My last posting had to do with the genealogy of Jesus and his testing by the Devil in the wilderness.
After that, when I created no posting, we have been reading about the beginnings of Jesus’ public ministry, most of which Luke places in the north—in Galilee. Unlike Mark and Matthew, but in harmony with John, Luke gives us small and tantalizing hints that Jesus also ministered in the south—in Judea—during this period. Still, the emphasis is clearly on the northern area, where Jesus grew up.
This early ministry focuses more on Jesus’ healings and exorcisms than on his oral teaching. That doesn’t mean he didn’t do a lot of such teaching, but the gospel writers have chosen to emphasize the other. Perhaps it is because his rapid rise in popularity is easier to understand when you consider the impact of the spectacular miracles, than if you see him only as another teaching “rabbi”.
Be that as it may, with today’s lesson we see the formalizing of the lynch pin of Jesus’ teaching ministry. Every ancient Jewish rabbi did some public teaching. But most of his teaching was done in private to his disciples (the Hebrew and Aramaic term for a student was talmîd, related to the familiar term Talmud, both words based upon the verb lammed “to teach” or lamad “to learn”). A rabbi’s wisdom reached the broader public normally through his private students, and the popularity of his wisdom established his reputation. Although Jesus did some public teaching from the very beginning, albeit most of this as part of organized synagogue worship, he now saw the need to acquire a core of students whom he could train to extend his ministry.
In Jesus’ day, well-known rabbis did not go out seeking disciples. Rather the fathers of young men sought out the rabbi and persuaded him to take their sons on as students. Jesus, on the other hand, went out and chose his own students. Only once in the gospels do we see a parent—in this case a mother—appealing to Jesus to give her sons a place of privilege. And in that case the parental intercession did no good.
Although Luke’s text can be read to suggest that after a single night of prayer Jesus chose the Twelve on the following day, the text need not be read that way. Rather, after an all-night prayer vigil Jesus gathered all those men whom he had been calling in the previous weeks and months, and out of a larger number of disciples thus called to follow him, he chose a smaller group of twelve and named them “apostles” (see Luke 6:13). This interpretation accords with other passages in the gospels in which we see Jesus approaching one or two men and calling them to follow him. It would be a mistake to visualize Jesus as having only twelve men following him as disciples during his three-year period of public ministry. There was an outer circle of disciples and an inner one.
The reason for the number 12 is not hard to see: there were 12 sons of Jacob who became the ancestors of the original 12 tribes of Israel. And Jesus once predicted that in the future kingdom each of his resurrected apostles would rule over one of the tribes of Israel.
Each of the synoptic gospel writers—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—lists the 12 men, and as expected does so in a different way, including using different names for some of the men. We won’t take the time to explain the apparent discrepancies here. It has often been done by capable scholars. Rather, what is interesting to me is that it was a very diverse group. It included at least one “Zealot” (Simon, in v. 16)—what we would today call a “terrorist freedom-fighter”, advocating the violent overthrow of Herod and the expulsion of the Roman governors and occupation troops—and one tax-collector, Levi/Matthew (v. 15)—a man in the employ of the occupying “Colonialist” power, engaged in gouging his own people for tax and tribute. Hardly a recipe for harmony within the group. Yet each of these twelve men had a bond to Jesus himself which enabled him to overcome his surface differences with the others in the group.
It has often been observed that this has lessons for the Church today. Churches today are often made up of disparate groups and odd individuals. Yet if the vertical bond of each member to the risen Jesus is sufficiently strong, there can be a vibrant unity among the members of the body. St. Paul used the imagery of the human body, calling each Christian a “member” of the body, and the risen Lord Jesus the “Head”.
In the case of the Twelve, according to Jesus’ teaching the eschatological Kingdom of God was about to break in, bringing a new world of universal peace and justice and ruled over directly by God through His Messiah. If that were so, then the Zealot-versus-Collaborator issue became moot: the Romans would not be in power for long anyway. In today’s world, because we cannot know how long it will be before Jesus returns to set up his worldwide Kingdom, we cannot so easily ignore present injustices or invasive immorality, but must as a Church address the issues, while keeping in mind that the real mission of the Church is the recruiting of believers and the nurturing of believers in the Word of God.
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