A Reflection for Wednesday of the Fourth Week of Easter
Find today’s readings here.
“I have called you friends,
because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.
It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you
and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain,
so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you.”
I won’t embarrass the priest who underlined this point to great effect during one Catholic campus ministry retreat, but one of the best insights into the Gospels that I gleaned from four years at a Jesuit university was the distinction between disciples and apostles, two names for the original followers of Jesus used at different points in the New Testament. Jesus’ friends were first called to be disciples—to follow him. It was “I who chose you” in the first instance, Jesus reminds his disciples in today’s Gospel. While Jesus walked the earth, performed miracles and underwent his Passion, his disciples’ primary task was to watch, listen and learn from him; to take to heart all that he said and taught, to model themselves after him and to obey his commands.
But as we look forward to the end of Eastertide and to our celebrations of the Ascension and Pentecost, when Jesus ascends to heaven and the spotlight in the biblical narrative turns to the mortal friends he left on earth, we see that those friends will soon be called by a new name: apostles. While they are still called to live as followers of Jesus, the way in which they are now called to follow him is more affirmative. Their task is to proclaim his death and resurrection, to pass on his teachings and emulate him in their lives, most crucially by “loving one another as I have loved you.” They are sent forth as heralds of his love for humankind, to preach and proclaim the Gospel in his place until he comes again.
All of us are heirs to those friends to whom Jesus gave this task. While we are in no sense Jesus’ equals, our relationship with him now is nonetheless different than that of the first disciples at the moment of their initial calling. We are servants and followers of Jesus—but we are also his friends, to whom he has entrusted a formidable responsibility. He has called us to take an active role in his plan for humanity, to “go and bear fruit that will remain.” Such is our commission. I feel this responsibility in a particularly acute way working at a Jesuit media ministry, but this vocation is common to all Christians. We are Jesus’ disciples, but we are also his apostles, his earthly ministers and his friends. He has sent us to love others as he loves us, and to proclaim the good news of his saving grace by our lives.
Go and announce the Gospel of the Lord!
