Those who attend Mass during the week know that through the fall we have been feasting on the richness of Luke’s Gospel, which unfolds the remarkable pattern of Jesus’s messianic mission first proclaimed in the fourth chapter.
After his baptism and temptations in the desert, Jesus returns to his hometown in Nazareth where we find a crowd gathered to hear him. Luke tells us,
He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
When he finished, “The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him, all eyes were fixed on him,” and he said to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:16–21). Their initial response to him was admiration, but that quickly turned to rage when he reminded them that God’s grace has never been confined to those who believed they were entitled to it. His examples of Elijah and Elisha ministering to Gentiles resulted in their trying to kill him. Belonging, it seems, is no guarantee that one will understand or welcome God’s salvific work.
After Jesus escapes the mob, he returns to Capernaum and resumes his ministry, and in Luke’s Gospel, the miracles come rapidly, one after the other, as testimony that his claim in the synagogue in Nazareth was true. Soon, Jesus expands his circle by choosing twelve men as his apostles whom he entrusts with a share in his mission. Luke tells us that “Jesus called the twelve together and gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal” (Luke 9:1–2).
Our neighbor is anyone in need, and when we see another person in need we must help—without distinction.
But sometime after the apostles returned from their first venture, there was some confusion among them. John approached Jesus with a complaint. He said, “Master, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he does not follow with us.” Jesus’s response to him was, “Do not stop him; for whoever is not against you is for you” (Luke 9:49–50). In his hometown of Nazareth, Jesus himself was an insider rejected by his own people. Now we have Jesus affirming the work of this anonymous exorcist who acts in the name of Jesus, but the apostles regard him as outside their circle.
That scene is rich. If the apostles were thinking that their ministry was exclusive, they learned a lesson in humility that day. Luke does not tell us how this man came to act in Jesus’s name. We can only guess that he was acting on his own initiative—not casting out demons by his own authority but by the power of Jesus’s name. What he does tell us is membership in the apostles’ inner circle was not the condition Jesus imposed for allowing his work to flourish—there is a place for others.
John’s complaint about this man came immediately after the apostles were arguing among themselves over which of them was the greatest. Jesus “was aware of their inner thoughts” and resolved the dispute by bringing a little child into their midst to teach them that the key to ministry is humility: “The least among all of you is the greatest” (Luke 9:48).
After Jesus announces his messianic mission in chapter 4, he begins to expand his circle to share his ministry with others, including spiritual gifts that would give witness to their preaching. Jesus calls his apostles and commissions them to go out to preach and heal in his name. Later in chapter ten, he appoints seventy others and sends them out in pairs as additional “laborers into his harvest.”
In our own time, the Second Vatican Council affirmed the vocation of the laity in their Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, Apostolicam Actuositatem. They wrote that, “The laity derive the right and duty to the apostolate from their union with Christ the head,” and “they are assigned to the apostolate by the Lord Himself” (3).
In one of his most revered parables, Jesus discusses with a Jewish lawyer what he must do to inherit eternal life. The lawyer provides the right response: to love the Lord with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself. But Jesus responds to the lawyer’s question about who his neighbor is with a fantastic story of an injured man who had fallen into the hands of robbers and was left on the road beaten, robbed, and half dead. In the story, the religious figures—a priest and a Levite—both passed by him, making sure to cross to the other side of the road to avoid him. But a Samaritan, an outsider, stopped to care for this man.
Jesus gives no indication of the injured man’s identity, and he only identifies the one who helped him as a Samaritan. As St. John says in his Gospel, “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans” (John 4:9), but this Samaritan’s deep compassion becomes the central lesson in the story: Our neighbor is anyone in need, and when we see another person in need we must help—without distinction. The “insiders” failed in their obligation to the law, and the “outsider” provided a vivid reminder of what love really entails.
The Roman Catholic Church has built an incredible network of support through its social services, and we Catholics can be tempted to assume that the charitable institutions of the Church will manage our charitable works for us. The anonymous exorcist makes clear that the Church’s institutional work does not replace our personal obligation to be evangelists.
There are many people near to us—even in our parishes—who still await an encounter with Jesus’s liberating mercy. The poor, unemployed, and homeless are waiting for relief from the burden of their poverty. Those who are captive to sin long for an encounter with the mercy of Christ, and the sick, disabled, and impaired search for welcome and friendship. The anonymous exorcist, the Good Samaritan, and Vatican II all show us that ministry isn’t the responsibility of a select few who hold positions within the institutional Church. Evangelization—bringing the good news of the messiah into the darkness of the current age—is all our responsibility.
Jesus presents us with an example of the demand of discipleship in the parable of the good Samaritan, and he leaves us with a choice. We can either pass by those in need, as the priest and Levite did, or we can embrace our neighbor in friendship and with the ministry of love that Jesus has entrusted to all of us who bear his name.