Published September 18, 2026
There is a quiet verse tucked into the eighth chapter of Luke's Gospel that rarely gets its own homily, rarely makes it onto a holy card, and yet it may be one of the most theologically rich passages in the entire New Testament. Jesus is traveling from town to town, village to village, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve are with him, as we would expect. But Luke adds a detail that the other evangelists pass over almost entirely: also present were "some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities," among them Mary Magdalene, Joanna the wife of Herod's steward Chuza, Susanna, and many others, who provided for Jesus and the disciples out of their own resources.
At first glance this might seem like a minor logistical footnote, the kind of detail a careful historian includes almost as an afterthought. But Luke does nothing by accident. He is telling us something essential about how the kingdom of God actually spreads in the world, and it is worth sitting with for a moment, because it says as much about discipleship today as it did two thousand years ago.
The first thing to notice is that these women are named as healed people. Before they are described as helpers, before they are described as generous patrons, they are described as those who have been set free. Mary Magdalene, we are told, had seven demons driven out of her. We do not know the details of Joanna's affliction, or Susanna's, only that something in their lives had been broken and Jesus had restored it. This ordering matters. Discipleship, in Luke's telling, does not begin with what we can offer to God. It begins with what God has already done for us. Gratitude, not obligation, is the engine of Christian generosity. These women were not fulfilling a religious duty when they gave of their means; they were responding, with the natural overflow of a grateful heart, to a mercy they had personally received. This is a pattern worth examining in our own lives. So often we approach faith as a transaction, a matter of what is owed, what is required, what will keep us in good standing. But the Gospel invites a different starting point. What has already been given to us? Where have we already been healed, forgiven, restored, even if we rarely name it that way? Genuine spiritual generosity flows from remembered mercy, not from a ledger of religious obligation.
The second thing Luke wants us to see is that these women were not passive beneficiaries of Jesus's ministry. They were active participants in it, and their participation was concrete and financial. The text says they provided for Jesus and the Twelve "out of their resources." This is a strikingly practical detail. It tells us that an itinerant preaching mission, however spiritually elevated its purpose, still needed food, lodging, and travel expenses, and that this mission was sustained in significant part by the generosity of women. In a first-century Jewish context, where women's public roles were often circumscribed, this is remarkable. Luke, writing to a broader Greco-Roman audience, is quietly making a theological point: the kingdom of God does not operate according to the world's hierarchies of who matters and who does not. Those whom society might have overlooked were, in fact, indispensable to the mission's continuation.
This has real implications for how we think about ministry and community life today. It is tempting to measure the value of Christian service by visibility. We tend to celebrate the preacher, the missionary who travels to distant lands, the person whose name appears on the program. But Luke's Gospel quietly insists that the person who manages the finances, who prepares the meals, who keeps the lights on, who gives generously and without fanfare, is not a secondary character in the drama of salvation. She is essential to it. The kingdom of God has always depended on both the proclaimed word and the sustaining, often unseen, labor of those who make that proclamation possible. If we take this passage seriously, we are pushed to reconsider whom we honor in our own faith communities, and whether we have too narrow a definition of what counts as ministry.
There is also something worth pondering about healing and vocation. Each of these women had been cured of something, whether a physical infirmity or, in Mary Magdalene's case, something described in the more dramatic language of possession by evil spirits. And each of them, having been healed, chose to stay close to the source of that healing, to follow, to serve, to give. This is a pattern that appears again and again in the Gospels, and it offers a template for our own spiritual lives. Healing is not meant to be a private transaction between the individual and God, concluded and then forgotten. It is meant to become the foundation of a new way of living, a new orientation toward gratitude and service. Whatever wound or captivity Christ has addressed in our lives, whether it is named as illness, addiction, grief, or simply a long season of spiritual dryness, the invitation is the same: to let that healing become the root of a generous, outward-facing life rather than something we quietly file away and move past.
It is also worth noting the sheer diversity of this small community traveling with Jesus. Fishermen, a tax collector, women from different social backgrounds, some with means and some presumably without, all walking the dusty roads of Galilee together. The kingdom Jesus proclaimed was never meant to be homogeneous. It gathered people whose only common thread was that they had encountered him and chosen to respond. Our own parishes and communities are called to the same kind of gathering, one that does not sort people by usefulness, prominence, or social standing, but welcomes anyone who has been touched by mercy and wants to walk the road a little further.
As we sit with this short passage today, perhaps the most fruitful question is a simple one. Where has God's mercy already reached into my life, and how is that mercy asking to be expressed, not someday in some grand gesture, but today, in the ordinary provisions I am able to make for others? Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna remind us that faithfulness often looks less like eloquence and more like showing up, quietly and consistently, with whatever we have to offer.