Take Nothing For The Journey

Most of us pack for a trip the way we pack for life: for every contingency. A second charger, a backup card, enough in savings that no single bad month can touch us. That instinct looks like prudence, and often it is. But today’s readings put a finger on the thing underneath it, which is a quiet conviction that if I don’t provide for myself, no one will. Agur, the least-known sage in the Old Testament, prays for exactly enough and no more, because he knows what a full pantry does to a man’s memory of God. And Jesus sends 12 men out across Galilee with no bread, no money, no bag, and no second shirt, to teach them by their own hunger who actually feeds them.

Today the Church celebrates Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, a Capuchin friar who rarely left his friary for 50 years and drew the whole world to a hill town in southern Italy anyway, with nothing in his hands. Padre Pio had a confessional, a pair of wounded hands, and very little else. Read the two readings beside his life, and the question that comes back is uncomfortable. How much of what you carry is provision, and how much of it is an insurance policy against ever needing God?

The Readings

First Reading: Proverbs 30:5-9

Every word of God proves true; he is a shield to those who take refuge in him. Do not add to his words, lest he rebuke you, and you be found a liar.

Two things I ask of thee; deny them not to me before I die: Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, “Who is the Lord?” or lest I be poor, and steal, and profane the name of my God.

Gospel: Luke 9:1-6

And he called the twelve together and gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to preach the kingdom of God and to heal. And he said to them, “Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money; and do not have two tunics. And whatever house you enter, stay there, and from there depart. And wherever they do not receive you, when you leave that town shake off the dust from your feet as a testimony against them.”

And they departed and went through the villages, preaching the gospel and healing everywhere.

Scriptural Analysis

Proverbs 30 opens a small collection with its own title, “the words of Agur son of Jakeh of Massa.” The identity of Agur is a mystery. No one knows who he was. The Navarre commentators note that the Vulgate did not even treat the name as a name: Jerome rendered it “the words of the Gatherer, son of the Vomiter,” a riddle pointing at Solomon, and Saint Bede followed him, connecting “the Gatherer” to Ecclesiastes, the one who gathers together.^[1] Whoever he was, verses 2 through 6 sound like Job: Agur confesses he is too stupid to be a man, then asks the questions God asked out of the whirlwind, who has gathered the wind in his fists, what is his name, and what is his son’s name (cf. Job 38). Augustine, answering a correspondent who claimed Solomon had said God has no son, pointed straight at this verse: Solomon asked the name of God’s son, and “what is Christ but the wisdom of God?”^[2]

Out of that humility comes the only prayer in the book of Proverbs. Everything else in the book is counsel; here a man speaks to God directly, and he asks for two things before he dies. The first is to be kept far from falsehood and lying. The second is the famous one: neither poverty nor riches, but “the food that is needful for me.” The Hebrew is lechem chuqqi (LEH-khem khook-KEE), the bread of my allotment, my portion, the ration a master measures out to a servant for the day. Agur asks to be put on rations. And he gives his reasons with a realism you can feel in your own chest. If I am full, I will deny you and say, “Who is the Lord?” If I am poor, I will steal, and drag your name through a courtroom. The Navarre editors put it plainly: a person needs a basic level of subsistence to have the room to develop a relationship with God, and “lack of the necessaries of life, and having too much of the good things,” both are an obstacle to serving God and other people. They point out that Our Lord taught us to pray the same prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11; Luke 11:3), and that the rich man in the parable of Lazarus is what verse 9 looks like when it comes true (Luke 16:19-31).^[3]

The Fathers loved these two verses. Ambrose, preaching on the six days of creation, said the poor man and the rich man should both take heed, because there are temptations for each, and he explained Agur’s arithmetic: a man has enough when he has a sufficiency, “because a wealthy man tends to distend his mind with cares and anxieties, just as he gorges his stomach with rich food.”^[4] Basil the Great, writing his rule for monks, took the verse as a definition. Riches are satiety, poverty is the complete lack of necessities, and sufficiency is “a state both free from want and without superfluity,” which varies with a person’s bodily condition and present need. Augustine added that sufficiency is wanted for the health of the body and for the clothing that lets a man live among others honorably, and for nothing beyond that.^[5] All three read the prayer as a request for freedom.

The Catechism gathers this up under the fourth petition of the Our Father. “Our bread” means all the goods life requires, material and spiritual, and the Father who gives us life “cannot but give us the nourishment life requires.” The Catechism rules out idleness in the same breath, and then says what Jesus is after: he “wants to relieve us from nagging worry and preoccupation.”^[6] That is Agur’s prayer restated. And the word “daily,” epiousios (ep-ee-OO-see-os), means first what is necessary for life, “every good thing sufficient for subsistence,” and then the Bread of Life itself, the Body of Christ.^[7] Agur’s ration and the Eucharist are the same petition, at two depths.

Now the Gospel, which is what Agur’s prayer looks like as a way of life.

Luke 9 opens with a hinge. The miracle stories of chapter 8 have just ended: the storm, the demoniac, the woman with the hemorrhage, Jairus’s daughter. Jesus turns from doing to delegating. Pablo Gadenz reads the passage as Jesus equipping the Twelve to share in his ministry, multiplying his outreach and training them for what is coming.^[8] Luke’s words are exact. Jesus gives them dynamis (DOO-nah-mis) and exousia (ex-oo-SEE-ah), power and authority, and Luke Timothy Johnson notes that these are the two words Luke has used of Jesus’s own ability to rebuke demons and disease (Luke 4:36; 5:17; 6:19; 8:46). Joseph Fitzmyer adds that Mark has only “authority” here, and that Luke, by giving both words and by conferring them before the sending, shows Jesus “granting the Twelve a share in the dominion that he enjoyed as God’s special emissary.”^[9] Cyril of Alexandria saw the theological weight of that. The saints work miracles by participation in the Holy Spirit, but it was never in their power to hand that authority to someone else; only one who is God by nature can impart it from himself.^[10] The Catechism cites this very verse for the origin of apostolic authority: “He gives the Twelve a share in his authority and ‘sent them out to preach the kingdom of God and to heal.'”^[11]

The rules for the road are the part everyone remembers. No staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no second tunic. Luke is stricter than Mark, who allowed a staff and sandals (Mark 6:8-9); Luke’s Jesus forbids the staff and says nothing about sandals.^[12] Why? Fitzmyer’s answer is the one to hold onto. The Twelve are to go without encumbering provisions, impedimenta, so that nothing distracts them from their purpose, and their obedience, which looks like poverty from the outside, is really an indication of “their reliance and trust in the providence of God himself.”^[13] Johnson makes the same point from a different angle. The ancient wandering philosopher, the Cynic, was recognized by his rough cloak, his staff, and his wallet, and Jesus denies his men even those. Johnson insists the severity has a purpose beyond asceticism: traveling with nothing makes the missionaries totally dependent on the hospitality of the people they preach to, so that every village becomes a decision for or against the prophet. And at the Last Supper Jesus will ask them whether they lacked anything on that road, and they will answer, nothing (Luke 22:35).^[14] Gadenz says it in a sentence: “Through this radical simplicity, Jesus is teaching them to rely more on God than on their own resources.”^[15]

The Fathers in the Catena Aurea saw the pastoral genius in it. Chrysostom lists what the command accomplished at once: it made the disciples unsuspected of profit, it kept them clear of every care so they could give their whole study to the word, and it taught them their own virtue. Eusebius compares them to soldiers: when Christ made them soldiers of God, “He girds them for battle against their enemies, by telling them to embrace poverty.”^[16] Ambrose drew the lesson for every preacher after them. The one who preaches the kingdom “must not require the supports of secular aid,” and, clinging wholly to faith, must believe that the less he requires those things, the more they will be supplied to him.^[17]

Verse 4 gives the counter-rule. Take a house and stay in it. Gadenz explains that staying in one house keeps the intention upright and avoids any semblance of pandering to the wealthy who could offer better lodging, and Ambrose, in the Catena, says it is foreign to a preacher of the heavenly kingdom to run from house to house and change the rights of inviolable hospitality.^[18] If a town will not receive them, they shake its dust from their feet, the gesture Paul and Barnabas will make at Antioch of Pisidia (Acts 13:51). Bede reads the dust two ways, as testimony that the apostolic preaching really reached that town, and as a refusal to take anything, “not even of the necessaries of life,” from people who despised the Gospel.^[19]

Then verse 6, and the Twelve go. Luke says they went through the villages euangelizomenoi (yoo-ang-geh-lid-ZOH-meh-noy), proclaiming the good news. Gadenz points out that this verb and kēryssō (kay-ROOS-soh) in verse 2, the roots of our words “evangelization” and “kerygma,” are the verbs Luke used for Jesus’s own preaching at Nazareth (Luke 4:18-19, 43-44). They are applied here to the apostles, later to the Church in Acts, and “they continue to apply to the Church’s mission today.”^[20] Johnson calls this whole section the preparing of a leadership for a restored Israel, and the first thing Jesus teaches the men who will lead it is how to be poor.^[21]

Put the two readings together, and you get one lesson from two directions. Agur asks God for exactly enough, because he knows his own heart. Jesus gives the Twelve exactly nothing, so that they will find out that God supplies enough. Both are lessons about who the provider is. Fitzmyer notes that the road rules get revised later, when hostility comes (Luke 22:35-38), which tells you the point all along was the trust the empty bag produced.^[22]

Daily Application

The interior movement these readings ask of you is to stop treating God as the backup plan.

Agur feared what a full bank account would do to his prayer. “Who is the Lord?” is what a man says when he hasn’t needed anything from God in so long that he has forgotten the question has an answer. Look at your own week and ask where you last actually depended on him. I mean the place where you set out without the provision and had to be fed; thanking him afterward for something you had already arranged doesn’t count. If you can’t find that moment, the Twelve are being sent to you today. Jesus made them walk the villages of Galilee with no bread so they would come back able to say they lacked nothing, and the Church has never found a shortcut to that knowledge. You learn that God provides by letting him.

So find one thing you carry as insurance against needing him, and set it down for a season. It might be money: the tithe you keep deferring because the margin feels thin, given anyway, so that the margin has to come from somewhere else. It might be the second tunic in whatever form you keep it, the fallback you’d be embarrassed to admit is really a refusal to trust. The Catechism won’t let you make this an excuse for laziness. “Pray and work,” it says, and even after the work, the food is still a gift, which is why Christian families say grace.^[23] But it also says Jesus wants to relieve you of the nagging worry, and the empty bag is the condition for the relief.

There is a second edge, because the Gospel is also about how the sent are received. If the apostles were to depend on hospitality, someone had to open the door, and Ambrose’s promise that the less a preacher requires, the more will be supplied came true through ordinary houses in Galilee. Who is walking through your town with nothing this week? The newly ordained priest, or the catechist who gave up a better job to teach your kids. Take them to dinner. Be the house they can stay in.

Padre Pio is the right saint for a day like this, because he is the most extreme case on record of the Gospel working exactly as Jesus said it would. He entered the Capuchins at 15, received the stigmata in 1918, and after that rarely left the friary at San Giovanni Rotondo, and yet busloads of people came to him. In time his confessional ministry ran 10 hours a day, with penitents taking numbers. He owned nothing, and a 350-bed hospital rose on the mountain beside him. When John Paul II canonized him in 2002, he stressed the power of suffering accepted with love, which can become “a privileged path of sanctity.”^[24] A friar with an empty bag, who bore the years when the Church herself forbade him to say Mass in public without a word of complaint, and whom the Lord kept feeding. That is Luke 9 with a date and an address.

Take nothing for the journey today. Then watch what he gives you.

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Notes

1. The Navarre Bible, Old Testament, commentary on Proverbs, by members of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Navarre (Dublin: Four Courts Press; New York: Scepter Publishers, 2004), 247. ↩
2. Saint Augustine, Letter 102.5, in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament, on Proverbs 30:1-9, 176. ↩
3. Navarre Bible, commentary on Proverbs, 248. ↩
4. Saint Ambrose, Six Days of Creation 6.53, in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament, on Proverbs 30:1-9, 176. ↩
5. Saint Basil the Great, The Long Rules 20, and Saint Augustine, Letter 130, in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament, on Proverbs 30:1-9, 177. ↩
6. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2830. ↩
7. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2837. ↩
8. Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018), 171-172. ↩
9. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 145; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), 753. ↩
10. Saint Cyril of Alexandria, quoted in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected out of the Works of the Fathers, vol. 3, St. Luke, trans. John Henry Newman (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1843), on Luke 9:1-6. ↩
11. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 551. ↩
12. Fitzmyer, Luke I-IX, 752; Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 145. ↩
13. Fitzmyer, Luke I-IX, 752. ↩
14. Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 148. ↩
15. Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 172. ↩
16. Saint John Chrysostom and Eusebius, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, St. Luke, on Luke 9:1-6. ↩
17. Saint Ambrose, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, St. Luke, on Luke 9:1-6. ↩
18. Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 172; Saint Ambrose, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, St. Luke, on Luke 9:1-6. ↩
19. Bede, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, St. Luke, on Luke 9:1-6. ↩
20. Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 172. ↩
21. Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 147-148. ↩
22. Fitzmyer, Luke I-IX, 752. ↩
23. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2834. ↩
24. “Saint Pio of Pietrelcina,” Saint of the Day, Franciscan Media, accessed September 22, 2026, https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-of-the-day/saint-pio-of-pietrelcina/. ↩

Books Cited

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• J. Robert Wright, ed., Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament IX (InterVarsity Press, 2005)
• Catholic Church, 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)
• Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Doubleday, 1981)
• Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, 4-volume set (Baronius Press)