The second section of three into which Matthew divides his record of the Lord's mission instructions to His disciples refers, as we have seen, to the period that began with Pentecost:
... a testimony to Gentiles is in view - v. 18
... the gift of the Holy Spirit is assumed - v. 20
... active persecution, not mere indifference, is expected from the Jews - v. 17
It is worth noting just how literal a fulfilment the warning Jesus gave here was to have: "They will deliver you up to councils, and flog you in their synagogues." In Acts 22:19, you read a persecutor's testimony: "In every synagogue I imprisoned and beat those who believed in You" ... Paul, later recalling his Pharisee days. To King Agrippa he would say, "I punished them often in all the synagogues ... and in raging fury, I persecuted them even to foreign cities." (Acts 22:19, 26:11) Paul regarded himself as belonging to this era of the Disciples' Mission: "I joined it late," he would say, and he took his share of the persecution he had once himself handed out: "Five times I have received at the Jews' hands the 'forty stripes save one'; three times I have been beaten with rods; once I was stoned." It was he who did most to spread the Mission out beyond Israel's borders, in fact, taking the Gospel through Asia, Greece and the islands of the sea to Rome, before Jerusalem fell and Israel ceased as a country to exist.
Out of the instructions for this second phase of mission we again seek to distil principles. We cannot apply to our own day every detail of what Jesus said here without some thought.
The word 'behold' with which this section begins (v. 16) is to arrest attention; it means , "Listen now."
"I send you," Jesus said. The Lord Himself, not the church, sends us out. It is as the Church that we are sent. We cannot 'go it alone.' Indeed the Lord never meant us to. He sent them out in pairs, and regathered them afterwards, so that the whole mission was undertaken in a fellowship setting. That is how it must always be.
But the call, nonetheless, is a thing we have to experience at a deeply personal level. It is not a matter of: "Well, I'm in the church now, so I suppose I had better go along with what it does." You do go along with what it does, but because Jesus says to you, directly, "I send you."
Where will this week's life take us? To a bank? To a school? To a hospital? To a solicitor's office? To a workshop? We are sent there, by Jesus. We are under orders to go, on His business.
Then Jesus said this astonishing thing: "I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves."
Christian Mission is a risky business! We are quite defenceless out there. And we shall be attacked - hunted, even, in packs - and our only defence will be our Christian spirit of faith and love. The true mark of a disciple on mission is his vulnerability. Our only defence against those who oppose us is our Christian spirit. That means:
• faithfulness, in our delivery of the message;
• love, in the way we deliver it, so that we confront all those to whom we go, even when they oppose us, with unconquerable goodwill;
• and faith - in the Shepherd of course, with Whom we are willing if need be to lay down our lives.
There is to be no retaliation when people reject or scorn or ill-treat us. We are not to turn into wolves ourselves.
Sheep we are, and sheep we are always to be. We have nothing with which to meet the enemy but the Word, and 'agape' love, and a capacity to suffer. Paul in II Cor. 4:1-14 says exactly that: "We have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways; we refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God's word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God. For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For while we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you."
To New Testament Christians suffering no longer posed the problem it does for us. They saw that the capacity to suffer without it hardening the heart was the creative means by which love triumphed. You won when you went on loving those who hated you - for the only victory worth winning is the victory of love, and it is as love persists through suffering that it finally wins. The only way to avoid the suffering is to cease from loving, for love makes us vulnerable.
In II Cor. 6, Paul went on: "We put no obstacle in any one's way so that no fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, tumults, labours, watching, hunger; by purity, knowledge, kindness, forbearance, the Holy Spirit, genuine love, truthful speech and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honour and dishonour, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything."
There you have a commitment to the spirit of vulnerable love so deep that Paul will not contemplate any sort of winning that does not come that way. If you do win by love, how you win! And if you fail? There is no other victory worth the winning anyway. That is what it means to be sent out as sheep in the midst of wolves.
I have never forgotten a thing I heard the then secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society in England, Victor Hayward, say to a college lecturer, "I never want to be less than vulnerable. I think when we cease to be vulnerable, we've ceased to be Christian." It is a great foolishness in the world's eyes. But it is a foolishness in which we should take a fierce and secret pleasure, for it is the very 'foolishness' by which God wins His way, as Paul said in I Cor. 1:27-29. (The foolishness of God is wiser ...)
We must face the fact, of course, that when we do bear our testimony to Jesus in this spirit, we may actually lose our lives for it. We have to be honestly ready for that. God has not promised that we shall always be protected. Those who overcome are described in Rev. 12:11 as those "who overcame by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death."
Clement of Rome, one of the early church fathers, had been preaching on this text, and he was asked, "But what if the wolves tear the sheep in pieces?" He replied, "Let not the sheep fear the wolves after death."
But we are not to be foolish about it! Jesus goes on, "Be wise as serpents, and innocent as doves."
Note in passing that a mention of a serpent does not - always - in Scripture refer to the devil. This one clearly does not; Jesus is hardly counselling us here to be like the devil. When Paul echoed this saying of Jesus in Rom. 16:19, "I would have you wise as to what is good and guileless as to what is evil," he went on to say, "for then the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet." We are not to be clever the way the devil is clever.
As a pastor, I am sometimes frustrated by the wooden-headedness with which folk read the Bible. They have learned that the devil is sometimes likened to a serpent, that oil is sometimes a symbol of the Holy Spirit and leaven a symbol of evil influence, and every time they see the word 'serpent' they interpret it to mean the devil, and every time they see the word 'oil' they understand it to mean the Holy Spirit, and every time they see the word 'leaven' they think it means evil, and it is simply unintelligent. I sometimes feel a sneaking regard for the Roman Catholics who maintain that the Scriptures are to be understood only as they are officially interpreted by the Church. It is a dangerous notion, of course, because it puts the Church which does the interpreting above the Scriptures which are to be interpreted, and that leads to all sorts of abuses. It is the Word that shapes the Church, not the Church that shapes the Word. Let the Church shape the Word, and revelation is taken out of the hands of God and put into the hands of man; and once that is done, there is no end to the nonsense men can impose on one another and claim divine authority for it. But when we leave the Word free to every man's conscience, as we must, we are exposed to the same risk. I suppose there is no solution to the dilemma ... which is why every generation must wrestle afresh with the Word of God. But wrestle with it we must ... and beware of letting ignorance or 'sloth of the mind' darken our understanding. As Paul said in I Cor. 14:20, "Brethren don't be childish in your thinking; be babes in evil, but in your thinking, grow up!"
"Be wise," Jesus said. The word means 'knowing,' 'cluey'. We are to be perceptive, not naive. "Beware of men," Jesus goes on; "don't play foolishly into their hands."
I remember seeing Dr Billy Graham interviewed by the Australian television interviewer, Mike Willesee, and he displayed just the quality Jesus pleads for here. Mike Willesee had obviously set out to make Billy Graham look foolish, and Billy answered him, courteously, but with so many hard facts and solid arguments and sensible observations that in the end it was Mike Willesee who looked foolish. Billy Graham was wise, cluey; but he was also innocent without being 'an innocent'.
You have the same sort of situation in Acts 7 where Stephen made his defence of the Gospel to the Jewish Council. He was no 'innocent' in the way he did that; what he gave the religious leaders was a masterly survey of their nation's history which demonstrated conclusively how the leaders he addressed were still resisting God and His truth the same way their forefathers always had. It was 'wise' and it was 'innocent', in the sense that it was a very plain statement of the truth - but it was not harmless.
As Martin Luther King said once, "Christians are to be tough-minded and tender-hearted. Too often they are soft-headed and hard-hearted ... the tough mind breaks through the crust of half-truths ... it sifts the true from the false."
That we need to do. "Is it not one of our greatest needs?" he went on. "Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think ... and this soft-mindedness invades religion so that religion has sometimes rejected truth with a dogmatic passion. Soft-minded persons have revised the Beatitudes to read, 'Blessed are the pure in ignorance: for they shall see God'! There is little hope for us until we become tough-minded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice (than which nothing is more damaging to truth) and half-truths and downright ignorance. A people that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own death on an instalment plan.
"But we must not stop with the cultivation of a tough mind. The Gospel also demands a tender heart. Tough-mindedness without tender-heartedness is cold and detached, leaving one in a perpetual winter devoid of warmth. Jesus reminds us that the good life combines the toughness of the serpent with the tenderness of the dove. To have serpent-like qualities devoid of dove-like qualities is to be passionless, mean and selfish. To have dove-like qualities without serpent-like qualities is to be sentimental, anæmic and aimless."
This was a verse which convinced Martin Luther King that he must pursue the path of non-violent resistance, "which," he said, "combines tough-mindedness and tender-heartedness, and avoids the complacency of the soft-minded and the bitterness of the hard-headed. Thus we shall be able to oppose the unjust system and at the same time love the perpetrators of the system."
He ended that sermon by observing that God Himself is both: "God has two outstretched arms. One is strong enough to discipline us with justice, and the other is gentle enough to embrace us with grace. On the one hand God is a God of justice who punished Israel for her wayward deeds, and on the other hand He is the forgiving Father whose heart is filled with unutterable joy when the prodigal returns home."
As Paul said, "Behold the severity and the kindness of God."
Wise as serpents, innocent as doves.
We may take in here v. 23: "When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next." We could interpret that to mean, "Be cowards!" That of course is not what Jesus meant. What He meant was, "Don't provoke hostility needlessly, stubbornly. Don't invite martyrdom." There is to be no wanton waste of Christian lives and witness. We may be obliged to accept death for our witness to the Gospel, but we are forbidden to court it. We are to be wise, not reckless and foolhardy.
v. 17: "They will deliver you up to councils and flog you in churches and drag you into courts."
Jesus never deceived us about the cost of discipleship. The normal reaction of the world to our testimony is hostility. That ought not to surprise us. Have we forgotten how repentance put the knife into our own pride? Our own experience should warn us. Opposition is to be expected, Jesus says here,
... from the state (you will be dragged before governors) v. 18
... from the church (you will be flogged in synagogues) v. 17
... from the family (brother will deliver up brother etc.) v. 21
Each of those institutions God Himself ordained. But the Christian must remember that every human institution, like man himself who was created too by God, has become infected with evil.
But none of them is to be defied lightly, only with a heavy heart.
Nonetheless, Jesus went on, you are to be confident in your witness.
v. 19: "When they deliver you up, don't be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you."
The words "don't be anxious" are the same words exactly as in Matt. 6:25: "Don't be anxious, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'what shall we drink?' or 'what shall we wear?'" The word means 'fretful anxiety.' "Don't get worked up into a lather of anxiety," in other words. It does not mean, "Don't bother to prepare yourself at all to defend the faith." We are to do that; as Peter would say, "Be prepared to give a reason for the faith that is in you." Jesus is not saying, "Don't prepare." He is saying, "Don't panic. The Holy Spirit Himself will inspire in you what you are to say. "
It does not hurt to give Him some raw material to work on in advance, though! Peter's boldness when he was hauled up before the Jerusalem Sanhedrin, and Stephen's too, were both examples of the truth of the promise Jesus here made; but you cannot say that neither of them was prepared. Indeed, the very word 'boldness' implies authority and confidence; they knew where they stood and what they believed. So must we.
The final word is, "Be steadfast, endure to the end." Not to the end of the world, or to the end of the age (many will die before then anyway) but to the end of the ordeal.
Our commitment must be for real. We have to go all the way with Jesus. It doesn't do to fight well all through the day till sunset, but at midnight be found in the enemy's camp. We have to see it through to the finish.
Remember there is to be a judgment. "The Son of Man will come."
"When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?" - in our hearts, burning brightly at the end of the day as at its beginning?
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