Sunday’s Gospel recounted Jesus dispatching His Apostles, two by two, on their first missionary internship. They are dispatched to the neighboring villages in Israel and Judea, a fairly circumscribed venue considering they will ultimately be sent “to all nations” (Mt 28:19). That Gospel is instructive as to how the Church should accompany people. The motif running through the entire Gospel is “repentance.” The Apostles are sent out with “authority over unclean spirits.” They “went off and preached repentance.” The Apostles “drove out many demons,” and they anointed the sick and “cured them.” (A link to the Gospel reading is here.)

The Apostles do the same thing that Jesus did (Mk 1:15b), which is the same thing John the Baptist did. John began by preaching “repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mk 1:4). Repentance is the common theme of proclamation of the Kingdom.

The Apostles are sent out explicitly with charge and authority to engage evil, not theoretical or notional evil but diabolical, personal and malicious, in need of exorcism. Jesus came to heal men who were broken, not to make them feel good. If they felt good, it was a consequence of the healing, not a prerequisite to it. Indeed, the problem with making people feel good (even though they themselves, in their heart of hearts, often know something is deeply awry) is that it tends to foster complacency rather than repentance.

It’s worth noting that Jesus doesn’t instruct the Apostles on how to “welcome” potential listeners. His comments focus rather on how the potential hearers “welcome” — or don’t — the Apostolic message. The hearers’ reaction is in fact to be the criterion for “testimony against them.” Mark is terse; the parallel text in Matthew (10) adds, “Truly I tell you, it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town” (v. 15).

I make these observations — as I have regularly written during the past year — in response to the “accompaniment” mentality pushed by the Vatican, which seems, in practice if not theory, to give short shrift to the theme of repentance. Previous popes have lamented a “loss of the sense of sin,” but one begins to wonder whether that lament might not also apply to the practical impact of current Roman approaches.

As Sunday’s Gospel shows, it’s not how Jesus approached things.

It is also worth reading the Gospel against the First Reading’s text, in which God’s prophet, Amos, is rebuked by Amaziah, “priest of Bethel,” maybe something like Shrine Rector. Amos was also not a particularly “welcoming” prophet: He tended to excoriate the privileged who committed rank social injustice. But what deserves our attention in this passage is the interplay. Amaziah is clearly part of the ecclesiastical establishment, well-attuned to the Zeitgeist of 8th-century BC Israel. Fr. David Whitestone made a great observation: notice that Amaziah tells Amos to get out of Bethel because “it is the king’s sanctuary and a royal temple.” One would have thought it was God’s. Amaziah adds that Amos should split for Judah and “earn your bread by prophesying.” In that remark, he points out a key thing about prophets in ancient Israel and Judah. There were true and false prophets. The true prophets — those who spoke Yahweh’s Word — didn’t become prophets on their own initiative and certainly didn’t prosper as a result. Just ask Jeremiah.

The false prophets — like the paid shepherds who run away from the wolves (a reference found in the Matthean account of the dispatch of the Apostles, though not Mark’s) — tended to sing pleasing contemporary tunes, generally the easy listening music their audience wanted to hear.

Amos does not belong to that company. He says, “I was no prophet” and has no membership card in the prophets’ union. All he has is what “the Lord said to me,” a word that, as Jeremiah (20:9) says, cannot be repressed because “his word is in my heart like a fire.”

We err if we think of Israel’s prophets as some kind of predictors of the future. They were not. Their primary focus was not the future but the present. They sought to “read the signs of the times” in the light of God’s covenant with Israel (which included the Ten Commandments) and to point out where present practice came up short. They were thus moral teachers who critiqued how Israel lived in light of how Israel should be living, and they did not give participation-in-the-covenant awards for just showing up. If they spoke of the future, it was incidental; depending on how one responded (or didn’t) to God’s Word, things might go well.

Sunday’s Gospel is followed immediately by the account of John the Baptist’s martyrdom. The Baptist probably also wouldn’t get today’s “Accompaniment of the Year” award. He was martyred over what some today would call a “culture war” or “pelvic” issue: he rebuked Herod Antipas and Herodias for pretending to be married after the former took his brother’s wife, in violation of the Torah. John didn’t seek to find “what could be done” or make “a pastoral accommodation” for the tetrarch. He wasn’t “discerning” how Herod felt in conscience about Philip’s ex-wife. He demanded Herod put Herodias away, which is why John got put away (and beheaded) instead.

You can learn a lot about “accompaniment” from the Bible.