Sent to Preach

This excerpt is talking about when the twelve disciples were sent out to proclaim "the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matthew 10). It never occurred to me to wonder how the apostles felt about it. Jesus spoke and so they did it. But thinking of how reluctant I feel to put myself out there sometimes ... they must have felt much the same, at least at the beginning.

Matthew and John and Peter (whose Gospel Mark wrote) were among the six pairs of apostles sent out on that first mission (Mt 10). No one of them gives us a single detail. Yet it may well have been the most nerve-racking experience any of them had yet had. To begin with, they had been ordered to take the road with no money and no food, wearing nothing but what they stood up in — they went out as mendicant friars would later go. They were to live on what they were given, and for men not rich indeed but respectably brought up, this could have been trying.

Yet it was as nothing to what they had been told they must do. We can imagine the cold pain in the back and the gulp as they steeled themselves to their first miracle — would the disease obey them? Would the devils? Their first sermon might have meant a chiller pain, a more sickening gulp — anyone who remembers his own first speech will know about that. And preaching was such a long way away from fishing, or even tax collecting. Fishermen had no training as prophets, tax collectors still less.

Their instructions were so very exacting (some indeed envisioned a wider apostolate than this first one). They were to be wise as serpents — considering the part that the serpent's cunning had played in the Fall of man, it is interesting that our Lord mentions its wisdom. It is faintly surprising that he offers is apostles the serpent for their imitation at all.

The dove also is held up for their imitation. Yet there is nothing dovelike in what they must do is any house or city will not receive them or hear their words: "Going forth out of that house or city, shake off the dust from your feet" (Mt 10:14). This shaking the dust from the feet was an exclusively Jewish gesture — Jews used it, for instance, when returning to the Holy Land from the lands of the Gentiles. The apostles must have been startled to be instructed to use it against their fellow Jews.

To Know Christ Jesus by Frank Sheed