288. Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time (C)

Meditations no. 270 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

Our Lord sends his disciples out before him.

The Lord appointed seventy-two others, and sent them on ahead of him, two by two, into every town and place where he himself was about to come. It is not yet time to announce Christ’s saving message to the nations. For the moment, St John Chrysostom explains, our Lord wants his disciples to exercise their apostolate in Palestine, as a sort of training-ground, so as to prepare them to do battle throughout the whole world. Hence he offers them greater and greater fields for their struggles, as their strength grows, so that they will find it easier to wage the battles that await them in the future … For the present he sends them out to heal men’s bodies. Later he will grant them a higher gift: that of healing men’s souls.

The Apostles and the other disciples do exactly as Jesus bids them. Later, our Lord will give them the task of going out to the whole world and preaching the Good News to all people. And filled with the Holy Spirit, they will launch out upon the universal mission entrusted to them by Christ. They will each take responsibility for a specific task in a particular place, using well-defined means. The rest of their lives will be the story of their faithfulness to the mission they have received, the apostolate through which our Lord’s universal command will be fulfilled.

The way Christ’s first followers acted served to blaze the trail for Christians to follow throughout the centuries. Every great undertaking demands diversification; in order to bring any task to a successful conclusion, responsibilities have to be shared out. Each worker is responsible for his or her own area of duty, and they each know that as they fulfil that duty they are working for the successful outcome of the whole project in solidarity with everyone else.

Our Father reminded us of this: None of you is an isolated piece. If you stop, you make everyone else stop. The apostolic activities we carry out personally, all come together day by day to form a great woven fabric that we offer to God. If we all fulfil our work, if we are faithful and dedicated, this great fabric will be beautiful and faultless. And the apostolate of the Work will progress as it should, because of each apostle’s faithfulness to his or her allotted apostolic task.

Responsibility for our own apostolic task.

It is God himself, through the Father and the Directors, who puts his servants in charge, each with his work. We all have a specific apostolic task which fits in with our individual circumstances. This ensures that our apostolate is not something sporadic or dependent on events, but is a task as constant as our heartbeat, and equally necessary to our lives, and to the whole of the Work besides.

Our faithfulness to our specific apostolic task gives us a yardstick for our sense of responsibility and for whether we really feel ourselves to be a tiny bolt in that great undertaking of Christ’s. When we are given a specific apostolate in the Work, that task becomes an instrument to do Opus Dei. Hence there are no insignificant tasks: all are of great importance. Whatever they are, it is we who determine their status by the degree of responsibility and love for God we put into fulfilling them. The specific apostolic task is so important that our Father gave us this question to ask ourselves in the examination of conscience in the Circle: Have I diligently carried out the apostolic tasks entrusted to me by the Work?

Diligence in our apostolate is particularly important when the task that we are entrusted with is directly linked to other people’s tasks, as is normally the case. This is when we have to put our hearts into order and punctuality in fulfilling it. Another sign of our spirituality, our Father pointed out, is the way we look after the efficiency of our work. Don’t allow backwaters to build up in your work. Anyone who holds onto something longer than necessary - out of neglect or apathy, or because it just happens - is slowing up the apostolate.

We should take decisive steps to combat any temptation to be careless or lazy in fulfilling our apostolic tasks. Our Father commented: It has never happened, thank God, but it would be shameful if anyone were ever to think they were doing the Work a favour by fulfilling the task they are given. It’s the other way round! So I really do suffer when I sometimes notice a sort of slowness in some of my children, and I recall those first years, the unceasing work… I have forbidden you to work when you ought to be sleeping, but we should have our hearts in God’s concerns night and day. We should all feed the need to work hard and well for the apostolate, with the love of children working for our Father God, and a sense of responsibility for the mission we have received. Then our soul will feel a deep desire to serve, and to fulfil our task of love perfectly. And we will find ways to make our particular apostolate more effective so that it reaches further and further, and contributes to the great work of God’s vineyard.

Perseverance in the tasks we undertake.

If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love. By fulfilling our duties exactly, and persevering in our apostolic task, we will prove that our dedication is real. Joyful hope in fulfilling our tasks is perfectly compatible with the absence of any feelings of satisfaction. Hope means persevering in putting our best efforts into our work day after day, for love of God. As our Father used to say, I believe in the prayer-life and spirit of sacrifice of my children when I see that three years on, or five years on, they are still putting the same effort into their apostolate as they did on the very first day, even when it goes against the grain. Because, as our Founder always taught us, in Opus Dei we don’t do things because we like doing them, but because they have to be done. And when we do them, we do them for the love of God, happily… and with style.

Our specific apostolic task isn’t handed to us ready-made, as if we only needed to watch over it statically to keep it going. It is divine and human activity. We each have to put ever-renewed efforts and initiatives into developing it, so as to reach more souls and extend our apostolate further and further. It takes everyone’s daily concern and personal effort in fulfilling their own tasks, for the whole Work to achieve the divine goal God has set us: that of bringing all souls to him.

God’s grace is effective in moving us to daily faithfulness in our apostolic task. In the words of St John Chrysostom, our Lord is not content with just urging on his disciples … ; he develops their aptitudes for their ministry. We should be filled with confidence, knowing that we will overcome all the difficulties and obstacles we may encounter with the help of God’s grace. If he has called us to serve him, and allotted us a particular place and a specific apostolate, he is obviously going to give us all the help we need.

Our Lady is always there, close to our Lord, reminding us lovingly of the obligation we have towards her Son: Do whatever he tells you. She will intercede for the results of each one’s personal apostolic task.