In this year of our parish's focus on being the Body of Christ, especially by reflecting on the Eucharist, I suspect that one of the questions we'll run into at some point is "Isn't going to mass each week and praying the same prayers just leading people to merely go through the motions?"   Isn't it just boring, mindless repetition, and if it is, then how can people really come to know the freshness and liveliness of Christ? 

 

At least - those are the hard questions my twenty-something students ask - and those questions aren't far afield from points my older friends and relatives sometimes make too.  "You Catholics don't treat the Eucharist in a very special way. You do it all the time and that makes it too common and too easy to dismiss," my non-Catholic friends say.

 

In a certain way this is true.  If the rites have become nothing but meaningless, unthinking motions to get through, then that can't help people see God's grace very easily.  Today's scriptures offer another way to think about this question of sameness, commonness and boring repetition - which is to think instead about what the benefits are of staying in the same place, blooming where you're planted and living into sameness.

 

The first reading (2 Timothy 4:10-17b) is Paul's letter to Timothy while he is in prison in Rome.  He is writing just a bit before his death; he has had a trial and been charged and found guilty (likely, the Alexander he mentions here is one of the people giving witness to the charges).  Paul writes about how so many of his supposed friends have deserted him, seeking the "world" rather than friendship with a man imprisoned.  Only Luke, the author of the gospel, remains to help Paul.  In this letter, the worldly disciples have moved on, abandoning Paul in his need, but also not seeing something crucial: that preaching the gospel can and should take place everywhere, even in jail.  Note that even at his trial, Paul was chiefly concerned with witnessing to the gospel, and not much concerned with his own defense.  The point of preaching the gospel is to be able to preach wherever and whenever you are - and not necessarily to be constantly on the move to do it.  Though Paul spent a lifetime travelling everywhere, he was not travelling for the sake of seeing something new, but for the sake of preaching the same message at all times.  Christ is died, but he is risen!  I suspect that Paul is worried that some of the worldly disciples are more in love with the life of the nomad than they are with the message of the gospel.  Blooming where we're planted reminds us of the true aim of Christian discipleship: to follow Jesus and not the glamour of whatever new thing might come our way.

 

The gospel reading (Luke 10:1-9) reinforces the importance of blooming where you're planted, too.  Jesus sends out his disciples to do the same kind of work he does, but what is striking in this passage is that he tells them: "Do not move about from one house to another.  Whatever town you enter and they welcome you, eat what is set before you, cure the sick and say to them, 'The Kingdom of God is at hand for you.'"  Disciples who move about from place to place, and who complain about the food, are disciples who are concerned primarily with their own comfort and their own desire for newness - with finding the best food and the best bed.  But Jesus suggests instead to learn to be where you are, and keep your focus instead on the gospel.

 

Today's feast honors St. Luke the Evangelist.  One of the things he is known for is emphasizing worshipping Jesus above all else - as we see in today's gospel.  Worshipping Jesus above seeking new things, or wanting life to be less boring, or worrying about commonness - especially if it's Jesus himself that we're seeing as boring - that's something Luke would want us to guard against.  Today let us pray for the grace to bloom where we're planted.

 

- Jana M. Bennett