The sending of the Twelve | a sermon

A sermon by Jamie Howison on Matthew 9:35-10:10

I have this picture in my mind, of Jesus and his disciples traveling together through Galilee. They sit and listen as he teaches, bear witness to healings, visit with him in various homes along the way, and just generally keep company with him wherever he goes. It is an itinerant sort of life—remember how Jesus had said, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20)—but exciting and a bit confounding all the same. Oh, and along with this company of the twelve there were clearly women as well. They’re sometimes mentioned by name, as is the case with Mary Magdalene, and so it should not surprise us to imagine quite a little group of them traveling together. In fact, there were quite clearly children with them as well. Remember the story when the disciples come and ask Jesus “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And Jesus “called a child, whom he put among them, and said, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’” (Matthew 18:1-3) Where do you suppose he got that child? And there are several instances like this in the gospels.

So while my rather conditioned picture of things is to have Jesus and the twelve roaming about together, when you stop and look closely at the texts you’ll see a rather larger and more mixed sort of traveling group.

But then there’s this other episode that we read about tonight, which also pushes aside some of the assumptions. “Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness”… and he sent them out. He sent them out on the road, to proclaim the good news and offer a ministry of healing and reconciliation to all who would receive them. They weren’t even to take extra provisions to support themselves, but rather to rely on donations from those to whom they provided ministry.

Now I don’t know about you, but on this count, I also carry a rather conditioned picture of Jesus and his disciples. I’ve seen enough of those biblical movies, from Jesus of Nazareth to Godspell to the more controversial Last Temptation of Christ, to rather easily imagine the disciples as staying always very close by his side. And yet here in Matthew 10 and in its parallels in Mark and Luke, off they’re sent.

And they’re sent, not to the Gentiles nor to the Samaritan towns, but instead quite clearly “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” which also needs a little attention from any responsible preacher.

So that road trip, what’s it all about? In the verses just prior to their being sent out, Jesus says quite clearly, “The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest.” He’s been faced by growing crowds of people who have heard of his gifts as a healing presence and a life-giver, and “he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” Too many people, too many needs, too much pressure… and there were still more such people all through Galilee and beyond who are hungry for hope, restoration, and good news. So it would seem that at this critical moment in his ministry, he decides to begin to spread that good news like wildfire, and to use the disciples to do just that.

But what about that instruction to go only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, which means effectively ignoring the needs of the Gentiles and Samaritans? Here Stanley Hauerwas comments,

Jesus has been sent “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” to fulfill the prophecy that Israel is God’s beloved, called to be a light to the nations. We have seen [in the gospels] that some Gentiles are ready to respond to Jesus’ call, believing that the kingdom is present through his life and work. The Gentiles who respond to the call for repentance are grafted into God’s promise to Israel. But Israel is not to be left behind—Jesus has come to call her to repentance. (Hauerwas, Matthew)

Similarly, in his commentary N.T. Wright notes,

So far, the Gentiles who have appeared have come at their own initiative; Jesus has not sought them out, and won’t do so during his public ministry. If he and his followers had started taking their message to the Gentile world at this stage, no self-respecting Jew would have paid them any more attention. It would have confirmed his enemies’ taunts: he was in league with the devil. (Wright, Matthew for Everyone)

“The time for the Gentiles will come soon enough,” Bishop Wright continues. But “for the moment, every effort must be made to tell the chosen people that their great moment, the fulfillment of their dreams, has arrived.”

So during his lifetime, Jesus’ primary ministry was to Israel; to what Paul will later call God’s “cultivated olive tree.” The message of Good News is first proclaimed to a people who were chosen, and in a sense chosen against all odds. There is no obvious or logical reason why God would have chosen dear old Abraham and Sarah to be parents of a great nation and ultimately a message of hope to the world. They’re old, they’re childless, and they aren’t without their own complexities. Their son Isaac who was born to them in their old age was also a complicated man, and then when it comes to his son Jacob… well, he’s even less likely to be the foundation of a great people.

Yet God is persistent, and committed to what becomes a sometimes great but more often troubled nation. And in and through all of that, God sees Israel as being that fine, cultivated olive tree. The Gentiles, says Paul, the Gentiles—and remember, that is me and you and all of us who aren’t Jewish—are “by nature” cut from “a wild olive tree and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree.” Grafted into the cultivated olive tree, which means we are grafted into the promise that was made to Israel. Not only that, but Paul is insistent that even those natural branches of the cultivated tree that were “broken off” on account of unbelief are not somehow banished from the saving love of God. Let me read you the verse I’ve been riffing off in its fullness:

For if you—meaning you Gentiles, which includes us—have been cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree—which means Israel—how much more will these natural branches—those Jews who have turned away or rejected Christ—how much more will these natural branches be grafted back into their own olive tree. (Romans 11:24)

You see it is not as if Jesus first took his message to the Jews, and then because he was rejected he called Paul to take the message to the Gentiles. He wasn’t rejected by all of Israel, for in fact every one of those disciples was a Jew, as were Mary Magdalene, Stephen, Mary the mother of Jesus, Paul, and all of the other characters who fill the gospels and the first half of the book of Acts… including Jesus himself! No, what happens in the light of his resurrection and through the calling of Paul on the Damascus Road is that the good news is well and truly opened to the Gentiles, the branches of the wild olive tree, so that we can be grafted back onto the only tree that matters, namely God’s profound love for Israel. In fact, I think if you pushed Paul just a bit, he would probably say that God loves you precisely because he first loved and called Israel to be a sign to the world.

And here’s one more thing to ponder in this gospel reading. It is interesting to note that in the list of the twelve disciples that Matthew provides, he begins with “Simon, also known as Peter,” who will be shown to be remarkably good at fumbling the ball at critical moments in the gospels, and who ultimately denied even knowing Jesus on the night of his arrest. That same list of the twelve ends with “Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed him,” and between the two characters we have quite remarkable bookends to the list of rag-tag characters who Jesus has called to follow him. “The disciples are not impressive people,” writes Hauerwas.

The undistinguished character of the disciples is a sign of hope for us who inherit their task, for it is surely right that the church understands itself to be in the tradition of the apostles.

The disciples are not impressive people, but then neither are we. Their mission, as well as our own, is not to call attention to ourselves but to Jesus and his kingdom.

Which is actually very liberating, when you stop to think about it. None of us is called to be impressive nor to somehow do it all ourselves. We are simply called to bear witness as best we can to the transformative presence of Jesus in our lives, and to dare to live lives shaped by his vision of God’s kingdom, which is generous, forgiving, loving, and redeeming.

And that I can do.