NOTES for Luk 9:1-2

Jesus is truly a Teacher: He alternates "theoretical instruction" for His disciples with "practical lessons." In fact, they spend only three years with their Mentor, receiving from Him everything they are able to receive, and then they will have to carry the Gospel and preach the Kingdom of God throughout the whole world. While they are still learning, they must taste the mission, see how the word of God acts in the world, how evil retreats, how the eyes of people who receive the Good News light up. Later, after Christ's Ascension, they will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit and accept a special power for witness to Christ, but already now Jesus equips them with everything needed for preaching: instructions, and "power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases."

Mission is service, so the messengers must not display worldly power or wealth; they are called to rely on God in everything. Their task is to bring the message, not to persuade or force people to accept it, and the healing of the sick is not a bright show meant to attract unbelievers, but simply a nonverbal witness that the Kingdom of God has drawn near.

Sending the apostles out to preach, Jesus tells them not to make distinctions among the houses where they will have to stay, and not to hide from anyone the message they bear. Even rejection itself was not to be perceived by them as a failure of the mission, for their task was to bear witness to the Kingdom, and the rest was left to the free choice of those who heard.

Such an approach could seem somewhat unusual in those days. The institution of messengers, and the word "apostle" properly means messenger, had a quite specific meaning in the life of religious brotherhoods of the Gospel era. Such messengers were the connecting link among the separate communities that belonged to the brotherhood. Since the brotherhoods had no rigid hierarchical structure and were community movements, the role of such messengers was very important: they became living witnesses of important events in one or another community, events about which the members of that community considered it necessary to inform their brothers from other communities.

Preaching to outsiders, as a rule, was not part of the task of such apostles-messengers; special missionaries existed for that. But Jesus, while calling His disciples messengers, at the same time also proposes that they be missionaries, and more than that, that they be missionaries first of all, and that they consider the whole people of God, the whole Synagogue, as their community. Such an approach was unusual at the very least. But the witness of Jesus' apostles was unusual as well.

Ordinary apostles-messengers bore witness to something significant for their own religious brotherhood, usually in the context of that brotherhood's religious life, and each brotherhood's religious life had its own features. But the apostles sent by Jesus were to bear witness not to religious life, but to the Kingdom which, according to the Savior's word, had "drawn near." This approaching Kingdom was what Christ's apostles were to testify to, and to testify in such a way that its nearness would become obvious to everyone who wanted to see.

For such witness the community truly was the whole people of God, because the matter was not some specific religious tradition or religious practice, but something that concerned everyone who belonged to that people: the Messiah and the Kingdom, the things of which the prophets had spoken. And Jesus tells the apostles not to make distinctions and not to hide the message from anyone, so as to bring into the Kingdom everyone who wants it. For the issue is salvation, and God wants to save everyone, regardless of the religious tradition to which that person belongs.

Having gathered the twelve disciples, Jesus sends them out to preach. But their task is not merely to proclaim the Kingdom of God; they must embody it in their lives. They are to live in complete trust in God, relying on themselves in nothing and taking nothing for the journey. They must pass fearlessly from town to town, staying now in one house, now in another, never having a permanent shelter and at the same time regarding the whole world as their home. How powerful Christ's words must have been for the apostles to set out through towns and villages without hesitation, fulfilling His command. How strong their faith must have been for them to dare to heal the sick—not as learned physicians but as simple fishermen—simply because the Teacher had commanded it.

This call to proclaim the Kingdom of God with our whole life is addressed to each of us. And the Lord does not limit Himself to issuing the call: He gives us the strength to fulfill it.

When the Lord sends the twelve apostles out to preach, He charges them to proclaim the Kingdom of God and to bear witness to those who are willing to receive their testimony. At the beginning of the next chapter He gives the same charge to the seventy apostles. Both the Twelve and the Seventy are called to rely on God and not to take unnecessary provisions for the journey. The characteristic distinction noted by the evangelist Luke is that the twelve apostles also receive the power and the charge to cast out evil spirits and heal diseases. This is precisely why the next generation of Christians already spoke of Christ as having “established His Church on the foundation of the twelve apostles.” For He endowed them with His own power and authority and gave them the commission that He Himself fulfilled in His ministry. The distinctive feature of the charge to the twelve apostles indicated by Luke is important because it characterizes not only their task at that particular moment but also the essence of the Church the Lord is building. Like the apostles, the whole apostolic Church continues Christ’s ministry on earth: proclaiming the Kingdom and healing damaged human nature.

Luke briefly touches on a whole series of events about which the other evangelists, especially Matthew, speak in greater detail. He gives the central place to Peter's confession and to Jesus' account of His approaching death and resurrection. There is a logic to this presentation. First of all, the Savior lets His disciples feel the power of the Kingdom and learn from their own experience how this power acts in the world. And not only them: the miraculous feeding of thousands of people with five loaves and two fish is also possible only in the Kingdom. This is not surprising: when it comes to the Kingdom, it is easier to show than to tell. Meanwhile, even those who had previously taken no interest in Christ's testimony begin to notice it—for example, Herod, who was generally wary of every kind of messianic movement that threatened his power.

This is precisely why, immediately after Peter's confession, Jesus explains to the disciples just how different the messiahship He has brought into the world is. Of course, the apostles fully understood everything Jesus told them only on the day of Pentecost. But it was immediately after Peter's confession that He began speaking to them about His messiahship and His path. It is as though He is trying to make everything clear from the outset, so that His messianic ministry will not become associated in His disciples' minds with traditional popular messianic expectations.

From the very beginning, the Savior does everything possible to help His disciples understand as much as they can of what they will have to understand fully in due time. This is natural: Golgotha lay ahead. The disciples had to be prepared, as far as possible, for what awaited them—and what awaited them was the shock of the complete collapse of their entire worldview and sense of the world. Only the experience of the Kingdom could help them endure it—not the earthly kingdom of popular expectations, but the true Kingdom, the one the Savior brought into the world.

The apostles gained as much experience of the Kingdom as was then possible after they went out to preach on their own, without their Teacher. The new ideas about the Kingdom proved more difficult: they would not fit into the disciples' minds or find room in their consciousness. All that remained was to rely on their intuition and, above all, on the personal relationship that bound them to Jesus. Nevertheless, He tells the apostles everything that can be said in human words about His earthly path and earthly ministry. And then each one takes in as much of His words as he is able to take in.

Today's reading offers us several events that Luke links together, making them links in one chain. The passage begins with a description of how Jesus sends the twelve apostles out to preach (vv. 1-10), continues with the story of the miraculous multiplication of the loaves (vv. 11-17), and ends with the account of Peter's confession, including Jesus' conversation (vv. 18-27). And this connection is, of course, not accidental. Jesus sends His disciples to witness to the Kingdom, and to witness not only by word but also by deed, so that the witness would be supported by such a visible manifestation of the Kingdom as healings (vv. 1-2). And the apostles' preaching, as we see, had success, attracting the attention not only of the people but also of the authorities (vv. 7-9).

Then something happened that perhaps even the apostles did not expect. The miracle of the multiplication of the loaves was, as we see, a surprise even for them. In order to feed the gathered people, they were ready to act by the most ordinary methods (vv. 12-13), but Jesus expected something different from them: He told them to behave as if they were in the Kingdom (vv. 14-16). And then something really happened that could not happen according to the laws of our world, not yet transformed, but that is possible in the Kingdom: a small amount of food was enough for everyone, and more than enough, so that if even more people had gathered, there would have been enough for each one (v. 17).

This was a very important experience of the Kingdom for everyone, and above all, of course, for the apostles themselves. Until now they had been witnesses of how the power of the Kingdom acts in a world not yet transformed, a world where its action manifests itself, in one way or another, in opposition to the evil in which this world remains. Now the apostles saw the Kingdom from within, as it will be when the world is completely transformed and renewed. Such an experience of abiding in the triumphant Kingdom could not pass without a trace, and Peter's confession may have become its result (vv. 18-20).

Then Jesus warns His disciples that before the victory of the Kingdom, which they had already partly had occasion to see, becomes complete, He Himself will have to pass through the cross, and those who follow Him will have to share that cross with Him (vv. 21-27). Thus, by giving His disciples a share in the Kingdom, Jesus at the same time tells them about the price of the Kingdom. About the price of the world's transformation and its deliverance from the evil into which the fall plunged it.

Today's reading brings together several short narratives, but Christ and the disciples stand at the center of each. In all these passages He gives them a special gift: unity. It can take shape in very different things—in shared trust and hope in God, in their shared experience as eyewitnesses to miracles and healings, in a shared meal, the breaking of the multiplied loaves, in a common confession of faith, in following Jesus together into suffering, and—summing all this up—in the shared experience of the Kingdom that has come in power. This path of unity is open to us as well: in common prayer, in the breaking of bread, in shared faith—in a relationship with Jesus in which there is not merely my personal faith, but the realization that, living together with one another and with Him, we become one Body.