Overview:

Friday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time

A Reflection for Friday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time

Jesus said to his Apostles:
“Behold, I am sending you like sheep in the midst of wolves;
so be shrewd as serpents and simple as doves.
But beware of men, 
for they will hand you over to courts
and scourge you in their synagogues,
and you will be led before governors and kings for my sake
as a witness before them and the pagans.
When they hand you over,
do not worry about how you are to speak
or what you are to say.
You will be given at that moment what you are to say.
For it will not be you who speak
but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.
Brother will hand over brother to death,
and the father his child;
children will rise up against parents and have them put to death.
You will be hated by all because of my name,
but whoever endures to the end will be saved.
When they persecute you in one town, flee to another.
Amen, I say to you, you will not finish the towns of Israel
before the Son of Man comes.” (Mt 10:16-23)

Find today’s readings here.

When I was a college student at Loyola Marymount University a few many years ago, one of the Jesuits on campus approached me one day to ask if I would give a Gospel reflection the next week at one of the daily Masses held on campus. Since this was not then (and is not now) something I really ever was asked to do, I was surprised.

He wasn’t looking for a German-style fight with the Vatican (well, maybe he was), as there were other options in those days for daily Mass on campus and this was an informal affair attended by maybe a dozen or so faculty, staff and students every day. Rather, he was asking students because he thought it might give some variety to the preaching. Was he also cultivating vocation prospects? Sure. Was he also saving himself the trouble of preparing his own homily? Who knows. Anyway, I was flattered and a little trapped, so I agreed.

I spent the next week somewhat haphazardly constructing a short reflection on the Gospel for the day he had assigned me. The details are not worth going into here, but suffice it to say my prepared text would have been terrible.

It didn’t matter, because when he stood up and began proclaiming the Gospel on my day, I realized very quickly that one of us had gotten things very, very wrong. It wasn’t my Gospel. What could I do? I pocketed my prepared text, waited for him to finish, got up and completely winged it. “I think what Jesus is telling us in today’s reading from Matthew is…”

The next five minutes were of course awful from my point of view, but after Mass, several people came up and thanked me. One was a nun with a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Fribourg who was clearly just being kind; but a couple of others said thank you for an insight that they had not considered. 

Was I just an excellent bullshitter? Were they offering kudos for giving it the old college try? Do people not really pay attention to the homily at a daily Mass at the end of the work day? Or are the words of Jesus in today’s Gospel passage from Matthew actually true? “Do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say. You will be given at that moment what you are to say. For it will not be you who speak but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.”

The aforementioned Jesuit—after he ascertained I was not going to throw him off the bluff for giving me the wrong readings—told me that was surely the case, and that any preacher will tell you the same. It is the reflection you prepare with the utmost care and deliver with the utmost confidence that falls flat. But it is the reflection that feels clumsy, uninformed or—worse—completely improvised on the spot that touches someone’s heart or mind. Why? Maybe because you are vulnerable in that moment, more honest and more yourself. But it is also a moment when you really must trust that the Spirit will speak through you. And yes, the preachers tell us: The Spirit does.

Jesus is of course prepping the disciples in today’s reading for a much more menacing reality: They’re going to be arrested, persecuted, killed for their preaching. But the mission is the same, is it not? And it is the same Good News, and the same Spirit. And it requires the same trust: If God wants me to be any part of this Great Commission, no matter how small, God will also give me the inspiration for it that I surely need.

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.