GOSPEL REFLECTION, WEDNESDAY, 14TH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME, 8 JULY 2026

Matthew 10:1-7.  As faithful Jews, Jesus’ followers would have been familiar with an ancient understanding of Jewish tradition concerning “vocation,” a divine call to a mission in life.  So it was with Abraham, our father in faith, who responded immediately to God’s call.  Moses, on hearing God’s call protested that he was unfit for the mission, saying that he was a poor and faltering, stuttering man, but eventually submitted to God’s will.  The prophets responded to their divine call, putting themselves at risk because so many of them had been killed for what they then did and said in response to God.  Jesus reminded his own disciples, the ones he chose for specific mission, that “you did not choose me, I chose you; and I appointed you to bear fruit….”(John 15:16) – we do well to remember that regarding our own vocation to serve.  In Jewish and Christian thought a vocation was not simply an inner conviction (although that is essential too), but a vocation by divine call attested by the conviction of others that it is truly a divine call.

When Jesus called his twelve disciples, they responded right away.  He chose them from among his followers who had begun learning from him.  They were ordinary men, some rather rough at the edges, may we even say they were a motley crew.  For example, Matthew was a tax-collector, an agent of the Roman authorities and may have been seen by others as a sort of double agent.  Simon the Zealot belonged to a radical group prepared to do anything at all to gain their ends, including violence.  Simon Peter, the impulsive and mercurial one, was a fisherman, as were James and John, sons of Zebedee known as “Boanerges” or ‘sons of thunder,’ likely a pretty noisy and blustering pair.  Judas Iscariot was among the twelve, but eventually betrayed Jesus.  All of them were from Galilee, rather a back country to the centre of Jewish society surrounding the Temple in Jerusalem. 

For all they ordinariness they were called to important missions in the Kingdom of God.  Called to preach the Kingdom in words, they were called to preach it by their deeds of  healing of people’s ills, participating in Jesus own authority to do so.  The Greek word for Jesus ‘appointing’ them is also translated as ‘ordained’ them in Mark 3:14.  Theirs was no minor mission.  Their appointment came as an immediate response to Jesus’ own saying that there were ‘few labourers for the harvest’ (Matthew 9:35-38), and after a rehearsal of  Jesus’ own source of authority, his preaching of the Kingdom, and his own miraculous healings  (Matthew ch’s 5-9).  It was as participants in these works that the twelve were ‘appointed’ or ‘ordained.’