Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

The readings for Sunday, June 18, 2023:

First reading and Psalm

Genesis 18:1-15, (21:1-7)

Psalm 116:1-2, 12-19

Second reading

Romans 5:1-8

Gospel

Matthew 9:35-10:8, (9-23)


In many modern churches, especially in the time around Pentecost, we spend a lot of time talking about mission, even if we're not realizing we're talking about it. Does the church exist to serve the members? Does the church exist to serve the community? And what do we mean when we talk about the church anyway?

In this Sunday's Gospel, we get a very different vision of the early church than we'll get in parts of Acts. In Acts, we often see the early believers arguing about doctrine, like who gets to belong and who doesn't--and once we've decided who gets to participate, there are debates about how to participate, like what can be eaten and when it should be eaten.

In this Sunday's Gospel, we see a vision of the early church in the way that Paul will practice it. Jesus gives instructions to his disciples to go out taking very little with them: no food, no money, not even a change of clothes. Their mission: "Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons."

And what will they get for their troubles? They will be flogged in the synagogues and drug before rulers, where we assume a gruesome death will follow. Their message will divide families, but they are to persevere, to endure.

I think about those early disciples and our current time. The early disciples lived in a time of upheaval, and Jesus had fomented even more unrest. We, too, inhabit a time of social unrest with threats both familiar and new. We, too, sense we are at a hinge moment in history, when the time before us will be completely different to the time we lived in not too long ago.

In these days when we can't budget in the ways we once did, how can we possibly plan for our mission in the coming months and years? We have spent years and decades learning to make plans and budgets, skills which seem useless now.  Each day, if we listen to news and social media platforms, we get news of how the church seems increasingly irrelevant to the larger world.

Yet our mission remains the same: to care for the outcast of society, to speak truth to the ones who rule, to cast out the demons that oppress society. Jesus sends his disciples out into the world without a plan, without a budget, without supplies, without a script. He trusts them to be able to think on their feet, to react to the circumstances that they actually encounter, instead of planning for encounters that may never happen.

Jesus ends with one last piece of instruction: "See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves" (Matthew 10: 16). 

Let us all be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, a mission that is as important now as it ever was.