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Luke 10:1-16
Jesus Sends Out the Seventy-Two
After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. 2 He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. 3 Go! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves. 4 Do not take a purse or bag or sandals; and do not greet anyone on the road.
5 “When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ 6 If a person of peace is there, your peace will rest on them; if not, it will return to you. 7 Stay in that house, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house.
8 “When you enter a town and are welcomed, eat what is offered to you. 9 Heal the sick who are there and tell them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’ 10 But when you enter a town and are not welcomed, go into its streets and say, 11 ‘Even the dust of your town we wipe from our feet as a warning to you. Yet be sure of this: The kingdom of God has come near.’ 12 I tell you, it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom than for that town.
13 “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. 14 But it will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment than for you. 15 And you, Capernaum, will you be lifted to the heavens? No, you will go down to the depths.
16 “Whoever listens to you listens to me; whoever rejects you rejects me; but whoever rejects me rejects him who sent me.”
This passage strikes me as one of the most under-appreciated stories in the gospels. It’s the record of the instructions Jesus gave for sending out the second mission of his followers. As you might recall, Jesus had already sent out the twelve apostles, and now he sends out a larger group of seventy-two others. (Some translations say it was seventy others, but in any case, it was a larger group of disciples.)
We should probably stop and think about what that means in terms of the number of disciples Jesus had. We tend to think of Jesus either as traveling with twelve men or surrounded by crowds of thousands, but this story might actually us a better idea of the number of committed disciples Jesus had at this stage of his ministry. Some New Testament scholars have suggested that by the end of his earthly ministry, Jesus actually had somewhere between 75 and 100 devoted followers. So the number in this passage would seem to fit that estimate. As we know, some of Jesus’ disciples were women, but it would be unsafe for pairs of women to be sent out unaccompanied.
One of the reasons I say this passage is under-appreciated is that the instructions Jesus gave his disciples as he sent them out are probably meant to apply to people like us who represent him in our time.
I think it’s important for us to notice that Luke says Jesus sent his followers ahead of himself. Think about what that means: they weren’t being sent out with the expectation that they would convert large numbers of people by themselves. Their assignment was to prepare the way for their master. It was Jesus himself who would ‘save’ people and transform them by the power he brought into the world.
Here’s why I think that’s important: Lots of believers are intimidated about sharing our faith, because we make the mistake of thinking that we have to single-handedly persuade people to commit to their lives to Jesus. But our mission, like the mission of the seventy-two, is more modest – to tell others about the difference Jesus has made in our own lives, and about what we’ve seen him do in the lives of others. Then we can trust that Jesus will come after us, working by the power of the Holy Spirit to make himself known in a saving way.
Jesus also tells his followers to pray that God would raise up others to join in telling the world about him. When he talks about ‘the harvest,’ he’s talking about God’s ‘gathering in’ people to himself. So the people Jesus sends out are to be praying for God to call others to join in the work of the kingdom.
In keeping with his instructions to the original twelve apostles, Jesus tells the larger group not to take a bunch of stuff with them, and not to stop along the way to visit with others. His intention probably was not that they stare straight ahead and not speak to anyone, but rather that they refrain from stopping along the way to visit family and friends. They were “on business,” so to speak, not on vacation.
Jesus tells his followers that they are to offer his peace to those they meet in their travels. Some would be inclined to embrace that peace, and to offer hospitality to those who came in his name. Some would not, and in those cases the disciples were simply to move on.
It’s easy to miss the significance of Jesus’ instructions to the disciples to eat what they’re offered. (In fact, he tells them twice.) Although Jesus understood his ministry to begin with the people of Israel, some of his ministry took place in gentile areas. So it was entirely possible that some of those he was sending out would be served foods that were not considered kosher. Accepting the hospitality of people of all kinds and breaking bread with them would be an important way to build relationships that allowed the disciples to effectively tell the good news about Jesus.
And as it turns out, that good news was and is that the kingdom of God has come near. That might seem a little surprising — we might expect that Jesus would have the disciples tell people that he’d come to die for their sins. Or that they should repent of their sins and be good. But it seems that the main point Jesus wanted them to communicate was that the kingdom of God had started to break into this world. His incarnation was the beginning of that process, and his followers were to play a part in bringing that kingdom to fulfillment.
Jesus also tells his disciples to heal the sick. That’s very significant, too — they are to minister to people’s physical needs as well as to their spiritual ones. And in the years to come, the commitment by Jesus’ followers to healing the sick would become one of the identifying marks of their movement, as it still is to this very day.
Finally, Jesus warns the disciples that not everyone will accept their ministry. He points out that even in his adult hometown of Capernaum, lots of people failed to follow him even when they witnessed his miracles. He also mentions that people in some gentile towns would respond to the word better than the most of the chosen people. So his followers should expect that the good news they bring will not always be accepted and embraced. That’s obviously true of our witness today, too.
One of the reasons I say this is an under-appreciated passage is that when you look closely, it’s striking how much Jesus’ instructions to these seventy-two disciples apply to our own circumstances as the body of Jesus in the world today.
Let’s pray. Lord, we thank you for the opportunity to receive these same instructions Jesus gave his first followers. Help us to go into the world as they went, following his directions as they did, and inspired by the same Spirit that empowered them. Amen.
Every Blessing,
Henry
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