Catholic Mass Readings and Reflection September 23, 2026

1. Jesus gives the Twelve real authority, over demons and diseases, and sends them to proclaim the kingdom. Then comes the strange instruction. Take nothing for the journey. No staff, no bag, no bread, no money, not even a second tunic. Go out with empty hands.

2. It sounds reckless. Any of us planning a trip packs for what might go wrong. Jesus tells them to pack nothing. Not because provisions are evil, but because He wants them to depend, day by day, on God and on the hospitality of the people they serve. Empty hands keep the heart open.

3. There is a reason underneath it. If the apostles carried everything they needed, they might think the mission ran on their own resources. Sent out with nothing, they would learn quickly that any good done through them was God’s doing. The emptiness was not a hardship. It was a lesson in where the power comes from.

4. We tend to serve God the opposite way. We wait until we feel equipped, until we have the resources, the confidence, the time, the training. And we delay, because the hands never feel full enough. Jesus sends people out precisely before they feel ready, so they will lean on Him and not on their supplies.

5. Saint Pius of Pietrelcina, Padre Pio, was a poor friar in a small Italian town who understood this. He had no worldly power, no great platform. He gave himself to two things, the confessional and the altar, and spent endless hours hearing confessions, drawing sinners back to God. God worked extraordinary things through a man who held very little.

6. He is remembered for telling anxious people to pray, to hope, and not to worry. That was not carelessness. It was the empty-handed trust of Luke 9, a man who had learned to lean wholly on God and carry no anxious baggage of his own. His strength was that he depended on Someone stronger.

7. Agur’s prayer in Proverbs is the same spirit. Give me neither poverty nor riches, he asks, only what I need, lest being full I forget You, or being poor I steal and dishonor Your name. It is the prayer of a heart that wants to depend on God, not on a full store. Every word of God, he says, proves true; He is a shield to those who take refuge in Him.