A Midsummer's Reflection Series

Thursday, June 18, 2026

Meditation 18: Luke 8:1-4

Sunflowers, Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Arles, January 1889

Jesus teaches us hospitality by His welcoming a wide variety of followers as He goes around preaching the Kingdom of God. He includes not only the 12 apostles, but we find a wider group 70 (or 72) disciples sent out two by two with His authority, in some accounts of the Gospels, and an even wider crowd of 120 disciples. Even beyond this large number are the crowds of followers that may rightly be called His disciples because they are following Him and are receptive to His message.

According to the Gospel accounts, great crowds followed Him. At the beginning of the Chapter 8 of Luke’s Gospel, we hear about a small group of women who are singled out alongside the 12 apostles among Jesus’ intimate followers (8:1-3). 

A few of these women are listed by name: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna (8:2-3). These were not the only women followers in this group, since Luke specifies that there were “many others, who provided for them out of their means” (8:3). These women were presumably present along with the 12 when the great crowds gathered to hear Jesus (8:4).

Women would not typically have been accorded the status of disciple of Jewish teachers of the day and, in fact, their testimony was formally forbidden from both Jewish and Roman courtrooms of the time. And yet Jesus includes them among His most intimate followers. As we find later at the end of all four Gospel accounts, it was to these women, including Mary Magdalene, that Jesus first appeared after rising from the dead. Mary Magdalene herself would eventually be known by the title “apostle of apostles.”  

Jesus’ hospitality extends to all those who are willing to follow Him. He makes few distinctions. His hospitality is open to all. The fact that He includes women among His intimate followers, who traveled around Galilee and Jerusalem as He preached the Kingdom of God, certainly set Him apart from other religious leaders of His day.  

Jesus, help us to be hospitable to those around us as we seek together to extend your Kingdom. Let us not make superficial distinctions among your followers, but rather let all who call upon your name be united in the love appropriate to your disciples. 

Dr. Jeffrey Morrow, Ph.D. is a professor of theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville and the Director of the St. Paul Studies Center at the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology. He spent 15 years as a professor of theology at Seton Hall University’s Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology. In his final year in that role, Dr. Morrow worked on the Preaching as Hospitality Formation Program, writing these reflections on Scripture through a lens of hospitality. 

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