Jesus Sends Out the Twelve
Then Jesus went around teaching from village to village. 7Calling the Twelve to him, he sent them out two by two and gave them authority over evil spirits.
8These were his instructions: "Take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in your belts. 9Wear sandals but not an extra tunic. 10Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave that town. 11And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, shake the dust off your feet when you leave, as a testimony against them."
12They went out and preached that people should repent. 13They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them.
BACKGROUND READING:
Jeremiah 31
Matthew 10
Dig Deeper
Usually when someone is sent off on an urgent mission, they don’t have the time to take a lot of extra stuff with them. Not only do they not have time to pack, they generally don’t want a bunch of extra stuff with them, weighing them down and slowing their progress. This seems to be the basic gist behind Jesus’ instructions to his disciples here. The time was short and the mission was urgent. There was no time for extra supplies. This wasn’t a vacation. Nor were these instructions on how churches should continue to operate. Sometimes churches like to have special evangelism campaigns, and that’s okay, but this is certainly not the intent of this passage. This was a specific set of instructions for a specific mission, not a paradigm for future church operations.
In some ways, the disciples on this mission would have looked a lot like the Cynics of the time. These were a group of traveling teachers who went from town to town making their living by begging and teaching. They tended to teach that the present world was just a pretense of empty flash and that people shouldn’t pay any attention to it. In particular, they tended to take shots at the rich and comfortable. Some people, seeing a couple of Jesus’ disciples coming into a village, teaching and preaching may have thought, at first, that they were Cynics. The big difference between Jesus’ disciples and the Cynics was that the Cynics couldn’t cast out demons.
Casting out demons wasn’t just a way of helping distressed people who were under the control of these evil spirits. It was a sign, as Jesus has already pointed out, that the kingdom of God was coming upon the world. This is why the mission was so urgent. They were town-criers of sorts, spreading the urgent message of the kingdom of God to the Jews. They were telling people to get ready for something new (a message that the Cynics never would have given). Getting ready for this kingdom meant repenting and entirely changing one’s life and way of thinking, it wasn’t just regret over one’s sins. There was no room for compromise or time to waste.
In sending out his disciples he gave them a share of the dominion that he was wresting from Satan. God had originally given Adam dominion over the earth, but he surrendered that dominion at the Fall. Satan had held that dominion all this time, but now one stronger than he was here to take it back. What Jesus started in the desert, he would finish at the Cross, completely seizing dominion from Satan at that time. For now, Jesus gave his followers a certain amount of authority over demons. After his resurrection and before his ascension, he would give them the dominion mandate of his full authority. He would echo the dominion command from Genesis, telling his disciples to once again exercise dominion on God’s behalf throughout the earth, being fruitful and multiplying. God has sent out his twelve representatives before, in the form of the twelve tribes of Israel, to be the light of the world, but they had failed miserably. These new twelve representatives, being sent out as both a literal and symbolic act, would not fail.
Jesus was always a realist, though, and he realized that not everyone would receive his message happily. The message was too urgent and the time to short to dwell on those people though. If they didn’t want to hear it, then his disciples should engage in the common symbolic action at the time of wiping the dust off of their feet. They shouldn’t tarry, but should move onto the next town.
This wasn’t just an act of being more efficient by sending out six groups rather than all staying together. In sending out the twelve to drive out evil as they went, Jesus is setting up another deeply symbolic act. He is sending off his twelve, his recreation of God’s renewed people in an echo of the original conquering of the promised land in the name of YHWH. A great climax in the annals of history was coming very soon. So, Jesus, in sending out this mission was gathering supporters, giving as many Jews as possible a last chance to repent before history changed dramatically, and laying the groundwork for the very different kind of kingdom that was about to come to fruition.
Although Jesus’ mission here doesn’t relate directly to us today, it would be unwise to set it aside as completely irrelevant for us. The setting and circumstances of our times are different but perhaps our response should not be. The church needs to be discerning and understand the urgency of our own time and craft a message that will spread to the world the fact that the great exile between God and man can come to an end in the kingdom of God.
Devotional Thought
Do you look around for the urgent situations that your country, community, or friends have put themselves in? Maybe it’s a disastrous national policy, or gang violence, or a dangerous personal decision that someone has made. Do you share the message of God’s reconciling kingdom with an urgency that equals the situation at hand?
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