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| Christ Sending Out the Seventy by James Tissot |
Mark 6:7-13
Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (RSVCE)
The Mission of the Twelve
7 And he called to him the twelve, and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. 8 He charged them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts;9 but to wear sandals and not put on two tunics. 10 And he said to them, “Where you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place. 11 And if any place will not receive you and they refuse to hear you, when you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet for a testimony against them.” 12 So they went out and preached that men should repent. 13 And they cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many that were sick and healed them.
Cited in the Catechism: In promulgating the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Blessed John Paul II explained that the Catechism "is a statement of the Church's faith and of catholic doctrine, attested to or illumined by Sacred Scripture, the Apostolic Tradition and the Church's Magisterium." He went on to "declare it to be a sure norm for teaching the faith and thus a valid and legitimate instrument for ecclesial communion" (Fidei Depositum). Passages from this Gospel reading are cited in the Catechism, paragraphs 765, 1506, 1511 and 1673.
Commentary
The mission of the Twelve
6:7. Cf. the note on Mk 1:27; 3:14–19.
6:8–9. Jesus requires them to be free of any form of attachment if they are to preach the Gospel. A disciple, who has the mission of bringing the Kingdom of God to souls through preaching, should not rely on human resources but on God’s providence. Whatever he does need in order to live with dignity as a herald of the Gospel, he must obtain from those who benefit from his preaching, for the labourer deserves his upkeep (cf. Mt 10:10).
“The preacher should so trust in God that he is convinced that he will have everything he needs to support life, even if he cannot himself obtain it; for he should not neglect eternal things through worrying about temporal things” (St Bede, In Marci Evangelium expositio, in loc.). “By these instructions the Lord did not mean that the evangelists should not seek to live in any other way than by depending on what was offered them by those to whom they preached the Gospel; otherwise this very apostle [St Paul] would have acted contrary to this precept when he earned his living by the labours of his own hands” (St Augustine, De consensu Evangelistarum, 2, 30).
6:13. St Mark is the only evangelist who speaks of anointing the sick with oil. Oil was often used for treating wounds (cf. Is 1:6; Lk 10:34), and the apostles also use it for the miraculous cure of physical illnesses by virtue of the power given them by Jesus. Hence the use of oil as the matter of the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, which cures wounds of the soul and even, if appropriate, bodily diseases. As the Council of Trent teaches—Doctrina de sacramento extremae unctionis, chap. 1—in this verse of St Mark there can be seen a “hint” of the sacrament of Anointing of the Sick, which our Lord will institute and which later on “is recommended and promulgated to the faithful by St James the apostle” (cf. Jas 5:14ff).
Source: The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries. Biblical text from the Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries by members of the Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, Spain.
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"Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ." St Jerome
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