B6 - The Disciples

In all the stages of Jesus’ activity that we have considered so far, it has become evident that Jesus is closely connected with the “we” of the new family that he gathers by his proclamation and his action. It has become evident that this “we” is in principle intended to be universal: It no longer rests on birth, but on communion with Jesus, who is himself God’s living Torah. This “we” of the new family is not amorphous. Jesus calls an inner core of people specially chosen by him, who are to carry on his mission and give this family order and shape. That was why Jesus formed the group of the Twelve. The title “apostle” originally extended beyond this group, but was later restricted more and more to the Twelve. In Luke, for example, who always speaks of the twelve Apostles, this word is practically synonymous with the Twelve. There is no need here to inquire into the widely discussed issues concerning the development of the use of the word apostle; let us simply listen to the most important texts that show the formation of the community of Jesus’ closest disciples.

The central text for this is Mark 3:13 - 19. It begins by saying that Jesus “went up on the mountain, and called to him those whom he desired; and they came to him” (Mk 3:13). The events leading up to this had taken place by the lake, and now Jesus ascends “the mountain,” which signifies the place of his communion with God - the place on the heights, above the works and deeds of everyday life. Luke underscores this point even more vigorously in his parallel account: “In these days he went out to the mountain to pray; and all night he continued in prayer to God. And when it was day, he called his disciples, and chose from them twelve, whom he named apostles”(Lk 6:12f.).

The calling of the disciples is a prayer event; it is as if they were begotten in prayer, in intimacy with the Father. The calling of the Twelve, far from being purely functional, takes on a deeply theological meaning: Their calling emerges from the Son’s dialogue with the Father and is anchored there. This is also the necessary starting point for understanding Jesus’ words, “Pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Mt 9:38): We cannot simply pick the laborers in God’s harvest in the same way that an employer seeks his employees. God must always be asked for them and he himself must choose them for this service. This theological character is reinforced in Mark’s phrase: “Jesus called to him those whom he desired.” You cannot make yourself a disciple - it is an event of election, a free decision of the Lord’s will, which in its turn is anchored in his communion of will with the Father.

The text then continues: “And he appointed [literally: “made”] twelve, whom he also called apostles, to be with him, and to be sent out to preach” (Mk 3:14). The first thing to ponder is the expression “he made twelve,” which sounds strange to us. In reality, these words of the Evangelist take up the Old Testament terminology for appointment to the priesthood (cf. 1 Kings 12:31; 13:33) and thus characterize the apostolic office as a priestly ministry. Moreover, the fact that the ones chosen are then individually named links them with the Prophets of Israel, whom God calls by name. Mark thus presents the apostolic ministry as a fusion of the priestly and prophetic missions (Feuillet, Études, p. 178). “He made twelve”: Twelve was the symbolic number of Israel - the number of the sons of Jacob. From them the twelve tribes of Israel were descended, though of these practically only the tribe of Judah remained after the Exile. In this sense, the number twelve is a return to the origins of Israel, and yet at the same time it is a symbol of hope: The whole of Israel is restored and the twelve tribes are newly assembled.

Twelve - the number of the tribes - is at the same time a cosmic number that expresses the comprehensiveness of the newly reborn People of God. The Twelve stand as the patriarchs of this universal people founded on the Apostles. In the vision of the New Jerusalem found in the Apocalypse, the symbolism of the Twelve is elaborated into an image of splendor (cf. Rev 21:9 - 14) that helps the pilgrim People of God understand its present in the light of its future and illumines it with the spirit of hope: Past, present, and future intermingle when viewed in terms of the Twelve.

This is also the right context for the prophecy in which Jesus gives Nathanael a glimpse of his true nature: “You will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man” (Jn 1:51). Jesus reveals himself here as the new Jacob. The patriarch dreamed that he saw a ladder set up beside his head, which reached up to heaven and on which God’s angels were ascending and descending. This dream has become a reality with Jesus. He himself is the “gate of heaven” (Gen 28:10 - 22); he is the true Jacob, the “Son of Man,” the patriarch of the definitive Israel.

Let us return to our text from Mark. Jesus appoints the Twelve with a double assignment: “to be with him, and to be sent out to preach.” They must be with him in order to get to know him; in order to attain that intimate acquaintance with him that could not be given to the “people” - who saw him only from the outside and took him for a prophet, a great figure in the history of religions, but were unable to perceive his uniqueness (cf. Mt 16:13ff.). The Twelve must be with him so as to be able to recognize his oneness with the Father and thus become witnesses to his mystery. As Peter will say before the election of Matthias, they had to be present during the time that “the Lord Jesus went in and out among us” (cf. Acts 1:8, 21). One might say that they have to pass from outward to inward communion with Jesus. At the same time, however, they are there in order to become Jesus’ envoys - “apostles,” no less - who bring his message to the world, first to the lost sheep of the House of Israel, but then “to the ends of the earth.” Being with Jesus and being sent by him seem at first sight mutually exclusive, but they clearly belong together. The Apostles have to learn to be with him in a way that enables them, even when they go to the ends of the earth, to be with him still. Being with him includes the missionary dynamic by its very nature, since Jesus’ whole being is mission.

What does the text say they are sent to do? “To preach and have authority to cast out demons” (Mk 3:14f.). Matthew gives a somewhat more detailed description of the content of this mission: “And he gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every infirmity” (Mt 10:1). The first task is preaching: to give people the light of the word, the message of Jesus. The Apostles are first and foremost Evangelists - like Jesus, they preach the Kingdom of God and thereby gather people into God’s new family. But the preaching of God’s Kingdom is never just words, never just instruction. It is an event, just as Jesus himself is an event, God’s Word in person. By announcing him, the Apostles lead their listeners to encounter him.

Because the world is ruled by the powers of evil, this preaching is at the same time a struggle with those powers. “In following Jesus, his herald has to exorcise the world, to establish a new form of life in the Holy Spirit that brings release to those who are possessed” (Pesch, Markusevangelium, I, p. 205). And, as Henri de Lubac in particular has shown, the ancient world did in fact experience the birth of Christianity as a liberation from the fear of demons that, in spite of skepticism and enlightenment, was all-pervasive at the time. The same thing also happens today wherever Christianity replaces old tribal religions, transforming and integrating their positive elements into itself. We feel the full impact of this leap forward when Paul says: “‘There is no God but one.’ For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth - as indeed there are many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’ - yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Cor 8:4f.). These words imply a great liberating power - the great exorcism that purifies the world. No matter how many gods may have been at large in the world, God is only one, and only one is Lord. If we belong to him, everything else loses its power; it loses the allure of divinity.

The world is now seen as something rational: It emerges from eternal reason, and this creative reason is the only true power over the world and in the world. Faith in the one God is the only thing that truly liberates the world and makes it “rational.” When faith is absent, the world only appears to be more rational. In reality the indeterminable powers of chance now claim their due; “chaos theory” takes its place alongside insight into the rational structure of the universe, confronting man with obscurities that he cannot resolve and that set limits to the world’s rationality. To “exorcise” the world - to establish it in the light of the ratio (reason) that comes from eternal creative reason and its saving goodness and refers back to it - that is a permanent, central task of the messengers of Jesus Christ.

In the Letter to the Ephesians, Saint Paul once described this “exorcistic” character of Christianity from another perspective: “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph 6:10 - 12). This portrayal of the Christian struggle, which we today find surprising, or even disturbing, Heinrich Schlier has explained as follows: “The enemies are not this or that person, not even myself. They are not flesh and blood…. The conflict goes deeper. It is a fight against a host of opponents that never stop coming; they cannot really be pinned down and have no proper name, only collective denominations. They also start out with superior advantage over man, and that is because of their superior position, their position ‘in the heavens’ of existence. They are also superior because their position is impenetrable and unassailable - their position, after all, is the ‘atmosphere’ of existence, which they themselves tilt in their favor and propagate around themselves. These enemies are, finally, all full of essential, deadly malice” (Brief an die Epheser, p. 291).

Who could fail to see here a description of our world as well, in which the Christian is threatened by an anonymous atmosphere, by “something in the air” that wants to make the faith seem ludicrous and absurd to him? And who could fail to see the poisoning of the spiritual climate all over the world that threatens the dignity of man, indeed his very existence? The individual human being, and even communities of human beings, seem to be hopelessly at the mercy of such powers. The Christian knows that he cannot master this threat by his own resources alone. But in faith, in communion with the only true Lord of the world, he is given the “armor of God.” It enables him - in the communion of the whole body of Christ - to oppose these powers, knowing that Lord’s gift of faith restores the pure breath of life: the breath of the Creator, the breath of the Holy Spirit, which alone can give health to the world.

Alongside the commission to exorcise, Matthew adds the mission to heal. The Twelve are sent “to heal every disease and every infirmity” (Mt 10:1). Healing is an essential dimension of the apostolic mission and of Christian faith in general. Eugen Biser even goes so far as to call Christianity a “therapeutic religion” - a religion of healing (Einweisung). When understood at a sufficiently deep level, this expresses the entire content of “redemption.” The authority to cast out demons and to free the world from their dark threat, for the sake of the one true God, is the same authority that rules out any magical understanding of healing through attempts to manipulate these mysterious powers. Magical healing is always tied to the art of turning the evil onto someone else and setting the “demons” against him. God’s dominion, God’s Kingdom, means precisely the disempowerment of these forces by the intervention of the one God, who is good, who is the Good itself. The healing power of the messengers of Jesus Christ is opposed to the spirits of magic; it exorcises the world in medical terms as well. In the miracles of healing performed by the Lord and by the Twelve, God displays his gracious power over the world. They are essentially “signs” that point to God himself and serve to set man in motion toward God. Only becoming-one with God can be the true process of man’s healing.

For Jesus himself and for his followers, miracles of healing are thus a subordinate element within the overall range of his activity, which is concerned with something deeper, with nothing less than the “Kingdom of God”: his becoming-Lord in us and in the world. Just as exorcism drives out the fear of demons and commits the world - which comes from God’s reason - to our human reason, so, too, healing by God’s power is both a summons to faith in God and a summons to use the powers of reason in the service of healing. The “reason” meant here, of course, is wide open - it is the kind of reason that perceives God and therefore also recognizes man as a unity of body and soul. Whoever truly wishes to heal man must see him in his wholeness and must know that his ultimate healing can only be God’s love.

Let us return to our text from Mark’s Gospel. After specifying the mission of the Twelve, Mark lists them by name. We have already seen that this is an intimation of the prophetic dimension of their mission. God knows us by name and he calls us by name. This is not the place to portray the individual figures who form the group of the Twelve in light of the Bible and tradition. The important thing for us is the composition of the whole group, and it is quite heterogeneous.

Two members of the group came from the Zealot party: Simon, who in Luke 6:15 is called “the Zealot” and in Matthew and Mark “the Cananaean” - which according to recent scholarship means the same thing - and Judas. The word Iscariot can simply mean “the man from Karioth,” but it may also designate him as a Sicarian, a radical variant of the Zealots. The zeal (zelos) for the Law that gave this movement its name looked to the great “zealots” of Israel’s history for its models: from Phinehas, who killed an idolatrous Israelite before the whole community (Num 25:6 - 13), and Elijah, who had the priests of Baal killed on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18), to Mattathias, the patriarch of the Maccabees, who initiated the uprising against the Hellenistic king Antiochus’ attempt to extinguish Israel’s faith by killing a conformist who was about to sacrifice publicly to the gods in accordance with the king’s decree (1 Mac 2:17 - 28). The Zealots regarded this historical chain of great “zealots” as a heritage that committed them to fight against the Roman occupiers in their own day.

At the other extreme within the group of the Twelve we find Levi-Matthew, who, as a tax collector, worked hand in glove with the reigning power and had to be classed as a public sinner on account of his social position. The main group within the Twelve is composed of the fishermen from Lake Genesareth. Simon, whom the Lord would name Cephas (Peter), “rock,” was apparently the head of a fishing cooperative (cf. Lk 5:10), in which he worked alongside his older brother Andrew and the sons of Zebedee, John and James, whom the Lord nicknamed “Boanerges” - sons of thunder. Some scholars argue that this name, too, indicates an association with the Zealot movement, but this is probably incorrect. It is the Lord’s way of referring to their stormy temperament, which also emerges very clearly in the Gospel of John. Finally, there are two men with Greek names, Philip and Andrew, to whom Greek-speaking Jews address themselves on Palm Sunday at the time of the Passover festival, in order to make contact with Jesus (cf. Jn 12:21ff.).

We may presume that all of the Twelve were believing and observant Jews who awaited the salvation of Israel. But in terms of their actual opinions, of their thinking about the way Israel was to be saved, they were an extremely varied group. This helps us to understand how difficult it was to initiate them gradually into Jesus’ mysterious new way, of the kinds of tension that had to be overcome. For example, how much purification must the zeal of the Zealots have needed before it could be united with Jesus’ “zeal,” about which John’s Gospel tells us (cf. Jn 2:17)? His zeal reaches its completion on the Cross. Precisely in this wide range of backgrounds, temperaments, and approaches, the Twelve personify the Church of all ages and its difficult task of purifying and unifying these men in the zeal of Jesus Christ.

Only Luke tells us that Jesus formed a second group of disciples, which was composed of seventy (or seventy-two) and was sent out with a mission similar to that of the Twelve (cf. Lk 10:1 - 12). Like the number twelve, the number seventy (or seventy-two - the manuscripts variously report one or the other) is symbolic. Based on a combination of Deuteronomy 32:8 and Exodus 1:5, seventy was considered to be the number of the nations of the world. According to Exodus 1:5, seventy was the number of people who accompanied Jacob into Egypt; “they were all Jacob’s offspring.” A recent variant of Deuteronomy 32:8, which has become the generally received version, runs as follows: “When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of men, he fixed the bounds of the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel” - this is a reference to the seventy members of the house of Jacob at the time of the emigration to Egypt. Alongside the twelve sons, who prefigure Israel, stand the seventy, who represent the whole world and are thus considered also to have some connection with Jacob, with Israel.

This tradition also forms the background of the legend transmitted in the so-called Letter of Aristeas, according to which the Greek translation of the Old Testament made in the third century before Christ was produced by seventy scholars (or seventy-two, with six representing each of the twelve tribes of Israel) under a special inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The legend is a way of interpreting this translation as the opening of Israel’s faith to the nations.

And in fact the Septuagint did play a decisive role in directing many searching souls in late antiquity toward the God of Israel. The earlier myths had lost their credibility; philosophical monotheism was not enough to bring people to a living relationship with God. Many cultured men thus found a new access to God in Israel’s monotheism, which was not philosophically conceived, but had been given from above within a history of faith. Many cities saw the formation of a circle of the “God-fearing,” of pious “pagans,” who neither could nor wanted to become full-fledged Jews, but participated in the synagogue liturgy and thus in Israel’s faith. It was in this circle that the earliest Christian missionary preaching found its first foothold and began to spread. Now at last, these men could belong wholly to the God of Israel, because this God - according to Paul’s preaching about him - had in Jesus truly become the God of all men. Now at last, by believing in Jesus as the Son of God, they could become full members in the People of God. When Luke speaks of a group of seventy alongside the Twelve, the meaning is clear: They are an intimation of the universal character of the Gospel, which is meant for all the peoples of the earth.

At this point it may be appropriate to mention another item peculiar to Luke. In the opening verses of chapter 8, he recounts to us that Jesus, as he was making his way with the Twelve and preaching, was also accompanied by women. He mentions three names and then adds: “and many others, who provided for them out of their means” (Lk 8:3). The difference between the discipleship of the Twelve and the discipleship of the women is obvious; the tasks assigned to each group are quite different. Yet Luke makes clear - and the other Gospels also show this in all sorts of ways - that “many” women belonged to the more intimate community of believers and that their faith-filled following of Jesus was an essential element of that community, as would be vividly illustrated at the foot of the Cross and at the Resurrection.

Perhaps it is a good idea at this point to draw attention to a few other details specific to the Evangelist Luke. Just as he was especially sensitive to the significance of women, he is also the Evangelist of the poor, and his “preferential option for the poor” is unmistakable.

Again, he shows a particular understanding for the Jews; the passions that were stirred up by the incipient separation between the Synagogue and the nascent Church - which left their traces in both Matthew and John - are nowhere to be found in him. I find particularly significant the way he concludes the story of the new wine and the old or new wineskins. In Mark we find, “And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but new wine is for fresh skins” (Mk 2:22). The text reads similarly in Matthew 9:17. Luke transmits to us the same saying, but at the end he adds: “And no one after drinking old wine desires new; for he says, ‘The old is good’” (Lk 5:39). There do seem to be good grounds for interpreting this as a word of understanding for those who wished to remain with the “old wine.”

Finally - on the subject of specifically Lukan features - we have already seen several times that this Evangelist devotes special attention to Jesus’ prayer as the source of his preaching and action. He shows us that all of Jesus’ words and deeds issue from his inner oneness with the Father, from the dialogue between Father and Son. If we have good reason to be convinced that the Holy Scriptures are “inspired,” that they matured in a special sense under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, then we also have good reason to be convinced that precisely these specific aspects of the Lukan tradition preserve essential features of the original figure of Jesus for us.