14th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C

This Sunday's Gospel (Luke 10:1-12, 17-20) continues the theme of vocation: The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.

Pope Francis's message for the 2014 World Day of Prayer for Vocations includes the following words:

Peasant woman binding sheaves,
 Vincent van Gogh (1889)

... Every vocation, even within the variety of paths, always requires an exodus from oneself in order to centre one’s life on Christ and on his Gospel. Both in married life and in the forms of religious consecration, as well as in priestly life, we must surmount the ways of thinking and acting that do not conform to the will of God.

Let us dispose our hearts therefore to being “good soil”, by listening, receiving and living out the word, and thus bearing fruit. The more we unite ourselves to Jesus through prayer, Sacred Scripture, the Eucharist, the Sacraments celebrated and lived in the Church and in fraternity, the more there will grow in us the joy of cooperating with God in the service of the Kingdom of mercy and truth, of justice and peace. And the harvest will be plentiful, proportionate to the grace we have meekly welcomed into our lives.

13th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C

"Follow me," Jesus says to a man in today's Gospel. “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.” This "mystery of God's call, the mystery of vocation," Pope Benedict said, is "part of the life of every Christian, but it is particularly evident in those whom Christ asks to leave everything in order to follow him more closely." In his message for the 2006 World day of Prayer for Vocations, he told the audience:

Before the creation of the world, before our coming into existence, the heavenly Father chose us personally, calling us to enter into a filial relationship with Him, through Jesus, the Incarnate Word, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Dying for us, Jesus introduced us into the mystery of the Father’s love, a love which completely envelops his Son and which He offers to all of us. In this way, united with Jesus, the Head, we form a sole body, the Church.

... It is not surprising that, where people pray fervently, vocations flourish. The holiness of the Church depends essentially on union with Christ and on being open to the mystery of grace that operates in the hearts of believers. Therefore, I invite all the faithful to nurture an intimate relationship with Christ, Teacher and Pastor of his people, by imitating Mary who kept the divine mysteries in her heart and pondered them constantly (cf. Lk 2,19).

At the Plough, Vincent van Gogh (1884)