Location and movement are important. Life depends upon it.  Where we are and how we move determines so much about our livelihood.  The inability to move can be at times an impediment and perhaps at other times a blessing.  Where we find ourselves and the freedom to move in given circumstances can be determined by so many different factors – culture, inheritance, privilege, domination – just to name a few.

We live in a world that is feeling the gravity of location and movement on a daily basis. Pain, joy, suffering, privilege, marginalization, and opportunity collect in many times combustible pockets of life.  We seek higher places because we consider them to be vantage points of view, and most times exclusive.  For many of us, there is almost an unspoken aversion to the plains, to the level playing field of life.  Structures of caste have been built in societies to demarcate the extreme ‘relief’ or topography of divisions of location and movement.  We prefer a mountain to a plain.  Why is that?

Many Gospel stories allude to this sense of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ with the image of the mountain and the valley and the plain. The transfiguration is perhaps one of the best known stories, wherein the disciples who witness Jesus’ transfiguration wish to remain on the mountain rather than return to the everydayness of their ‘plain’ lives.  However, as the story goes, that is just where Christ leads the disciples – down the mountain and into the everyday world.

The evangelist Luke is telling us another story that involves the mountain and the plains in the Gospel today (Lk 6:12-19).  The opening lines tells us that “Jesus departed to the mountain to pray.”  Indeed he spends the entire night in prayer.  The image of the mountain here is related to withdrawal or solitude, but also communion.  Jesus is not alone – He is with God.  As day breaks, he doesn’t go down the mountain immediately, but instead calls the disciples up to him.  We then hear the naming of the Twelve Apostles.  Many times the Gospel selection will end here. However, in today’s Gospel it goes further.  I’m glad that it does, because I believe it may be giving a wider context to what this whole sense of discipleship and being co-missioned with Christ may mean.

“And he came down with them and stood on a stretch of level ground.
A great crowd of his disciples and a large number of the people
from all Judea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon
came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases;
and even those who were tormented by unclean spirits were cured.
Everyone in the crowd sought to touch him
because power came forth from him and healed them all.”

Just as after the transfiguration, Jesus leads the disciples down the mountain, so to here, after ‘choosing’ the twelve Christ leads them right into the heart of their mission – a stretch of level ground…a plain…a crowd. This is where life is happening.  This is the place where Christ lives – right there among everything – “even those tormented by unclean spirits”

There is no hierarchy in Christ. There is every landform – mountain, valley, plain – and every type of person “from all Judea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon” in Christ. We don’t receive an appointment from a clerical Christ but from a rough-shod divine person who rubs shoulders with what we may judge to be the ‘worst of us.”  It’s the hungry for healing that Christ goes to and who in today’s gospel leads these ‘new appointees’ into.  It’s almost as if Christ is showing the apostle-disciples how ‘plain’ their mission is.  It is simply to be in the crowd, to feed the hungry, to heal diseases and to cure even those who are ‘unclean.’  Christ is saying – this is ME!

We have to touch each other! The Gospel is clear in saying that “everyone in the crowd sought to touch him.”  Why?  Because that is where the power comes – from the touch – from the sharing, from the interaction.  It’s interesting how Luke moves so quickly from the ‘choosing of the twelve’ on the mountain to the quite general sense of “he came down with THEM and stood on a stretch of level ground.”  There is no distinction here.  There was “a great crowd of his disciples” the passage tells us.

This is not to say that we don’t have particular gifts that we are meant to share with each other in order to bring more life into the world. It does mean though that Christ is not just on the mountain.  Christ is in the plains – in plain living, where people struggle, make mistakes, get sick, hurt each other, need food, have unclean spirits.  We many times picture ourselves as bringing Christ to others.  It seems that it is the other way around perhaps.  We encounter Christ when we allow ourselves to move toward the places where Christ IS. For many of us that means being open to going down from places of privilege to find out that real bliss is at the borders, at the margins, because here we can find not just Christ but ourselves in Christ.  This is both painful and joyful.

This is not a mission of assistance, but one of communion. When we are named authentically by the Christ we encounter in our everyday lives, we are transformed and likewise transform.  The energy is interactive, never unilateral.  The electric touch of true communion has the capacity to shock us out of the violent illusions of hierarchy, bigotry, classicism, racism, etc.  Such illusions that have guided and directed assaults against humanity and divinity require a solid touch that often comes as a slap in the face.

We are who we have hurt! This is the first touch of healing – to recognize and admit our shared woundedness in the cycles of violence and marginalization that we have structured into our lives.  And the work is responsibly applying the ointment of communion which stings at first, because the pain cannot be denied. The unclean spirits…the diseases of our souls…must be named even as the Twelve were named.  Isn’t this the true co-missioning of Christ – IN Christ!?  To be co-missioned is to go down the mountain, to go down into ourselves into our brothers and sisters whom we have hurt and who have hurt us, those from whom we learn as much as teach.  This is a willingness to move deep into where God is calling, which is always into THEM…into US – Christ!

Here now, in this place, wherever you are, whomever you meet, whomever you like or dislike, whomever you judge to be this or that, THIS is Christ!  This is the divine fullness that does not wait outside of us but is born within us aching to move forward and connect in abundance.  Our everyday lives are the ‘stretch of level ground” which is the Plain Christ waiting to be given and received!

“For in Christ dwells the whole fullness of the deity bodily,
and you share in this fullness in him”  (Col 2:6-15)

Peace,

Thomas