Some of the most important sentences in the Gospels are the ones that sound like stage directions. Today Luke pauses between two scenes, tells us who was actually walking the roads with Jesus, and slips in three names that nobody would have thought to record. The whole mission of the Church is hidden inside those few lines.
And it happened afterwards that he was making a journey through the cities and towns, preaching and evangelizing the kingdom of God. And the twelve were with him, and certain women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, who is called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had departed, and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod's steward, and Susanna, and many other women, who were ministering to him from their resources. (Lk 8:1-3)
Three verses. No miracle, no argument with the Pharisees, no parable. Luke is doing something a good writer does when the story has been moving fast: he stops the camera and lets us see the travelling company as it really looked, dusty and unremarkable, on a road between two villages nobody outside Galilee could name.
Notice first what Jesus is doing. He is making a journey through the cities and towns. Not one city, not a capital, not a single decisive stage from which the message would radiate outward. Town after town, on foot, with the wearying repetition that any missionary knows: the same news announced again to a new group of faces, the same walk in the evening to somewhere else. The kingdom of God does not spread by broadcast. It advances at walking pace.
Then the company. The Twelve are mentioned, and we expect that. What we do not expect is the second half of the sentence, because it was not the sort of thing a first-century writer would invent. A group of women is travelling with a rabbi. That detail cost Luke something to write, and it is precisely the kind of detail that has the ring of memory rather than of arrangement.
Luke says why they are there, and his reason is beautiful in its lack of flattery. They had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities. Their qualification is not their virtue, their learning, or their usefulness. It is that something was wrong with them and Jesus put it right. They follow him for the simplest reason in the world: they know from the inside what he can do, because he did it to them.
Then the names. Mary, who is called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had departed. Centuries of legend have buried this woman under a story the Gospel never tells about her. Luke says only that she had been in a darkness so total it needed a number to describe it, and that she came out. She is not introduced by a husband, a father, or a village role, but by the fact that she was set free.
Joanna is introduced quite differently: the wife of Chuza, Herod's steward. Read that slowly. Her husband managed the household finances of the man who would soon have John the Baptist beheaded. Somewhere in that palace, money was being quietly diverted from Herod's own table to feed the preacher Herod would later want to see as a curiosity. Grace works its way into the least likely households, and it usually enters through someone whose name nobody expected to matter.
And then Susanna. That is all. No illness specified, no husband, no city, no later appearance. A name, set down once, and kept for two thousand years for no other reason than that she was there. If you have ever wondered whether the hidden part of your life is registered anywhere, Susanna is your answer. Luke did not need her name for his narrative. He wrote it because it was hers.
After her, the phrase that widens everything: and many other women. The unnamed ones, who are always the majority. Luke names three and then admits that the real number is beyond his page. Every parish, every mission, every community rests on such a sentence. Three names we happen to know, and many others whose faithfulness held the whole thing up without ever being written down.
Finally, the mechanism: they were ministering to him from their resources. This is the least spiritual-sounding clause in the passage and possibly the most important. Someone bought the bread. Someone paid for lodging when the town proved unfriendly. Someone made sure that the preaching of the kingdom did not stop for lack of a meal. The Gospel does not float above economics; it was carried on the household savings of a handful of grateful women.
Saint Paul, writing to Corinth today, insists that if Christ has not been raised then our preaching is empty and our faith is worthless, and then answers his own dread: Christ has been raised, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. Luke's three names belong inside that sentence. These same women will be standing at a distance on Good Friday and walking towards a tomb before dawn on Sunday, and their memory is one of the reasons we can speak of the Resurrection at all. The people who paid for the journey were also the people who did not leave when it ended badly.
Here the crib at Bethlehem tells the same truth in a different key. God chose to arrive needing things: warmth, arms, milk, a roof borrowed from animals. From the very first night, the coming of God into the world depended on people who had no title and who did not appear in any register. He has not changed his method. The kingdom still travels on the resources of those who are small enough to give without needing to be seen giving.
So the invitation today is unusually concrete. Think of one person whose steady, unnoticed work makes something good possible in your life, and tell them so before the week ends. Then look at your own resources, whatever they are, and let something real leave your hands towards the mission of the Church, without announcement.
Luke wrote three names and admitted there were many more. Somewhere in that unwritten crowd there is room for ours.
Scripture text: Catholic Public Domain Version (CPDV), public domain.
Prayer of the Day
Father, you allowed your Son to depend on the generosity of women whose names would otherwise have vanished, and you chose to enter our world as a child who could only receive. Give us their kind of gratitude, the kind that remembers what it has been healed of and cannot stop giving because of it. Where our work is unseen, keep us joyful; where we have resources, loosen our hands; where others carry us quietly, open our eyes to thank them. Let us walk with your Son from town to town, at his pace, content to be counted among the many others. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
For Meditation
- What has Jesus healed in us that we have never let become a reason for gratitude?
- Who are the unnamed people whose faithfulness carries our community, and have we thanked them?
- What part of our own resources could we place, without noise, at the service of the mission?
