Pentecost happened four weeks ago, and Ordinary Time started the next day, but today is the first Sunday in Ordinary Time on which we are not celebrating a particular solemnity of the Church Year. It’s the first truly ordinary Sunday in Ordinary Time this year. I remember how Father Eddy used to breathe a sigh of relief around this time and exclaim with a big smile: “Thank God for Ordinary Time!” Beyond no longer needing to worry about special Easter texts and rubrics, he understood that Ordinary Time has a special character of its own. It isn’t a blank liturgical period. Though he never said so explicitly, I would guess that what Father Eddy had in mind was that, after we have delved deeply over many months into the mysteries of our salvation as lived by the Lord Jesus, now comes the moment when we are invited to hunker down personally and live these mysteries ourselves, in our “ordinary, obscure and laborious” Cistercian existence. Ordinary Time urges us to make the Paschal Mystery permeate our concrete, ordinary circumstances. Despite the mostly nose-to-the-grind exterior of our life, it is only here that our mystical transformation into other Christs can take place.
Today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke gives us the perfect theme to explore the actualization of the Paschal Mystery in our lives: namely, Christian discipleship, the existence of those Jesus first calls to himself as disciples and then sends out as apostles after making them into “a new creation in the Spirit”. For us monks, discipleship means specifically Cistercian discipleship, a topic of great relevance as we enter our yearly retreat today as a community and ponder our specific charism.
Christ Jesus himself is, in a real sense, the one and only Apostle, the One sent forth from the Father as bearer of the world’s salvation. And yet he has chosen to share his redemptive mission with us through our active participation in it. No one, least of all we monks, can honestly bear the name of Christian without becoming a disciple through intimacy with the Lord and then sharing, as apostle, in Christ’s mission to save the world.
Today’s gospel contains a rich teaching concerning the particulars of Christian mission. The disciples are explicitly sent out to prepare the way for the coming of Jesus into people’s lives. Our mission, whether visible or hidden, is always a clearing of the way for the person of Jesus so that he will come to mean to others what he already means to us. The Lord is himself the greatest treasure we possess, the Peace that inhabits our hearts; and the quality of our love for both Jesus and others is shown by the intensity of our desire to share that treasure with everyone. The disciples are sent out two by two because our fraternal communion with one another as disciples is already in itself a manner of proclaiming the nearness of the Kingdom. In this Kingdom, interpersonal communion and joyful unity reign supreme as the visible realities that best reflect God’s Trinitarian nature as continual circulation of love. The very heart of Jesus’ Gospel is love, and this truth can best be witnessed to not primarily through words but through lived relationships by persons who help and support one another, who find the meaning of their individual lives within a God-established network of relationships. In our lives as Christians, we are called to become the visibility of Jesus as the loving Heart of God’s Kingdom. Such should be the witness borne by the monastery as an ecclesiola or “small local church”.
Those whom Jesus sends out are very few indeed, considering the enormity of the harvest, and they are not given many provisions and even fewer certainties. The disciples are poor, a tiny minority hidden in a huge mass of people, and their existence is precarious. All of this, in and of itself, is obviously quite negative; and yet Luke presents these facts not at all as regrettable obstacles impeding the mission but, paradoxically, as the very conditions that Jesus himself imposes on the mission! The poverty of those sent, it seems, is meant to underscore the fact that the Christian mission has to be enacted by the whole of a person, with nothing held back, and relying on none of the gimmicks (like colorful appeal and guarantees of success) that the world considers essential. The apostles are, after all, proclaiming the Word made flesh, and so it isn’t enough for them to lack sufficient means: they must be poor in actual fact. Nor is it enough for them to proclaim the Kingdom of God with words: they must actually be men of God. And it isn’t enough for them to proclaim peace: they must actually be peace-makers.
All the requirements made of the disciples by Jesus are, thus, at the level of personal identity and existence. At bottom, the many necessary actions and words of Jesus’ followers have to flow forth from their unique personhood as Christians, that is, from their joyful and vital symbiosis with the Lord Jesus. Their ministry does not at heart have to do with pre-set official functions performed exteriorly, or with precisely worded formulas and definitions, divorced from personal experience. Their highly personal identification with Christ—the fruit of grace, prayer and intense struggle—is what enables the disciples to truly become lambs who follow the Lamb of God himself wherever he goes, and who therefore offer themselves as an oblation in union with Christ.
When you are poor in fact and not only in theory, then, as an evangelist, you have only yourself to give away, as conformed with the Word of God living in you. “Mission” has meaning only if it is but a single thing with the following of Christ. This truth has particular significance for us Cistercian monks that we are. Our special contemplative mission in the Church has nothing to do with going out physically from the monastery into the world, but everything to do with our actually becoming conformed with Christ in our inner being. The brunt of our monastic missionary effort consists in concentrating all the energies of our heart on intimate union with Christ, so that the Lord may then take the substance of our surrendered being and do with it as he wishes throughout the body of humanity and the cosmos.
And yet, we monks are very ordinary human beings, living physically in this world for the time being and, thus, coming into contact more or less directly with all sorts of people. In faith we believe that Jesus is subtly “sending us out” to every person we encounter in whatever manner. In every case, the personal poverty and vulnerability we have deliberately embraced by our vows can become the space where God’s Spirit is manifested. Radical poverty, both material and spiritual, freely embraced, brings with it extraordinary power: Lord, even the demons are subject to us because of your Name. The disciples have renounced all earthly power and personal influence, and therefore the power of God is free to work the most splendid things through them. And the disciples’ necessarily self-effacing attitude makes their mission to be a non-threatening invitation to those who welcome them. They, therefore, inspire trust. Through their smallness as individuals, they open up a space for the miracle of conversion to Jesus. The witness of their own harmony of hearts, furthermore, shows clearly that authentically lived Christian faith drives out all fear, distrust and mutual recrimination. Where faith dwells, a truly Edenic condition flourishes which all rational beings yearn for. Isaiah embodies this condition of pure, universal joy in a glorious vision of Jerusalem as mother of all nations, where God will spread prosperity like a river and all may suck fully of the milk of her abundant breasts, a vision made real at this Eucharist.
Jesus does not send out missionaries who carry food, clothing or money to the needy. Rather, he sends persons without any money or provisions. The only thing they take with them is the all-sufficient Word of the Kingdom, which proclaims the necessity of conversion. This conversion has such urgency that the disciples musn’t waste any time along the way, greeting people and engaging in idle chatter. The radical Jesus excludes everything non-essential from the disciples’ words and actions, and this gives their mission a very ascetical, almost monastic flavor. Those Jesus sends are bearers of nothing but the living and naked Word, a Word they are called to embody in their existence as other Christs. This requires of them that, like St Paul, they never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Being Jesus’ intimate companion on the redemptive cross is both the form and the means of the Cistercian monk’s apostolate, which as such never requires that he leave the enclosure. Welcome, at last, to Ordinary Time!
