Jesus’ Missionary Instructions: How different history might have been…
This Sunday’s text (Lk 10:1–11) is Jesus’ reiteration—in greater detail—of his earlier “missionary instructions” (9:1–6). This double tradition, unique to Luke, articulates the gospel’s most important—and tragically most disregarded—teaching about evangelism as community-building.
In our 2021 Healing Haunted Histories: A Settler Discipleship of Decolonization (pp 132-141), Elaine and I focused on the “short version.” We look at it through the lens of the long and often lamentable history of Christian colonizing, which unfolded as a result of how the church ignored Jesus’ straightforward counsel! HARP (pp 94-97) summarizes that study, and this is necessary background for interpreting the “sending of the 70” in this week’s text.
Luke’s expanded version of the missionary instructions begins with two metaphors reflecting hardships of agrarian life: a harvest needing laborers, and lambs stalked by wolves (10:2–3). Jesus then increases the list of prohibited missionary “baggage” (staff, bag, bread, money, tunics in 9:3), adding “purse and sandals” (10:4), thus intensifying the traveler’s vulnerability. Dependent upon hospitality, when it is offered disciples are to pronounce a blessing of peace, and discern from the host’s response whether “that peace will return to you” (10:5–6). Jesus also expands the instruction of 9:4: “Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide… Do not move about from house to house. Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you” (10:7–8). In other words, don’t move around looking for a better deal, don’t demand special treatment, and eat locally and gratefully (stated twice).
In villages where the missionary is received (dechomai), healing and proclamation of the Great Economy should ensue (10:9), as befits the ethos of reciprocity. But where
there is no welcome, Jesus repeats that on their way out of town disciples may protest by shaking dust off their feet (9:5 = 10:10–12). Malina and Rohrbaugh write: “The Greek word here is better translated ‘squares’ than ‘streets.’ These squares, usually at the intersection of internal city walls, were used for public ceremonies and communication with the non-elite of the city… thus a very public act. When Israelites returned to the holy land from foreign lands, they shook the dust from their feet.”
Though the RCL omits 10:12-15, it should be included, since it represents the prophetic alternative to retribution for inhospitality. The disciples have just suggested the latter upon their rejection by Samaritans in 9:51-55, an episode that inspires Jesus’ lament about homelessness (9:58-62) but also a reiteration of his injunction against forcing the gospel on anyone. Disciples respond only with a symbolic ritual that expresses regret at how “the Great
Economy” came near that village (10:11).
This is accompanied, however, by a solemn “I tell you” (10:12) that re-members the story of Sodom (Gen 19). There, locals refused hospitality to, and then abused, the same angelic strangers whom Abraham and Sarah had just welcomed (Gen 18)! Jesus then again invokes prophetic “Woes” (as he does eleven other times in Luke),
aimed here at the trio of villages on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee—Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum (Lk 10:13-14) that are prominent in the gospel narrative. These he accuses of demonstrating greater hard-heartedness than enemy cities such as Tyre and Sidon!
These instructions conclude with the powerful warning: “Whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the One who sent me” (10:16). The two verbs tell the story: atheteō is a strong repudiation, like nullifying or violating a covenant, and is used no fewer than four times in this sentence; apostello (from whence our word “apostle” comes) means “to send.” These represent the two poles of the mission vocation: going out and being welcomed in—or not!
Both sets of missionary instructions conclude with one-sentence epilogues about the return of those sent out (9:10; 10:17). Jesus’ “counsel for the road” is an interesting artifact of his ancient movement, all the more poignant because of its subsequent wholesale dismissal by Christian missions across two millennia. But what does it have to do with Sabbath Economics? As the primal catechism of Exodus 16 outlines (HARP, 2A), a sharing-based ethos of community economics rooted in a cosmology of grace can be subverted (and ultimately destroyed) by two kinds of selfish behavior:
- Taking too much of the gift (Ex 16:16–18). Luke’s missionary instructions articulate a model for receiving hospitality with an eye toward problems of overreaching (or overstaying). Jesus understood that practicing intentional vulnerability and dependence are the best hedges against presumptions of entitlement or pathologies of greed that turn guest into conquest. The extractive and exploitive history of colonizing missions painfully reveals the genocidal consequences of ignoring Jesus’s instructions about self-limitation and replacing them with ideologies of superiority and domination. As Patrick Wolfe put it succinctly, “settler colonizers come to stay” on an “expropriated land base.” Needless to say, this is the opposite of bringing good news.
- Not sharing Commonwealth resources to which one has access (Ex 16:19). Implied in the missionary instructions is the conviction that hospitality will be extended in traditional village networks, and an itinerant organizer for the Great Economy actually strengthens this ethos by calling on it. As long as missionaries reciprocate with gifts of healing, mutual aid, and solidarity—and do not stay too long or consume too much—they are encouraging the circulatory receiving and giving material hospitality that is intrinsic to community economics.
This resonates with Indigenous practices of gift exchange, summed up by Lewis Hyde: “A cardinal property of the gift [is]: whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept… The
only essential is this: the gift must always move… ‘One person’s gift…. must not be another man’s capital.’”
These “marching orders” tell the two pillars of Sabbath Economics. Luke’s wilderness feeding, in turn—which he inserts between the two lessons—shows hospitality to vulnerable people in hard times through the practice of mutual aid. So does the equally well-known parable of the Good Samaritan—the 5th Sunday after Pentecost’s gospel lesson—which is another Sabbath Economics lesson of sustenance in the desert we’ll look at next week.
Jesus’ instructions for how to build a movement, and how not to, were clear and unequivocal. How different might the history of the world have been had Christian missionaries practiced them faithfully.
HARP Zoom Forum Details: The start of the twice-monthly zoom forum from July-Oct has been moved from July 2 to July 23rd. If you are registered and have questions, contact Chris Wight at inquiries@bcm-net.org.
Only 4 weeks more to use the HARP 20% off discount code SOJO20 at my page on Bookshop.org; it expires at the end of this month!
-Ched
