Out Of Their Means

Three women get named in today’s Gospel, and the detail Luke bothers to record about them is financial. Mary from Magdala. Joanna, whose husband managed Herod’s household. Susanna. They traveled with Jesus and the Twelve, and they paid for it, “out of their means.” Luke gives this one verse and moves straight on to the parable of the sower, as though bankrolling the Son of God were an ordinary line item in a Galilean budget.

Paul is blunter about what that kind of spending assumes. If the dead aren’t raised, he tells the Corinthians, then Christ wasn’t raised either, and the preaching is empty, and your faith is empty, and you’re still in your sins, and the people you have buried are simply gone. He runs it all the way out: if our hope in Christ is for this life only, we are the most pitiable people alive. Every Christian is spending something on the strength of an empty tomb. Joanna spent her husband’s money on it.

Today the Church remembers Saint Joseph of Cupertino, a friar who could barely pass an examination and was handed the friary mule to look after. By every measure his age used, he was a poor investment too. So the question underneath the whole day is the same one: what are you spending, and would you want it back if the tomb turned out to be occupied?

The Readings

First Reading: 1 Corinthians 15:12-20

Now if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied.

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

Gospel: Luke 8:1-3

Soon afterward he went on through cities and villages, preaching and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. And the twelve were with him, and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their means.

Scriptural Analysis

Paul is answering a specific claim. Some people in Corinth were saying flatly that there is no resurrection of the dead, and Raymond Collins points out how strange that is in a city where the excavated cemeteries show an unusual concern for the dead, in a community where Paul has already mentioned believers who have died (1 Corinthians 11:30, 15:6). The likeliest explanation is that these Corinthians believed they had already arrived. They thought of themselves as spiritual people enjoying the reign of God in full, with nothing further owed to them, and a future resurrection of the body would have sounded to them like being dragged back into the flesh they thought they had left behind.^[1] George Montague raises a second possibility, that they were stuck on a problem Paul had already met in Thessalonica: a living body can be glorified because it is intact, but what happens to a body that has rotted? On that reading they made Christ the exception, since he was in the tomb too briefly to decay.^[2]

Then comes the argument, and it is built like a proof. Collins counts seven conditional sentences in these eight verses, running almost as a syllogism. The credal phrase “has been raised,” egegertai (eh-GAY-ger-tie), lands in verse 12 and then four more times, so the whole case is nailed to the one clause the Corinthians already confess.^[3] Paul’s move is to show them that their conclusion devours its own premise. If the dead are not raised, Christ was not raised, and they have just denied the thing they preach. Montague notes that in the apostolic preaching those two announcements were never separable; Luke records the apostles “proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection of the dead” (Acts 4:2).^[4]

The consequences stack up fast, and each is worse than the last. The preaching is empty, and so is the faith it produced. Worse, the apostles become perjurers, and not merely before men. Montague points out that bearing false witness against a fellow Israelite carried severe penalties under the law (Deuteronomy 19:16-21), and asks what should be said of a man who bears false witness against God.^[5] Worse again, “you are still in your sins.” Forgiveness rests on the rising as much as on the cross. Christ was “handed over for our transgressions and raised for our justification” (Romans 4:25), so remove the rising and the sealing goes with it.^[6]

Verse 18 is the one that would have hurt most in that room, because it is about people they had buried. The word is koimethentes (koy-may-THEN-tess), those who have fallen asleep, and Collins shows how the metaphor stitches the chapter together: Christ the firstfruits in verse 20, the early witnesses who have since died in verse 6, and the Corinthians’ own dead in verse 18, all under one gentle word. Take away the resurrection and the gentlest word in the passage turns to iron. Their death becomes the final fact about them. They have perished.^[7] Then verse 19 closes the trap. Montague says Christians in that case are worse off than they were before they believed, having poured their lives and their energy into an illusion, and he puts the whole thing in one image: the hope Christians live by is a puff of smoke if Christ is not risen.^[8]

Verse 20 breaks it open. “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.” Montague’s note here is worth carrying around. The Torah required that the first sheaf of the harvest and a cake from the first batch of new dough be brought to the priest, a token of gratitude that the whole harvest was really the Lord’s gift (Leviticus 23:10-14). The part stood for the whole and consecrated it. And the day appointed for that offering was the sixteenth of Nisan, which is precisely the day Jesus rose from the dead. Montague thinks it was probably that providential coincidence that handed Paul the image in the first place.^[9] So the first fruits do a particular job. The sheaf claims the field it was cut from. Christ raised on the day of the sheaf means the entire harvest has been spoken for, which is what the Catechism says without the agriculture: Christ’s resurrection is the principle and source of our own.^[10]

Luke’s three verses look like a travel note and are doing structural work. For the third time, he pairs preaching with proclaiming the good news, the two verbs by which he defines Jesus’ prophetic mission, reaching back to the Nazareth synagogue (Luke 4:18, 43-44), and he sets up the parable that follows, where the sower sows the word of God (Luke 8:11).^[11] The Twelve are “with him,” which Luke Timothy Johnson hears as an echo of the first mandate in Mark, that they should simply be with him before they are sent anywhere.^[12]

Then the women, and Pablo Gadenz traces where Luke is going with them. They have been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, and their gratitude now takes the shape of service. These women from Galilee will follow Jesus to his death and his burial (Luke 23:49, 55-56), and they are the ones who find the tomb empty, hear the announcement of the resurrection, and carry it back to the apostles (Luke 24:1-11).^[13] Mary is named for Magdala, a fishing town on the western shore of the lake, and Jesus had freed her from a severe possession.^[14] A note on her is worth making, since we met an unnamed penitent woman in yesterday’s Gospel. The Western tradition ran the two together; Bede says plainly that Mary Magdalene is the same woman, and Gregory the Great reads her seven demons as the whole range of vice, since seven days make up all time and so the number stands for totality.^[15] Modern Catholic exegesis doesn’t follow them. Johnson notes that Luke gives no reason at all to connect her with the sinner of the previous story, whatever the harmonizing habit of later tradition did with her.^[16]

Joanna and Susanna are the other two. Joanna turns up again at the tomb (Luke 24:10), and since she and Mary accompany Jesus through a long stretch of the ministry, Gadenz suggests they may well be among the eyewitnesses Luke says his Gospel rests on (Luke 1:2), Joanna especially, because Luke alone mentions her. Married to Herod’s steward, she may be the source of the passages about Herod that only Luke carries (Luke 13:31-33; 23:6-15), the way Acts names Manaen, a member of Herod’s court, among the prophets at Antioch (Acts 13:1).^[17] Her husband’s title is epitropos (eh-PIT-roh-poss), a manager or steward of a great household.^[18] And the verb for what the women do, diakoneo (dee-ah-koh-NEH-oh), is the one Luke uses elsewhere for waiting at table and seeing to hospitality, the same root that gives the Church her deacons. Johnson points out that here it sits in the imperfect tense, so it was habitual, and that Luke attaches it to their hyparchonta (hoo-PAR-khon-tah), their possessions. The service in question was money.^[19] Joanna’s position tells you Jesus’ followers already included people of real social and economic standing, and the weight of the verse falls on what they funded.^[20] Saint Jerome saw no scandal in it. He notes it was an accepted Jewish custom for women to provide food and clothing for their teachers, and that these women gave the Lord their material things having reaped spiritual things from him, an arrangement Paul would later describe in a letter to this same Corinth (1 Corinthians 9:11).^[21]

Put the two readings side by side, and the seam shows. Paul’s entire case rests on witnesses, on named people who saw and could still be questioned. Luke names three women here and then names two of them again at the tomb, which is very likely why he names them at all. The women who paid for the mission became the evidence for it. Joanna put her household’s money into an itinerant preacher’s work years before there was any tomb to visit, and then she was standing in front of the empty one. Paul says a faith without the resurrection is a wasted life. Luke shows you the women whose spending would have been the waste, and tells you where they were standing on the third day.

Daily Application

Montague asks the question this reading is really driving at, and he asks it better than I can: am I actually betting everything on Christ, or am I hedging my bets, making sure I squeeze everything I can out of this life while hoping not to lose out on the next?^[22]

Hedging is quiet work, and it wears the clothes of prudence. It looks like a calendar with no room in it for anything that doesn’t pay, and a budget with no line on it that a sensible unbeliever would call a waste of money. A hedged life is perfectly respectable. It is also, on Paul’s logic, hard to tell apart from the life of someone who thinks the tomb is still occupied.

Luke’s women are useful here because their faith left a paper trail. He could have told us they believed. He tells us they paid. Whatever else was happening in Joanna’s heart, it showed up in her household accounts, and it showed up steadily, in the imperfect tense, week after week.

So open the two documents that already record what you believe: your bank statement and your calendar. Read the last month of both and look for the line that only makes sense if Christ is risen. If you can’t find one, that is your answer to Montague’s question, and it is fixable by Friday. Pick one thing this week: an hour given to somebody who cannot repay it, a gift large enough that you notice it gone, a standing commitment to the parish that will survive a busy October. Make it cost something. Montague is careful to say this can be lived in any state of life, and his examples are ordinary ones: parents forming children to prize virtue above achievement and possessions, some embracing celibacy, others going to the missions, others living simply so they can serve the poor. Knowing our citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20), we can hold our goods and even the people we love with a relaxed grasp (1 Corinthians 7:29-31), because the fullness of life is still ahead of us.^[23]

Saint Joseph of Cupertino is a strange and encouraging companion for this. He failed at his studies. The friars, not knowing what else to do with him, put him in charge of the mule. And then his body began leaving the floor when he prayed, so often and so publicly that the investigation before his canonization recorded 70 separate incidents. Crowds came to watch him the way they would go to a sideshow. The gift he could not control taught him humility, patience, and obedience, and he carried it through long stretches when he felt abandoned by God. His body did in miniature what Paul promises for every body that belongs to Christ. But the part worth stealing is the ordinary part: he kept praying in the dark, and he spent the one thing that was genuinely his own, his free will, on God.

Few of us will ever levitate. Every one of us can spend. Find the line in your life that would be foolish if Christ were still in the tomb, and then make it bigger.

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Notes

1. Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 541. ↩
2. George T. Montague, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 269. ↩
3. Collins, First Corinthians, 541-542. ↩
4. Montague, First Corinthians, 269. ↩
5. Montague, First Corinthians, 269. ↩
6. Montague, First Corinthians, 270. ↩
7. Collins, First Corinthians, 543. ↩
8. Montague, First Corinthians, 270. ↩
9. Montague, First Corinthians, 271. ↩
10. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 655. ↩
11. Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018), 154; Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 130-131. ↩
12. Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 131. ↩
13. Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 154. ↩
14. Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 154. ↩
15. Bede and Gregory the Great, in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea, on Luke 8:1-3. ↩
16. Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 131. ↩
17. Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 154-155. ↩
18. Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 131. ↩
19. Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 131. ↩
20. Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 155. ↩
21. Jerome, in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea, on Luke 8:1-3. ↩
22. Montague, First Corinthians, 270. ↩
23. Montague, First Corinthians, 270-271. ↩

Books Cited

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• Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Liturgical Press, 1999)
• George T. Montague, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2011)
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Doubleday, 2003)
• Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2018)
• Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Liturgical Press, 1991)
• Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, 4-volume set (Baronius Press)