? Surrendering everything, taking up our cross and following after our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ? How many lives have changed because we brought them closer to Jesus our Lord and our God?
Or are we still bickering with one another or who is right and who is wrong? Who has the Parish priest ear and who doesn’t? What other ugly sides are we showing to unbelievers instead of the face of Christ Jesus our Lord?
Both lungs of our Church in which the Holy Spirit breathes has the institutional dimension as well as the Charismatic dimension. Are we still focussed only on the institutional dimension? How alive in the Spirit is our Church? Our Ministries? Our Communities? Our Homes?
Come fill us with Your Presence Holy Spirit come dwell among us. Amen
First reading
1 Corinthians 6:1-11
Do not drag your brother to a pagan for judgement
How dare one of your members take up a complaint against another in the law courts of the unjust instead of before the saints? As you know, it is the saints who are to ‘judge the world’; and if the world is to be judged by you, how can you be unfit to judge trifling cases? Since we are also to judge angels, it follows that we can judge matters of everyday life; but when you have had cases of that kind, the people you appointed to try them were not even respected in the Church. You should be ashamed: is there really not one reliable man among you to settle differences between brothers and so one brother brings a court case against another in front of unbelievers? It is bad enough for you to have lawsuits at all against one another: oughtn’t you to let yourselves be wronged, and let yourselves be cheated? But you are doing the wronging and the cheating, and to your own brothers.
You know perfectly well that people who do wrong will not inherit the kingdom of God: people of immoral lives, idolaters, adulterers, catamites, sodomites, thieves, usurers, drunkards, slanderers and swindlers will never inherit the kingdom of God. These are the sort of people some of you were once, but now you have been washed clean, and sanctified, and justified through the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and through the Spirit of our God.
Gospel
Luke 6:12-19
Jesus chooses his twelve apostles
Jesus went out into the hills to pray; and he spent the whole night in prayer to God. When day came he summoned his disciples and picked out twelve of them; he called them ‘apostles’: Simon whom he called Peter, and his brother Andrew; James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James son of Alphaeus, Simon called the Zealot, Judas son of James, and Judas Iscariot who became a traitor.
He then came down with them and stopped at a piece of level ground where there was a large gathering of his disciples with a great crowd of people from all parts of Judaea and from Jerusalem and from the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon who had come to hear him and to be cured of their diseases. People tormented by unclean spirits were also cured, and everyone in the crowd was trying to touch him because power came out of him that cured them all.
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