The Third Sunday after Pentecost

 

“Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give”

As Christians living in the twenty-first century, we have little to fear. In this country, about sixty-three percent of Americans identify as Christian, a clear majority, and few fear persecution or death for their beliefs, unlike Jesus’ disciples or other Christians living in societies hostile to their faith. Jesus was sending his disciples “as sheep in the midst of wolves.” There was plenty to fear.

Matthew was writing his gospel during tough times. The tension between followers of Jesus and the established Jewish synagogue and the overall tension between the Jewish people and the Romans were increasing. Matthew’s gospel was addressed to the community at Jerusalem around 70 A.D., the year the Romans destroyed the Temple and caused widespread chaos both for the neophyte community of Jesus’ followers and the mainstream Jewish population. The need to affirm Jesus’ authority as Messiah permeates Matthew’s gospel, and today’s reading with Jesus sending out his disciples to evangelize the Jewish people would have been particularly timely for Matthew’s community. Jesus depicting the disciples being sent as feeling “troubled and abandoned” is an understatement.

The second descriptor of these disciples as needing a shepherd seems particularly apt when you consider how Jesus contemplated being killed at the hands of the Roman and Temple authorities, a feeling shared by the leadership of Matthew’s small Christian community in Jerusalem. What happens to sheep without a shepherd? They are devoured by wolves. It is difficult for us to imagine how desperate Jesus and Matthew were to get the message of God’s kingdom out to the “lost sheep of the house of Israel”. What could Jesus’ disciples, or for that matter, Matthew’s community offer coming from such a troubled community? They offered hope; their mission was to heal. But how can the wounded heal? Jesus summed it up by declaring the healing they received came free to them and “without cost you are to give”.  Who better to heal than those who are being healed?

We, too, are being sent. We begin our missionary journey, though, in our hearts. Before we can share God’s healing, we must realize God’s work in us that has begun. We don’t need to be cured to heal, but we need to know what the wounds look like. Before we can be Christ to the world, we need to see Christ in the world, present in the least and the last, the wounded and weak. As Christ’s glorified body still bore the wounds of his crucifixion, so we go forth using our wounds as proof of God’s healing and how real for us the coming of God’s kingdom is, because it has arrived.