HOMILY

This gospel continues St Luke’s reflections on just what it means to be a disciple of Christ.

The word ‘disciple’ literally means a ‘learner’, one who learns from someone else.

In our experience, so much of learning has been a matter of changing our minds, coming to think as others think, know what they know.  But to be a disciple of Christ, that is not nearly enough.  For a Christian, discipleship is infinitely more than accepting as true a set of teachings or accepting as normative a particular ethic, a set of do’s and don’ts.  It must first be a matter of what that person is at the core, the root.

That is part of what it means to be, as St Paul puts it in today’s reading, a new creation.  Those values that have been central in a person’s life, against which other values are measured, can no longer be so, not for a disciple.

Those who are sent by Christ are new creatures, truly recreated in him.  They are creatures whose lives are centred around different truths, different values than ever before, creatures who strive for different goals and bring to bear on their mission a whole set of powers.  So, a disciple, sent by Christ into the world, is necessarily being sent as a pilgrim, not as a resident.  A disciple is not completely at home in the world, not completely comfortable.

The message that disciples are to bring to the world is laid out for us as well.  The first thing we are to say to the world is “peace.”

The word in Hebrew, the word Christ used, is Shalom, and it is a rich word indeed.  It means a great deal more than simply an absence of conflict.  Shalom literally means “wholeness, completeness.”  As one writer put it, peace in the Scripture means the expansion of the Spirit, the free, uncluttered growth of the person, in harmony with the growth of others.

So, the blessing of peace offered by the disciples is not at all a guarantee of freedom from conflict.  Far from it.  But it certainly is a promise that that conflict too is ultimately unimportant.  It can’t harm us, it can’t prevent that expansion of the Spirit, that growth of the person.  Those who accept the peace of Christ can and frequently will be inconvenienced, thwarted, even as Paul puts it, abused.  But they can’t be damaged.  For a disciple, the world is no longer a dangerous place.

The kingdom has in fact begun, and those who are re-created in Christ are truly its citizens.  The creatures into which he remakes us are powerful creatures indeed.  All of the old demons that used to drive us, terrorise us, have been drained of their power to harm us.  In the gospel, the disciples returned from their mission successful, jubilantly so, and so can we.               Fr Andrew