The Mission of the Twelve (or, when and how it's about us)

Proper 6/3rd after Pentecost, year A 2023; Matt 9:35-10:8(9-23)

In this week’s Gospel Jesus calls and sends the twelve apostles/disciples (see below). The Revised Common Lectionary gives an optional extension, adding the detailed instructions of Jesus to the Twelve (Matt 10:9-23) for those wanting more (we should). In either case, the Gospel offers an important text about mission, but also implicitly a difficult question about how we read texts like these, relative to our own life and work.

One of the benefits and demands of reading Matthew as a narrative through the year is to learn that the story actually develops, and that things change: about Jesus, about the disciples, and about us. What may be true in this one Gospel today is not necessarily all that is true in the end.

The core Gospel that all we read (including in the Roman Catholic lectionary) depicts Jesus ministering in Galilee and calling the twelve; the RCL version also adds 9:35 at the beginning, an almost explosively dense summary of Jesus’ healing and preaching (which glances back to two stories we have skipped, as well as those we read last week), before shifting focus to calling and sending. Then comes the hinge between his activity and the call of others:

When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

Jesus’ own actions here (9:35-38) are clearly not for general imitation. Matthew is quite clearly presenting Jesus’ ministry here as bound up in his unique role as the Messiah. He has compassion on the people who are “like sheep without a shepherd,” referring to the lack of just and effective leadership in Israel—and he comes to provide it. His ministry is a sign of that leadership, given that he heals and liberates those whom he encounters, but it is also a part of something larger, a sign that (as he urges the apostles/disciples to preach), ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ This is about Jesus.

Jesus then calls the twelve in response. Matthew refers to them here as both “twelve disciples” and then “twelve apostles.” This may seem insignificant, but it points to an issue in how we read this passage as a whole. “Apostles” is typically a more specific, and even exclusive, term in early Christian writings generally; everyone is a disciple, but not everyone is an apostle. Jesus (or Matthew, or Matthew’s sources) calls them both here, but in order: first they are not a unique group (10:1), but then they are (10:2).

This detail is important, and can shape how we read the following passage. I am half-fearing sermons this week that ponder briefly all the wonder-working then tell us all to “go and do likewise.” This will either be either dispiriting, if we take this mission at face value, or else underwhelming, if we take it to refer to whatever nice things we do anyway. Such interpretation assumes however that the apostles/disciples stand for us, and that we are ourselves called to just this sort of ministry. What if—hear me out—we are not?

Of course Jesus does extend his own mission to the twelve, and in very deliberate terms. Yet just as his own actions were not some generalized set of amazing powers, but the arrival of the world-changing reign of God (at a specific point in time), so too the revolutionary expansion of his messianic power via these twelve others is confronting and exceptional, not a general model of mission.

This Gospel depicts a reality very different from any of ours, and challenges our tendency to read every passage of scripture as about us. It isn’t wrong to think of all scripture as “for” us, but that isn’t quite the same as it being “about” us. Even some quite profound processes of scriptural reflection, if not really fully understood—here I am thinking of lectio divina or Ignatian exercises— can encourage the thought that we are always in every story. I don’t think that’s how these processes are meant to work, but it is how our contemporary world-view often works; that is, we are told to assume that everything is about and for us, and to imagine otherwise is somehow perplexing, or just offensive.

Any temptation to assimilate this story to general ideas about mission however is undermined by the details. It’s not just that we are bewildered by a call to “cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons” (we should be), but the historical specifics are jarring: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Matthew has a specific picture of the messianic mission for Israel during Jesus’ ministry, and that it can only become universal later.

So this isn’t a general paradigm for ministry, it’s a specific and limited one-time campaign in the war against evil, part of the ancient story of Jesus and not first and foremost the story of us. The good news here is perhaps that this enacted proclamation of God’s reign did take place, that others were at the heart of it, and even that it wasn’t about you.

So today it would make sense to consider what it means to understand Jesus as that Messiah for Israel, of the place that God’s redeeming revolution begins, not first in each of our hearts (sorry) but in a specific place and time.

And yet. This interim campaign to Israel has a place in a bigger picture, which for Matthew will (eventually) climax in a mission to all nations (Matt 28:19-20). Here is where we will come in, in a different way. The call to participate in mission does exist, but it is not heard by just assuming all of this is always about us, or about us now. We do have a place in the reign of God, and the practice to which we are called may be as revolutionary as described in this Gospel, but it may not be right now.

Nevertheless there are hints here, both of how we may (also) come to receive deliverance from powers of evil ourselves, and then of how we may be called to take part it in. This story however invites us today to think with thanks and awe about the mission of Jesus, and the mission of the twelve. Jesus came as Israel’s Messiah and called a new set of leaders to represent a renewed Israel through whom all the nations would be blessed. In Matthew’s story we will also have Gospel to proclaim, not because of ourselves but because of him, and because of them.