In today’s Gospel, Jesus gives His apostles authority and sends them out. There are two things that call our attention: first, Luke tells us that Christ “sent them to proclaim the Kingdom of God and to heal the sick.” There’s two things: preaching, and healing. Indeed, they do just that, as Luke ends the passage by saying: “Then they set out and went from village to village proclaiming the good news and curing diseases everywhere.” Secondly, we notice that Christ is adamant that the apostles take nothing with them for the journey.

​Today’s Gospel should be one of great relief for us. In it we heard Jesus lay down the conditions of being in his family:1) hearing the word of God and 2) acting on it.

​This was a great change from the belief of the Jewish people up to that point. In order to belong to God’s Chosen People in the fullest sense of the word, one had to be born into that nation. The divide was so great between Jew and Gentile that even individuals born into non-Jewish families who converted to Judaism were always considered a sort of second class citizen. But that chasm which separated the two peoples was bridged by the cross of Christ so that one’s relationship with God was no longer based on racial background. 

​The word capital has a lot of different meanings. It could refer to an important city from which a region is governed, and so Annapolis is the capital of Maryland. It could refer to a letter which differs from its lowercase version in height and form. In economics, capital is that surplus of wealth or assets used to begin a new enterprise. In architecture, it refers to the highest point of a column which connects it with the structure which is being supported. But we are not studying government, nor economics, nor architecture, so we are not concerned about these capitals so much. Rather, we need to consider a different but far more important sort of capital, a capital sin.