Dark Devotional: Go and Make a Mess of Things

Last updated on: May 30, 2017 at 10:13 pm by Guest Contributor

Dark Devotional: Go and Make a Mess of Things 2017-05-30T22:13:13-05:00 Guest Contributor

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Eleven, original art by Brian C. Jocks

Raised in a Catholic lay missionary family, dedicated to proclaiming the Gospel–the Good News of God’s love–all over the world, I’ve long been a big fan of Jesus’ mandate in Matthew 28, “Go and make disciples of all nations.” I’ve seen with my own eyes time and time again the desperate desire, especially in the poor and forgotten of the world, to know the boundless love and forgiveness offered to them by Jesus, to know their infinite worth.

As I reread the Gospel today, however, something else grabbed me. The audience that Jesus addresses here is not what I pictured. I’ve held in my mind’s eye an audience made up of great saints who walked and talked with Jesus, who were intimately formed by His presence and example, who were perfectly ready to faultlessly proclaim the priceless message of the Gospel. This picture, I see now, is largely my own fabrication.

Who is Jesus asking to build His kingdom in today’s Gospel? A group of men fraught with doubt–doubt about their ability to follow their crucified leader, even doubt about their faith. They loved Jesus. They worshipped Him. But they doubted.

The eleven disciples went to Galilee,

to the mountain to which Jesus had ordered them.

When they saw him, they worshiped, but they doubted.

Then Jesus approached and said to them,

“All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations . . .”

Here’s the kicker I never noticed before: they doubted, and He sent them anyway.

Could it be that He sent them precisely because they were imperfect doubters? Could it be that our weakness is exactly what the power of the Gospel needs to reach the poor and persecuted who Jesus most intends it for?

When I was first called as a young single mother to serve the poor in Mexico, I went into mission with my children, overwhelmed by doubt. I had exited an extremely difficult marriage, was raising three kids alone, working on an annulment, torn up by a recently repaired break from my faith, certain that if I was able to make disciples it would be in spite of my doubt and inability. And yet I found the contrary to be true. As I walked with many women through situations similar to my own, I found that saying “I really don’t know” in response to questions about faith or the relevance of our suffering was often the most effective answer I could give. “I don’t know, but I choose to try to find the answer in Jesus. Do you want to join me?” I asked. I was a doubter who worshipped, making disciples.

In today’s Gospel I see that I’m not as much of an aberration in the Church as I thought. I went, as Pope Francis urges us to, and “made a mess of things,” entering a messy world armed only with doubt and worship.

Sarah Summers Granger was raised in a Catholic lay missionary family. She first shared her testimony while standing on an overturned bucket in the Philippines at the age of 6, and she has continued to witness her Catholic faith around the world as a foreign missionary. She is a full time homemaker, mother of six, and with her husband Kevin, Missions Director for Family Missions Company.

Sarah Summers Granger

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