I was exchanging emails the other day with someone who has been taking a New Testament class I’ve been teaching at a church. As often happens with classes like that, this woman has found herself drawn in to the text and to the swarm of questions that fly around it. We were emailing back and forth about the question of interpretation—how you might know what a passage means, and how you might discern between competing interpretations. My response to her, and to anyone who asks me a version of that question, is that the New Testament doesn’t mean anything, and it can mean any number of things. That is, the text itself never has any meaning apart from the meanings we give it—it only begins to have meaning when a reader reads it—and that because every reader is different from each other and even from themselves in other times and circumstances, the meanings that we produce with the text are infinite. So a particular interpretation can never be right, and it is also unlikely that it will be wrong in any demonstrable, verifiable sense. There are simply different reactions by different readers that interact with the text in different ways in different times and places to produce different readings.
In looking at the lectionary for this week, I am feeling a version of that dynamic. The two texts that really catch my eye are the one from Genesis, about the visitors to Abraham and Sarah and the divine message that they would have a child, and the one from Matthew, in which Jesus instructs his disciples and sends them out. I’m preaching this coming Sunday (something I do occasionally but not really frequently), using the Genesis text, so I thought I would focus on the Matthew text in this post. But as I began to try to narrow down what I thought was happening in the text, I realized that there were so many competing interpretations—even within my own mind, not even counting anyone else’s—that it was hard to choose just one. So rather than write a whole post about one angle on this passage, I thought I would offer a menu—an overview of a few different interpretative options, or hooks, that I notice while reading it.
Economics is so deeply embedded in the New Testament that we sometimes don’t notice it. But look at 9:37-38, and see if the language looks familiar. It’s the language of a labor shortage: “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.” If you’ve tried to buy anything over the last few years, from food in a drive-through lane to a new car, you’ve probably noticed labor shortages. If you’ve tried to hire someone, or if you’ve had to pick up the slack from unfilled positions in your workplace, you know the dilemma Jesus is talking about here. In an agricultural setting like the one Jesus is using as a metaphor, this is a big problem. There’s a short window to gather the harvest, and if you don’t succeed in bringing it in, then it rots on the vine or molds in the field. As people living in an agricultural society, both Jesus and his audience would have known that. So his choice here to use agricultural labor as a metaphor for his mission is both intentional and pointed. It suggests an urgency to the work, and it also suggests that the harvest is in danger of failing if the work can’t be done in time.
But what kind of work is it? Modern-day Christians are probably socialized to think of the outward-facing labor of Christian mission as primarily spiritual; we are probably inclined to think that Jesus is sending his disciples out to save souls. But that’s not even remotely what the text is talking about. He’s sending them to cast out unclean spirits, and to cure every disease and sickness (9:35), and then later to cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, and cast out demons (10:8). This is precisely what Jesus seems to have spent most of his time doing, so it probably shouldn’t surprise us, but the subsequent history of Christianity is so overdetermined by missionary proselytizing that we don’t always stop to notice that proselytizing was not what most of the biblical figures were doing. We could summarize Jesus’ charge to his disciples here as healthcare work. They’re curing sickness, which looks familiar as healthcare work, but they’re also casting out unclean spirits, which almost all of the time in New Testament contexts means 1) intervening in someone’s life to change their behavior, in a way that we might associate with intervening in mental illness today, and 2) intervening in the patterns of perception with which those persons’ neighbors and family understand them. The tasks in view here are really physical healthcare and mental healthcare (even if we would want to do both of these things differently in our own time, with our own understandings of medicine). There’s no suggestion of telling anyone about Jesus or convincing them to accept him as a savior, or anything even close to that.
There’s one other thing Jesus charges the disciples to do, and no, it’s not saving souls. “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘the kingdom of heaven has come near.’” Now, again, we might be tempted to read this as proselytizing; after all, “heaven” reads to us like a reference to an afterlife, which sounds suspiciously like Jesus is talking about salvation. But all Jesus is doing here is reiterating the core message of his whole ministry (at least as depicted in the synoptic gospels; John is a different story), which is the radical immanence of God’s reign. This is mixed up in messianic expectations, nationalist fantasies, anti-imperialist desires, and Jesus’ own (and Matthew’s own) understandings that the world was about to change. The “kingdom of God” in Mark and Luke, and the “kingdom of heaven” in Matthew, are ways of talking about what Jesus meant in the context of the cosmos and history. (Matthew probably used “heaven” instead of “God” because, as a Jewish person, he felt that saying God’s name was improper, even the generic noun that Mark and Luke used). This charge to proclaim the nearness of the kingdom of heaven has to be understood in context; Jesus and his disciples were living under Roman occupation, with a keen consciousness that the historical monarchies of Israel and Judah had been lost, and expecting a restoration of that kingdom, led by both God and one or more messiahs. Jesus seems to have spiritualized that kingdom a bit, moving it out of the realm of the strictly political and have it mean something about himself, God’s intervention in the world, and the Judean monarchy. I’m left wondering what people would have thought, when some random preacher showed up to their village proclaiming a coming kingdom. Would it have been welcome news? Would it have been a surprise? Would it have brought hope and expectation, or dread? There were so many different understandings of messiahship and kingdom floating around, I imagine that different people would have heard that message really differently.
Something interesting happens in 10:5-6: Jesus restricts this mission to Jews only. He specifically instructs them not to go to gentiles or Samaritans. (As an aside, I can’t stand it when texts—like the NRSV does here—capitalize “gentiles,” as if it were an ethnic group or otherwise a proper noun. It’s not—it’s a generic noun that means “nations,” and when we capitalize it, we introduce confusion into the text that doesn’t need to be there, because people start to think that gentiles are Gentiles, a defined ethic or political entity. Not the case). Jesus is saying that this is a mission for Israel, for the Jews, and not for anyone else. (In Matthew 28:19, in the so-called “Great Commission,” Jesus does expand the mission to include gentiles, telling the disciples to go to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” It’s worth noting that the word being translated “nations” there is exactly the same one being translated “gentiles” in 10:5 and elsewhere; the choice to translate it one way or the other is contextual, and kind of up to the translator). This pattern of Jews-first, gentiles-later appears in a bunch of different places in the New Testament (including Paul’s work as described in Acts, and arguably the gospel of John), so it might reflect a historical understanding on the part of Jesus’ followers about the priorities of his work.
10:9-10 are interesting, because they return to economics. Jesus tells them to “take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff, for laborers deserve their food.” This passage has been interpreted in diametrically opposed ways, both as an argument that people in ministry should not be paid (or should be paid meagerly), and as an argument that they should be paid (or paid well). On the one hand, the disciples are being told to live simply and travel light. On the other hand, Jesus is saying that they deserve their food. I’ve heard this preached as a text about humility and frugality before, but I wonder if that’s really what it’s saying. It almost reads like Jesus telling the disciples to live off other people’s resources, not their own. It’s one of those passages that can produce a different interpretation for everyone who reads it.
I’ve also heard a lot of sermons on 10:11-15, which is about hospitality. There are some great biblical texts about hospitality (and inhospitality), including the one referenced explicitly here, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s rarer, I think, to hear about hospitality from the perspective of the visitor or guest; usually we are hearing about it from the perspective of the host. Jesus is suggesting that some hosts are “worthy” and others are not, and that the response to an unworthy host ought to be to simply leave. Given the deep history of hospitality texts in the Hebrew Bible and other parts of Jewish tradition, this instruction has a lot riding on it. Showing proper hospitality was a critical behavioral requirement; the text in this week’s lectionary from Genesis 18 shows that as clearly as anything. If someone was willing to ignore the strong injunction to show hospitality to strangers and travelers, who knows what other things they were willing to ignore.
The verses that come after 10:15 seem to reflect a later stage of the Jesus tradition, in which Jesus’ followers might have faced pushback from the rest of the society at large. The warnings against councils, synagogues, governors, and kings reflects some of what is narrated in Acts, and indeed in the latter parts of the gospels. There are different forms of power in view here—councils and synagogues probably refer to local Jewish structures of governance and communal life, while governors and kings refer to imperial-level representatives of power. The gospels often emphasize that former category, the local Jewish forms of power, probably because that’s the most immediate context in which Jesus and his followers found themselves. It was the first layer of friction they likely encountered. It’s not unlike someone who, today, runs afoul of their local congregation’s or denomination’s rules about something; there are certain forms of discipline that those bodies might mete out, but that’s very different from going to prison for the same things. So in the 21st century, it’s important that we discern between those two categories, and recognize that when the New Testament speaks about conflict with Jews and Jewish institutions like councils and synagogues, it’s really talking about disputes about how best to live according to Jewish law and custom. We make a big mistake when we think of these councils and synagogues and their punishments as equivalent to the ones Rome had at its disposal, or when we think of their power as equal, or when we think of the violence Rome doled out as coming from religious conflicts. Jesus and his followers really were involved in an intramural dispute about the proper forms of religious and civic life, and from the perspective of normative, traditional institutions, Jesus and his followers were doing and saying weird stuff. So it’s not surprising that they would have come to the attention of those folks, and it’s not surprising that conflict with those people and institutions might cause people to go from one place to the next to avoid it, as 10:23 suggests. But we should not conflate that with the violence of empire.
10:21 does seem to suggest some really intense persecution, and the fraught social dynamics that might accompany it. Here, I am inclined to think that what’s in view here is not the same conflict with Jesus’ followers and synagogues that we were talking about in the point above, but probably conflict with the Roman Empire, since that’s the organization that had the authority to compel corporal punishment and the heft to push on social and family structures enough to fracture them. In my view, this section is a kind of apocalyptic flash-forward, to the period of the Jewish War, in which just these kind of fragmented loyalties and scattered attachments held sway. (Read Josephus for more; it’s a wild ride). The gospel of Matthew was likely written after the Jewish War, and passages like this one would have elicited nods of understanding from readers who knew that yes, Jews (Judeans) like Jesus’ followers had faced just this kind of imperial pressure and violence during the war.
Those are just a few of the places that I might try to dig in to this text. I read it overall as a kind of authorization for work, remembered in the 70s or 80s by Matthew (whoever he was) and/or his sources, that helped the followers of Jesus understand how they were supposed to keep Jesus’ mission alive after his death, which had happened 40 or 50 years earlier. It’s a blueprint and a structure for the kind of ministry they were supposed to be doing—healthcare work, basically, and tending to folks on the margins of their social systems. And it’s a kind of charter for the scope of the work, limiting it to Israel (until later in Matthew when Jesus seems to open it up to everyone else). This passage contains everything Jesus’ second or third generations of followers would have needed to undertake and continue their mission, including warnings about the perils of it and the proper ways to manage its costs and benefits.
I rather doubt that Jesus was intending a set of instructions like this for people like us. That’s important to remember; we can put ourselves in this text if we want to, but we have to remember that doing so means that we will have to translate certain things for our own contexts. Jesus is giving these instructions for a very limited group of people in very specific circumstances, and Matthew was recording them for another, slightly larger group with slightly differently circumstances. But we are centuries and a half a globe away from either of those times and places, and we are not the people that either Jesus or the text had in mind, either explicitly or implicitly. So, when it comes to imagining our own purposes and the scope of our own work, I think we should see this passage as a resource, but not as any kind of definitive handbook. How can we reimagine what we find here for our own networks, geographies, and systems, and how can we see ourselves finding the kind of purpose in the world that Jesus was giving these disciples?