“He who hears you, hears me,” said our Lord to his seventy or so apostles, “and he who rejects
you reject me, and he who rejects me rejects him who sent me.” Usually I hear this word from our Savior as a warning, and as severe, yet this time I find joy in knowing that through the apostles we can and do hear Him.
I don’t know that Luke is counted as an apostle in the usual sense (except on our wall calendar!), but we certainly hear Christ through St. Luke in the Gospel according to St. Luke! And our Lord’s voice echos through his apostles, evangelists, and various Bishops and teachers of the Church, and even somehow through those peculiar exemplars, the early Christian monks and nuns, and the later mystical saints: through words and silences and examples. What precious gifts our Lord
gives us!
The seventy returned with joy, from their mission, having found that our Lord’s authority, given to
them, had even caused demons to be subject to them. Our Lord asserts what He had seen, which was
from the Beginning, and affirms even more strongly the authority He had given to the seventy — but then places far above that, the fact that the names of the seventy are written in Heaven: they have a very favorable destiny ahead of them! And they are to rejoice far more about that, than about the authority and protection over demons that they had received.
We who are little, and not very deserving or capable, can take heart with the seventy, when we
hear Jesus rejoicing in the Holy Spirit, saying: “I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and understanding, and revealed them to babes; yes, Father, for such was Your gracious will.”
For it is God’s choice, to bestow precious gifts upon the small, the lowly, the despised. His ways are often all topsy-turvy when viewed with worldly eyes — and hearts.
We know of a psalm, that speaks of an evil man, steeped in evil, who so loved cursing, that the
psalmist prays that a devastating series of curses against this particularly evil man, among which we hear the psalmist pray,
“For he did not think of showing mercy,
but pursued the poor and the needy,
hounding the wretched to death.
He loved cursing: let curses fall upon him.
He scorned blessing; let blessing pass him by.
He put on cursing like his coat;
let it soak into his body like water;
let it sink like oil into his bones;
let it be like the clothes that cover him,
like a girdle he cannot take off!”
-Psalm 108 (109)
Sometimes that nearly gives me shivers, so hard is his point hammered home, making a pointed
image of what hell would be like, becoming so wrapped and soaked in one’s own evil that one is
permeated with it that quite opposite to getting free, one gets imbued with it, permanently, becoming it.
Our Lord would gift us with quite the opposite, in stark contrast: equally permanent, equally
permeating us and clothing us within and without, but what a difference: joy, glory, peace, jubilation, holiness, peace beyond understanding, union and communion with infinite God, and you may well add more!
No wonder He rejoiced in the Holy Spirit, over them receiving what the wise and understanding
had missed; no wonder He told his seventy, to rejoice far more, that their names are written in heaven!
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