Jesus sends his disciples out to bring his Good News to the world. We know that Jesus does not want them to take very much along with them on the journey. This reminded me of an interaction I recently had with Father Jeffrey. When I saw him a couple of weeks ago for the priests council, he told me that a lady from his parish from Columbus went on the pilgrimage hike of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. I had mentioned to Father Jeffrey that he and Mary Woodward should join me for the pilgrimage sometime, but you know how Father Jeffrey really does not like roughing it - he told me that all those heavy backpacks and hostels full of sweaty pilgrims would not be his cup of tea. But this lady from his parish told him that she had her luggage transported from place to place and that she did not carry a back backpack and that she stayed in really nice hotels each night. Father Jeffery responded that I never told him that one could hike the pilgrimage in that way.
Some pilgrims try to have discussions about what it means to be a “real pilgrim.” I recently saw a cartoon showing a pilgrim with this huge backpack on his back as he encountered St James himself on the pilgrimage. St James had only a staff and a cape and gourd in which he carried his water. The pilgrim looked at St James and said: “You are not a real pilgrim. A real pilgrim would carry a backpack.” We in the modern world accumulate so many things, don’t we? It seems like no matter how much we have, we want more. Those things often become what’s most important to us in life. That’s the point of the Gospel today. We need to travel lightly in light so that we don’t make the material things of this world our idols, that we don’t let them take the place of God as the center of our lives.
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