Matthew 9:35-10:9

These are exciting days to be called to ministry.  One would not necessarily think this was so if one were only to be reading the latest reports about the economy or the problems faced by so many churches around the world. If you are in a mainline denomination, all you hear about is the demise of your church. For some of you, all you hear about is how much your pastor needs your tithes and offerings.  Some of you who are pastors know what it is like to have to keep asking for those tithes because you are trying to figure out how you are going to pay for the new heating system your church needs, or fix the roof that is leaking, never mind pay your health insurance or–God forbid, a salary!

It is not just economic pressures we are feeling in the church. I am so tired of reading about all the scandals going on in the churches.  So many problems.  So many failures.

I heard someone say this summer that their church was at a point of intellectual and even moral bankruptcy. This might be true, but I am a Christian.  I believe in the resurrection of the dead.  And I believe God brings new life out of situations of death, or where we are on the point of death. Yes, our churches may be on the edge of bankruptcy, but as Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy pointed out, Christianity has always been on the edge of bankruptcy.  And when it goes bankrupt, it starts all over again.  Rosenstock said, “At the center of the Christian Creed is faith in death and resurrection…” He added:

Christians believe in an end of the world, not only once, but again and again.  This and this alone is the power which enables us to die to our old habits and ideals, get out of our old ruts, leave our dead selves behind, and take the first steps into a genuine future.[1]

I believe that resurrection is a living reality residing in our midst.  I also believe that the Christian message holds within it the power not only to report on the resurrection, but to provoke resurrections in unsuspecting places in our midst.

You never know when resurrection is going to break out.  You never know where new life will emerge from dying congregations.

You never know when God is going to hit the “reset” button and start over again with things in your life, things in your world.  You never know when and where the Risen Christ is going to appear in the power of the Spirit, in the fullness of his resurrected glory, to lead you and to lead your church into a new future, a new age, a new reality.

I see great promise for the churches, not because I see such strong, healthy congregations throughout our city and around the world. I see great promise because I can see Jesus; I can see his resurrected presence in our midst, in word, in sacraments, and in the works that you do in ministry and service.

I see Jesus when the poor are hearing good news.  I see Jesus when the hungry are being fed.  I see Jesus when the prisoners are being released.  I see Jesus when the strongholds of injustice and oppression, of racism and sexism and homophobia and greed and violence all come tumbling down. I see new opportunities on the horizon, not because our churches are so strong, but because Christ was raised from the dead.  I see local churches that are free from the burdens of being bearers of cultural power and tradition, free to try new things, free to follow where God is calling them.

I see signs all around the nation and across the world that God is not done with the church yet, that God has not given up even if some of us have, and that God still intends to work through these churches, which are the body of Christ on earth, to create a more just future, a more hopeful future, a future where joy and rejoicing will reign forever.

That is why I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord!

I think the time is ripe to hear again a reminder of what the church is to be about, and can be about.  Donald Kraybill wrote a book thirty years ago titled The Upside Down Kingdom.   We need to go dust off that title from our bookshelves and read it again.[2]

Hans Hoekendijk wrote a book more than forty years ago titled The Church Inside Out.[3] We need to go read that book again as well.  Hoekendijk said the church is a community that lives to give itself away.  God never intended the church to be the final goal of history, he said.  God intends the world to be renewed.  The church is supposed to be a community of faith working with God, following Christ, to help bring about that renewal in the world.

Hoekendijk said the task that the church was never just to build itself up.  No, the task the church had from the beginning was to build itself up in order to be able to work more effectively with God, work with Christ, work with the Spirit, to be about transforming the world.  Church planting is not the end of the mission, it is just the beginning he said.  And this in turn means that the church is always sent, never settled.  If you are comfortable in your church, you’re not in the right place.  You aren’t supposed to get comfortable in your church; you’re supposed to be getting ready to go out into the world to work in service and ministry for the Gospel, for Christ. It’s an outrageous vision:  my little church, my little congregation, my little community, this conference, this presbytery, this association–changing the world?  How could it be?

Here is the problem says Tom Long.  Many of us who are Christians believe the good news.  We believe in the resurrection.  We say so every Sunday morning.  We just don’t believe it can happen here–in this church; in this association; in this city; in my family; in my workplace; in my school; in my community.

We look around, we take inventory of our programs, we look at the bank account and the budget, and we get really discouraged.  I hear this all the time.  I hear pastors who tell me that they just do not have the resources to carry out their mission any longer. Or I hear pastors, some of them from megachurches, who tell me that they do have the resources, but that they have to spend so much time getting those resources through offerings and appeals, or so much time offering the types of programs and building the type of complexes that attract people with resources, that they do not have much time left to plan and implement the programs that would truly make a difference in the lives of those who matter most, those without such resources, which is at the heart of their mission in the world.

But I know a different reality through the Gospel.  I know that balancing the budget is not the mission of the church.  It is instead an important, even necessary step toward realizing the true mission, which lies elsewhere, which lies outside the church. That is why this text in Matthew is so important for us to heed.  I want to lift this text up in our midst as we begin the semester here at NYTS.  I want to be sure that we hear the right voice.  I want to be sure that we are paying attention to the right master. This text in Matthew 9 and 10 is for me a signature text for Matthew’s Gospel.  It sets out what I think is the very heart of Matthew’s message, which I would sum up as “making disciples.”

I have heard a lot of sermons preached about missions.  It’s not an accident.  I am a missiologist by academic training.  A lot of these sermons and a lot of missiological literature focus on Matthew 28:19-20, on what is often called “the Great Commission,” for biblical orientation.

You know the passage.  After the resurrection, Matthew 28:16 tells us, the eleven remaining disciples (Judas was gone by then) went to Galilee to a mountain where Jesus had directed them to meet him.  Maybe it was the mountain on which he had famously taught the multitudes back in Matthew 5-8.  Verse 28:17 says that when they saw him, they worshipped him, but some doubted.

Some doubted.  Matthew is sure to put that little phrase in there, that little barb, that little sour note to remind us that even after the resurrection and the appearances and all the excitement and all the glory, even after that, there were still doubts among the eleven, still doubts in their minds as to whether all of this was real, still doubts as to whether they were going to be able to pull this thing called faith or belief or trust in God off.  Some doubt in your congregations and communities.  Some of you doubt.  Don’t worry.   The power of the resurrection does not depend upon the absence of doubt on your part.  It is not your belief, your confident, your assurance that raised Jesus from the dead.

The doubts of the disciples cannot keep Christ from working. They cannot hinder the effectiveness of God’s resurrection power. Christ tells them this in Matthew 28:18:  “All authority, all power, all exousia/ ἐξουσία in heaven and earth has been given to me.”

Christ does not need our permission to be who he is.  Christ does not need our permission to exercise authority and power.  Christ does not depend on our belief, our confidence, our assurance, to be Christ.  Christ doesn’t need our help in defending himself in the public square.

But he does invite us to go, to help him in going about the work of healing the nations, transforming the world. “Go and disciple all nations,” all ethnē/ ἔθνη, he tells them.  Go, go on, depart, get out of here. “…baptizing [all the ethnē] in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe everything that I have commanded you.”  That passage is often called the Great Commission.  Sometimes the entire mission of the church gets reduced to that passage.   But I think Matthew’s Gospel is more complex than that.

This text at the end of Matthew, in 28:16-20, is interacting with another text in Matthew, Matthew 9:35-10:9.  There is a clear intertextual conversation going on inside Matthew’s Gospel between the two. These two texts–28:16-20 and 9:35-10:9 not only parallel one another in very interesting ways, but they intersect with one another and interpret one another. You would not know who the eleven are up on the mountain in chapter 28 if you hadn’t already read chapters 9 and 10.

There is movement in both texts.  In chapter 28 Jesus tells his disciples to go.  In chapter 10 he tells them to go.  But the latter passage, spanning chapters 9 and 10, opens in verse 9:35 with Jesus on the go, then closes in verse 5 with his instructions to the disciples to go.  It again parallels the passage in Matthew 28.

Here is a very subtle difference, the meaning of which shows up best by a comparative reading of the two texts.  In Matthew chapter 28 the disciples are told to go and make disciples of all nations, of all ethnē. But in Matthew 10:5 they are specifically instructed not to go among the ethnōn/ἐθνῶν.  Instead they are told to stay local, only go about the neighborhood, and stay in the country.

Since Matthew 28:16-20 is the Great Commission, then perhaps Matthew 9:35-10:9 ought to be called the Little Commission. Matthew 9:35-10:9 perhaps is the test run.  Here Jesus is sending out these same disciples, but for the first time.  Where the Great Commission in Matthew 28 was a sending out to all nations, all ethnē, here in Matthew 10 Jesus is sending them out locally, telling them explicitly not to go among the ethnē, but to go to the lost sheep belonging to the local household, those in the neighborhood who had found themselves living as outsiders, outside the boundaries of the covenant of Israel, outside the walls of the church.

The text is pivotal for me for understanding the ministry and mission of the church.  At New York Theological Seminary we constantly say that we are preparing people for ministry in the world.  Matthew is telling us here what they might specifically mean.

What does it mean not just to be followers of Jesus Christ, but people sent by Christ on a mission into the world, people who have been called to minister, to ministry? What can we expect from the dynamic leaders of the church in light of Matthew 9 and 10?

Let’s turn to the text to look at it more carefully. First, it is important to see that Matthew 9:35 through 10:9 forms a narrative unit.  Unfortunately when Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, decided to divide the books of the Bible into chapters in 1227, he drew a line through the middle of this narrative, separating the end of what is now chapter 9 from the beginning of what is now chapter 10.

Wycliffe then decided to incorporate these chapter divisions in the Bible that he translated into English in 1382, being the first to do so, and thereby making the separation permanent.  Almost every printed edition of the English Bible, and many versions published in other languages since then have continued Archbishop Langton’s chapter divisions.  However, it keeps you from seeing the inner connection that runs through the passage.

Jesus is going through the towns and villages of Galilee, preaching and healing.  Healing is particularly emphasized in this text and elsewhere in Matthew.  In a day when so many were without adequate health care coverage, then as now, people were desperate for alternative health care options.  Of course the health care delivery system was not so good back then as well.  Medical science was not entirely unknown.  Roman surgeons were even practicing cataract operations in the first century.  But access to medical resources was for the most part confined to the upper classes.  You had to be wealthy to be able to afford regular health care – sound familiar?

This is why Jesus was so popular among the crowds.  It was not so much his teaching but his healing that drew them.  All this disease and sickness set the occasion for his calling and sending here in the middle of Matthew’s Gospel.  But then the text takes an interesting interpretive turn.  Confronted with the conditions of sickness and disease, the maladies of his era, Jesus perceives them not to be a medical condition but a social condition, a spiritual condition.  Jesus sees the multitude, the crowd, the masses, the ochlous/ὄχλους to be, literally in Greek, cut loose, unfastened, unhinged, and to be cast down, downtrodden, thrown under foot.

The people are exhausted, harassed, despondent; they are fainthearted and helpless in some translations.  That is because they are without leadership, like sheep without a shepherd, says Jesus.  It’s not because the problems are so large, it is because the vision of their supposed-leaders is so small.  It’s not a problem with the sheep; it is a problem with the shepherds. Seeing the need, Jesus turns to his disciples and changing the metaphor from animal husbandry to agriculture, says, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few; pray therefore that the supervisor of the harvest sends out workers.”

Okay, wait a minute.  Just one or two verses before, Matthew is telling us that Jesus was healing all the diseases and sickness that he encountered.  Now in verse 38 he seems to be asking his disciples to pray that the one who is his supervisor go find other workers to help.  It is as if Jesus is admitting that he cannot do all this work on his own or by himself.  Let me go a bit further here and suggest it in even stronger terms:  perhaps Jesus could have done it all on his own, but it appears that he chose not to.  Rather, he chose to involve others, namely his disciples, to help him to get the work done.

Let’s go even further.  Yes, perhaps on philosophical or even theological grounds we can argue that God could have chosen just to go ahead and save the world without us, that God being God could have created a universe that did not include the option for human failure and sin, and that God could have restored things without involving direct human agency or participation in salvation.  But this is not the case.  Rather, it appears that God has chosen quite the opposite.  It appears God has chosen not to act apart from us, but rather, God has chosen to act in and through us in this world, through you and through me, through others, to get the job done.

Here is the mystery:  God calls us, God invites us, to be co-workers with God, to participate with God in the project of restoring and renovating the universe, of rebuilding communities, of reaching out to the downtrodden and the unhinged and the lost and the desperate ones.  God does not save the world alone.  And if God does not save the world alone, why do we who are trying to be leaders in the church so often think we can do it alone?  Why do we think that ministry is what the pastor does?  Why do we think that leadership is only what the pastor is supposed to provide?  Ministry in God’s realm is collaborative.  It is shared.  Leadership is participatory.  It is engaged.  We are all called to do it.  You were ordained into ministry at your baptism.  Get used to it!

You see, Jesus doesn’t want us do it all alone.  He tells his disciples, hey, go talk to the supervisor of the harvest to get some more help out here to help get the work done. And then he turns to them and says, “On second thought, let me send you guys!”

Do you see that?  When you read verses 9:38 and 10:1 together, you catch the quick shift: 9:38:  He said to his disciples, “Ask the supervisor of the harvest to send out workers into the field.”  10:1:  And he called to himself his twelve disciples and gave them power to cast out unclean spirits and to heal all sickness and disease.  “Ask the supervisor to send help.  On second thought, let me send you guys.”

Skip down to verse 5 next.  I will come back to the guys he sends in a minute. Verse 5 reads:  “These twelve Jesus sent out and instructed, ‘Do not go among the ethnē, the nations, or into any polis, or city, of Samaria, but go among these lost sheep of the house of Israel….”  These are the ones I have been talking about– the downtrodden, the despondent, the fainthearted, the discouraged, the disoriented, the outsiders, the lost sheep of the house of Israel.  In other words, your neighbors.  Your “peeps,” as they say.

The people in your family and community who you know are in need of a helping hand.  Those who are suffering that you run into every day in your office or at the car dealership.  Those who were once coming to your church but are no longer showing up on Sunday mornings.  Those who were once on the inside but are now for some reason thought to be on the outside.  Go and bring the good news.  Do it by performing the good news.  Don’t just tell people about the Good News.  Enact it.  Perform it.  Do it yourself.

“Cure the sick.  Raise the Dead.  Cleanse the lepers.  Cast out demons.  And don’t worry about how you are going to pay for it all.  You received without pay, give without pay.”

That’s the commission, but who are the ones commissioned?  I passed over verses 2-4.  Those are the verses that name the twelve:  Simon Peter, Andrew, James and his brother John, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.

A couple of observations are in order here.  First, they are all men.  Now we know from numerous other texts that there were plenty of women following Jesus, who were also listed among his disciples.  The women were the ones who supported him financially, Luke in fact tells us.  This means they were women of means, women of some wealth.  Women traveled with him on the road to Jerusalem.  They are among the crowds that touch him.  Some like the Syro-Phoenician woman he even credits with having more faith than anyone, including one would suppose these twelve disciples even, in all of Israel.

Women were the first to get to the tomb on Easter morning.  Women were the first to proclaim the good news of the resurrection.  Women were the ones Jesus entrusted himself to, to anoint him prior to his death.  He didn’t have any problem teaching them in their homes, as Mary and Martha, and charging them with the work of proclaiming his resurrection message, as he did to Mary Magdalene.  So why are there only men among the twelve?

Let me offer several suggestions.  It is possible as scholars have often suggested that Jesus was trying to make a symbolic statement by naming the twelve.  The symbolic statement was made against his own community backdrop, of Israel being made up of twelve tribes, each with an original brother as head of the tribe.  In other words, Jesus was trying here to reconstitute the household of Israel by naming an alternative twelve who would embody a new or renewed Israel.

Please to not read into this later anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism.  Jesus is a Jew.  He is not turning against the household of Israel, he is trying to reform it.  There is nowhere in Jesus where you can read successionism or suppressionism–that the Church somehow has succeeded and thus needs to suppress Judaism, or the house of Israel; that the promise to Israel given in Abraham is no longer valid, that Christianity has somehow superseded Judaism.  I think quite the opposite can be seen in Paul, who sees the covenant with Abraham being irrevocable and argues that Christianity is the way the Gentiles get grafted on to this Jewish tree.

And it is certainly not anywhere in Jesus’ world view to throw away the promises of Israel.  Later in Matthew Jesus tells his followers to listen to the Pharisees, for they sit on the seat of Moses and have his authority.  Jesus tells his followers to listen to what the Pharisees teach, just do not do what they do, for they do not follow their own teachings. This sounds pretty much like many churches I know.

Perhaps, as some scholars have recently argued, the insertion of the name of the twelve here actually came later.  Maybe Jesus originally called men and women equally to be his followers and equally to be in ministry.  After all in Mark this same passage tells us that Jesus sent out his followers two by two. One wonders if he sent out men and women in pairs, Peter and Mary Magdalene perhaps.  But later, after his resurrection, after he was gone, the brothers got together and decided to drop the part about the women being a part of the work.  After all, it was men who did the writing back then for the most part.  Maybe by the time they got around to writing the text, patriarchy and male dominance had taken over to such an extent that the women had their names left out of the list and written out of the books.  What we were left with was the name of twelve men who appointed themselves to be the leadership team–without the women.  It is not entirely implausible.  Things like that have happened in the church through the centuries.

But without making any decision on these theories, let me offer an insight from the text that I think is quite compelling, even–or especially – for a church that is committed to fullness and inclusion in ministry today. It isn’t the fact that there are twelve men that catches my attention in the text.  It is the fact that it is twelve men who have very little in the way of social standing, very little in the way of social power for their day.

These are not twelve educated men with graduate degrees and solid training.  They are a bunch of fishermen, tax collectors, and at least one misguided revolutionary.  It is a rag-tag group of workers.  It is not much to build the commonwealth of God upon.

Verse 4 names Judas Iscariot, and says explicitly that he betrayed him.  But I read the rest of the story in the Gospel.  They all betrayed him one way or another.  Peter denied him.  The revolutionary ran and hid with the others.  None of them bothered to stay with him near the cross, except maybe John, the beloved disciple, and even he appears to have kept quiet.

Here is my thinking:  I pick twelve associates to work with me, I train them and give them power and authority to cast out evil spirits and perform the same kind of miracles I can perform.  I spend three years with them, and then on the night when it really counts, on the night of my trial, they all run off and leave me?  I’m sorry, but I am going to start over on the other side of the resurrection, fire the whole bunch of them, get rid of this rag-tag crew of mine, and go find some new workers to train.

But this is the mystery for me, this is the miracle.  Jesus in Matthew 28 did not go find a new group of people in leadership.  He came back to the same bunch of losers.  And even though some of them, Matthew says, still doubted, he still sent them.  It didn’t matter that they had failed him.  He didn’t seem bothered by their doubts.  Instead he gave them an even bigger mission to do this time.  Go and make disciples now of all nations.

Jesus didn’t call folks whom the world would have thought of as being among the best and the brightest of his day.  He called people that in the eyes of the dominant culture did not amount to much. He did not call people with extraordinary gifts, he called ordinary people to do extraordinary things. Jesus calls ordinary people like you and me.  He calls people who might not even have all the necessary credentials and training to get the job done.  That doesn’t mean you don’t go get the training and earn the credential.  It just means that the calling does not depend upon the qualifications of the one being called.  The calling is what qualifies one in the first instance, and then inspires one to realize or complete the process of qualification.

Jesus calls us to ministry–all of us.  He calls us to collaborate and work together, not to go it alone, but to be a part of a working community, to take a team approach, as he did and as he still does.

And finally Jesus doesn’t give up on us, even when we mess up in leadership.  Jesus did not abandon those disciples.  He went back to them again in Matthew and told them once again to get back to work.

Jesus is calling you today to get back to work in the fields of ministry in the world.  Jesus is calling the church to turn itself inside out and upside down, to get out into the world where it is needed, to take on the mission God has given to it in this time, in this place. Jesus is still sending us out to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers and cast out demons. You need to equip yourself for the ministry ahead–no question about it.

Don’t worry if your co-workers do not look like they are coming from the ranks of the best and the brightest.  God called you, God called them, Christ is sending you, Christ is sending them–that is all that matters, that is all that counts.

Go, Get to work!  There is much to do all around you.  The fields are still ripe for the harvest. There are broken lives to mend, health care systems that need to be rebuilt, food banks that need to be replenished, principalities and powers in high places that need to be pulled down, injustices that need to be righted, oppression that needs to be overthrown, words of hope that need to be spoken. There are people who need to know that God loves them.  There are people who need to know that God is pretty upset with them.

There are still unclean spirits to cast out, outsiders to bring in, downtrodden to be uplifted. It is time to get back to work, time to mount back up on the barricades. Time to go for God!

People of God:   God is not going to do this work without you.  God has decided to do this work through you.  Don’t worry if you don’t always think you are up to the task.  Look at the twelve that Jesus called in Matthew 10.  If he can work with that hard-headed, slow-to-get-it crowd, he can work with you and all the wonderful folks who are a part of your congregations.

And if he wouldn’t give up on these twelve who all abandoned him, he is not giving up on you.  God has not given up on your church.   God has not given up on New York City.  God has not given up on the world God created.

So go! Get busy!

And if he wouldn’t give up on these twelve, who all abandoned him, he is not giving up on you. God has not given up on your church. God has not given up on New York City. God has not given up on the world God created. So go! Get busy!

May God renew you in the days to come, now and until the end of the age.  Amen.

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[1] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future, or the Modern Mind Outrun (New York:  Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946), 62.

[2] Donald B. Kraybill, The Upside-Down Kingdom (Scottdale, PA:  Herald Press, 1978; revised ed. 2003).

[3] Johannes Christiaan Hoekendijk, The Church Inside Out (Philadelphia:  Westminster Press, 1966).