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Gospel: Luke 6: 12-19
Jesus departed to the mountain to pray,
and he spent the night in prayer to God.
When day came, he called his disciples to himself,
and from them he chose Twelve, whom he also named Apostles:
Simon, whom he named Peter, and his brother Andrew,
James, John, Philip, Bartholomew,
Matthew, Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus,
Simon who was called a Zealot,
and Judas the son of James,
and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.
And he came down with them and stood on a stretch of level ground.
A great crowd of his disciples and a large number of the people
from all Judea and Jerusalem
and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon
came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases;
and even those who were tormented by unclean spirits were cured.
Everyone in the crowd sought to touch him
because power came forth from him and healed them all.
The Gospel of the Lord.
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Growing up, I remember playing backyard sports with my brother and his friends. I was often chosen last because I was the little brother; the tag-along; the runt of the group.
Everyone else was older, taller, stronger, and more experienced than me. It hurt being the least desired, but humanly speaking, it was a fair assessment of the group.
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In today’s Gospel, Jesus chooses the most unlikely men to be on his “team.”
None of them were religious scholars; none of them were wealthy, nor famous, nor influential. They were commoners with their own share of flaws, giving Jesus every reason to choose them last.
Or not to choose them at all.
Yet, together, they changed the world.
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What impresses me the most is the fact that Jesus unites these men in a single cause. Without him, some would’ve remained bitter enemies.
Simon, for example, was called “the Zealot,” because he likely belonged to an extreme nationalist group that was fighting for Jewish independence.
Meanwhile, Matthew was sleeping with the enemy, serving the Romans as a tax collector.
No doubt, these two men didn’t see eye to eye.
But they came together for Christ and changed the world.
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Such are the possibilities when ordinary people, even polar opposites, belong to God.
We can do extraordinary things when we set aside our differences and focus on proclaiming the Gospel.
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Image credits: (1) Arelor, Polar Opposites, WordPress (2) Appearance on Lake Tiberias, Duccio (3) JW.org