God chooses, God cherishes

Today’s Gospel, as one commentator observes, describing how Jesus commissioned the disciples to their ministry and how they performed it, repeats almost exactly Mark’s earliest description of the very first day of Jesus’ own ministry. On that day Jesus begins by 1) preaching repentance; then he 2) calls the first disciples, 3) teaches with authority, 4) exorcises a demon, and 5) heals by touching (Mk1, 15-34). So on this day, that the 12 might 1) preach repentance, Jesus 2) summons them and 3) gives them authority; besides preaching repentance they 4) cast out many devils and 5) anoint sick people with oil and these are cured. The theological point Mark seems to be making here is that those whom Jesus chooses for a ministry, do the work of Jesus himself. Jesus donates his own spiritual authority to Christians.

God chooses. And God’s choice is not an arbitrary, mindless thing on his part. He is very deliberate, and it’s about us that he deliberates. For God’s choice is never a mere wish on his part. What God chooses, happens. Amos was told to prophecy and, though he was no prophet, prophesied. The Lord told him to. Twelve men, mostly fishermen, were told to perform exorcism and heal people with oil, and people were exorcised and healed with oil. Jesus told them to.

But we have to rid ourselves of the illusion that God regards us a means to his end. No, we are more than mere "channels of his peace." He chooses us for "us" first for our own sake, and it’s only in the glad welcome of that choice that we could ever do what’s called "his will". Not an appointment to a job, his choice is more like the choice of spouses for each other, a choice of love. It is a choice that overflows naturally into creativity and into meeting problems at hand – meeting them with God, not just "for" God. To say God "chooses," then, means first of all that God "cherishes."

Still, many carry the question of their vocation to their graves. They wonder without wonder. Afraid to fall into the hands of the living God, they calculate and vacillate. Not that people don’t do what their vocation requires. But many of the faithful ones who do – like all the unfaithful ones who don’t — think of themselves as having made the choice alone. The only way to understand one’s vocation as both one’s own free choice and God’s choice too is to take it as a response to a call of Somebody, a You. Amos may have preferred his sycamores, and the disciples their spare tunics, but they went where they were sent because the Word of the Lord had sent them. God was at work and they loved it.

The older people may have forgotten that all these years it is God who has been on the move, that when they gave themselves over to life — through marriage, through religious vows, through commitments — it was love in them that did the giving over. They may have fallen out of awe — a cousin to falling out of love — and so fail to collect the old-age benefits of being glad for God’s sake. They deserve the consolation God is ready to share with them, but they need reminding to recognize the extent to which God has been laboring in their lives.

Fifteen Sunday, Ordinary Times, Mk 6:7-13