One reason why so many millions of Chinese people starved to death during the Great Leap Forward famine was that, with the harvest statistics inflated, it didn’t seem to matter that the shift of manpower from farming into industry reduced the labour force available for gathering the crops. The harvest seemed rich, and the labourers were fewer than they should have been.
Today’s Gospel reading sounds a stirring note: let seventy-two good men and true, set off immediately without so much as a spare pair of sandals, let alone the wherewithal to purchase food. Let them be sure that damnation awaits those who don’t welcome them to dinner; let them discover that they have acquired power over devils; let them be told that they’re invulnerable and can trample down whatever diabolic host the power of evil may send out against them.
Does it trouble us to learn that those who don’t welcome the mendicants will end up envying the men of Sodom? Perhaps it comes as a relief to read that E. J. Tinsley finds this “incident” undoubtedly “symbolic.”* The depth of the Australian winter is, after all, the worst of times for going walkabout without a haversack, even to preach the Gospel. Let the story speak to us, yes, but symbolically.
What warning might we draw from the tragic Great Leap Forward story told above? A warning against blind complacency—against assuming that, with such a wealth of people all around us, there is no need to “harvest” any? Is it a warning, too, to be alert—to surprises that challenge our assumptions?
What a surprise it is to find that today’s Gospel reading, with its talk of Word rejecters faring worse than folk from Sodom, is juxtaposed with a beautiful Isaiah reading that speaks of the Lord “sending peace flowing … like a river.”
He sends His river to Jerusalem, not Sodom, to be sure, but why not use this lovely metaphor to pour balm on those violent images conjured up in the symbolic story of the despatch of the seventy-two? The folk around us mightn’t want to listen to the Gospel even if we preached half-naked in the depth of winter.
Sending peace, like a river, into the parched cornfields of hostility and stress afflicting people we encounter, might be one way to bring us all a little closer to the Kingdom.
*E. J. Tinsley, comp.,
The Gospel According to Luke (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 113.
Helen Dunstan
Dominican Enquirer
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