13th Sunday 2023

We always follow someone or something. For several days, five rich people followed the wre        of the Titanic at the depth of around four thousand metres. They did not return to their homes, which they left behind when they undertook this risky venture. Today’s world is looking for  novelties and these in turn attract people’s attention.                                                                      Whom or what we follow? Who or what is the purpose of our earthy existence? Who inspires our thoughts, our will, our hope, our efforts?                                                                                 The liturgy of today’s Sunday gives the proposal to follow Someone who really makes sense of human existence, who presents Himself as truth and who shows the Way on which one can walk confidently. It is Christ. After the selection of the twelve apostles, Jesus speaks of the kingdom of God, gives them appropriate instructions, instructs them and sends them out so that they too, by word and deed, bear witness to the approaching kingdom of God.                                                   This mission should be rooted in faith and love for Christ, which is the more perfect expression of  that love that should be present in the family, in  the Church, in society and in the world         It is not easy to follow in the footsteps of Christ. We need to take His cross on our shoulders and have the courage of faith to entrust our lives to Christ: ” Anyone who finds his life will lose it; anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.” And this is not at all easy in a world that places Jesus, His teaching, and His Church on trial, as René Rémond expressed in his book Christianity on Trial.    On one hand, it is not easy to preach the Gospel in  a modern world that so often rejects Christ’s truth, on the other hand there will always be people who accept Christ’s teaching.     “Anyone who welcomes you welcomes me: and those who welcome me welcome the one who sent me.”    He himself will take care of those He calls and sends out.

This was the case with the prophets, as we heard in the first reading or the apostles in today’s Gospel. ” If anyone gives so much as a cup of cold water to one of those little ones because he is a disciple, then I tell you …, he will not lose  his reward.”                                                 For whom or what we follow? In Rome on the occasion of the Jubilee Year 2000 St John Paul II said: ” have no fear to give yourselves to Christ; he will guide you and give you the strength to follow him every day.”