You have to wonder about Jesus’ skills in HR. This twelve “hires” were something of a bust — one betrayed him, another denied him, and the rest deserted him when the chips were down. When St. Luke tells the story of their call he stresses that they were “named apostles,” i.e. those who were sent. So they eventually got what Jesus was about and spread the message. Luke introduces the scene of the choice of the twelve in a way typical to him: by stressing the importance of prayer. Jesus departed to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God. You’d think after the Son of God spends the night in prayer that what he prayed for would work out. But even for Jesus the immediate results of his prayer was not perhaps the stellar cast of characters he would have hoped for. It took time for the grace of God to transform them. That is our story as well. We pray about things and they, most likely, don’t turn out as expected. We can trust, though, that God does respond to our prayer but according to the divine time-line, not ours.
