Hilton Head Island, SC – December 15, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 10:1-23
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – These twelve Jesus sent out, charging them, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” – Mt. 10:5-6 (RSV)
During Advent I am preaching a series of sermons called a Reverse Retrospective on the Life of Jesus. We started with the crucifixion two Sundays ago, last Sunday we looked at Jesus’ frequent theological battles with the scribes and Pharisees, and next Sunday, the Sunday before Christmas, we will of course consider the birth of Jesus. For today we shall be thinking about one of the earliest events in the public ministry of Jesus, namely, the choice of his twelve disciples.
The point of doing these sermons in reverse chronological order is two-fold. First, while I have said and done some outlandish things in my time, I am not so foolhardy as to come to Christmas Sunday and to talk about the crucifixion. I hope I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. Furthermore, and of far greater consequence, I have been trying to suggest that there were particular historical reasons why Jesus died on a cross. The crucifixion was not a huge historical aberration, something totally out-of-the-blue with no connection to previous events. Jesus made enemies. That was not his intent, certainly, but it was inevitable, given what he said and did. He provoked some of the most powerful religious and political leaders of his time. The Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, has no quarrel with Jesus, but Pilate knew many Judeans did have serious disputes with Jesus. Pilate didn’t want to allow this intra-Jewish theological uproar to get out of hand. So reluctantly Pilate approved the crucifixion of Jesus.
Lest anyone misunderstand what I am attempting to do in this Advent sermon series, let me say there is no direct connection between Jesus’ choice of his twelve disciples and his crucifixion. Had the disciples been more astute than they were, they might have sensed that Jesus was in danger, and thus they might have tried to deter him from going to Jerusalem on that crucial (which literally means “at the cross”) spring week about the year 29 CE or so. But they were who they were, they did not see the cross coming, and when Jesus was arrested, the disciples did nothing to try to free Jesus, and in fact fled for their lives.
Jesus was a young man. Luke says he was about thirty years of age when he began his ministry in the Galilee. When he started out, he was very inexperienced. And he named the twelve just after he started out, perhaps within only a few weeks or months.
How did Jesus ultimately succeed via the twelve men he chose? Did they prove to be the ones who properly learned what Jesus intended to teach them? (The word disciple literally means “learner or “student.”) And why would Jesus have chosen a group of men who can only be honestly described as a very motley crew?
But before we see how motley they were, why did Jesus choose twelve disciples? The answer to that is very clear. There were twelve sons of Jacob, and thus twelve tribes of Israel, and the number “12” had always been symbolically very significant to Jews. Jesus saw himself as first, foremost, and solely a Jew, and he intended to establish a reform movement among the Jewish people. Therefore he chose twelve disciples, a very biblical number.
So who were the Twelve? We don’t get exactly the same list in any two of the three Gospels which provide lists (typically John doesn’t give us a list of the names of the Twelve at all), and there are some important small differences in the lists the three synoptic Gospel-writers give us. For example, both Matthew and Luke say Matthew was one of the disciples, but Mark says nothing about Matthew, and includes Thaddeus, whom neither of the other two writers names. Matthew and Mark list James the son of Alphaeus as a disciple, but Luke says it was Judas the son of James. Matthew and Mark say there was a disciple called Simon the Cananean, but Luke says it was Simon the Zealot. Furthermore, sometimes Matthew is called a tax collector, and sometimes that same person seems to have been known as Levi the tax collector.
If nothing else, these discrepancies suggest that thirty to fifty years after the crucifixion and resurrection, nobody was absolutely positive who the actual Twelve really were. However, that didn’t stop the early Church from developing elaborate traditions about what happened to the Twelve. In his book The March of Eleven Men Frank Mead wrote this about how various early followers of Jesus are believed to have died: “James the brother of Jesus and James the son of Zebedee preach and are killed by mobs in Jerusalem; Matthew is slain on a sword in Ethiopia; Phillip is hanged in Phrygia; Batholomew is flayed alive in Armenia. Andrew is crucified in Achaia, Thomas is run through with a lance in East India, Thaddeus is shot to death with arrows, a cross goes up in Persia for Simon the Zealot, and another in Rome for Peter. Matthias is beheaded; only John escapes a martyr’s grave.”
Are all those claims historically accurate? No one knows, nor can anyone know. But there is no question that early traditions in the Church declared that most of the Twelve plus other followers told about in the Book of Acts ended up as martyrs for their faith. If the traditions are valid, this must be said for the men Jesus chose: Whatever else they were, they were willing to die and did die for their allegiance to him and to his teachings. That by itself is remarkable, especially when we consider that they abandoned Jesus in his most perilous hour in Gethsemane.
But there are other important observations to be made about these men. First, they were so ordinary. There is nothing outstanding about any of them. The first four to be chosen were commercial fishermen on what Christians call the Sea of Galilee, or what Jews called Ha-Kinneret: the harp, because it is shaped like a biblical harp. Peter and Andrew were brothers, as were James and John. Simon Peter became the chief spokesman of the Twelve, but he frequently suffered from foot-in-mouth disease, probably because he was exceedingly impetuous. Matthew was a tax collector, which means he was a minor bureaucrat paid by the Romans to extract taxes from his fellow Jews. No doubt that did not endear him to many Jews. One of three disciples identified by the name of Simon was also identified as a Zealot. The Zealots were nationalist insurrectionists who engaged in hit-and-run killings of the Roman soldiers who occupied Judea.
The one disciple whom all four Gospel writers intentionally identify as the one who betrayed Jesus on Maundy Thursday was Judas Iscariot. The name “Iscariot” is said to mean one of two things. There was a village close to Bethlehem in Judea which was called Keriot. Thus Judas may have been Ish-Keriot, “Man of Keriot” in Hebrew. If so, that is important, because Judas would have been the only southerner in the inner circle. Everyone else was from the north, from the Galilee, where Jesus grew up and where he presumably spent all but the last week of his three-year ministry. What is an analogy for this very odd choice? It would be as though Jesus had lived his entire life in Maine or Michigan or Minnesota, and he chose eleven apostles from his home region, and one from South Carolina or Georgia or Alabama. Why would he do that?
The other possibility regarding Judas Iscariot is that the second “name” doesn’t connote the village of Keriot at all. Instead, it is claimed it refers to a short Roman sword called “the sicari.” By it Zealots crept up behind Roman troops and stabbed them in the back with the sicari, killing them instantly and silently. Thus Judas would have been Judas Ish-Sicari, Iscariot, the Man of the Short Sword. And if that is what the word connotes, it implies that Jesus chose as disciples one Jewish man who collected taxes from Jews for the Romans and two men who previously had been violent enemies of the Romans. Why, particularly, would he do that?
By selecting ordinary people, and by selecting people who theretofore might have been at great odds with one another, Jesus was illustrating by his very choices that he intended to establish a new kind of theological order, which he called “the kingdom of God.” In God’s kingdom, differences were to be acknowledged and dealt with, and grievances were to be recognized and sublimated. The fellowship Jesus would create would include those who otherwise would be enemies or unnatural allies or uneasy partners. Everyone would be welcome, which is why Jesus chose ordinary Galileans, plus maybe one tragically unique Judean.
But for what were they chosen? Initially, it seems, Jesus had only a short-term mission in mind for them. “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Mt. 10:5-6). Stay close to home, guys; go only among Galilean Jews. And among them, go only to those who are left out, whom institutional Judaism has overlooked or rejected, or those who themselves have deliberately elected to remain outside the religious culture of the Jews. Christians would call these people “the unchurched.” I doubt that any Jews ever considered calling such folks “the unsynagogued.”
Furthermore, the mission was to be brief. “Take no gold, no silver, no copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, nor two tunics, nor sandals, nor a staff; for the laborer deserves his food” (Mt. 10:9-10). Surely the additional sayings in Matthew 10 were things Jesus said to the disciples later on, when he sensed his days were severely numbered, and they needed to be mentally and spiritually prepared for what lay ahead of them. “Beware of men; for they will deliver you up to the councils, and flog you in their synagogues, and you wil be dragged before governors and kings for my sake, to bear testimony before them and the Gentiles” (10:17-18). In Matthew 28 Jesus would commission the disciples to go to the Gentiles and to the ends of the earth, but not in Matthew 10. Their first assignment was to be the fleet-footed advance men to prepare the towns and villages around the Sea of Galilee for when Jesus himself would make visits in those places. Jesus didn’t intend to come “cold” to any community; he wanted people in the neighborhood of the Galilee to be told who he was and that he would soon be arriving there.
But how was this motley crew to build unity among the Galileans, when they themselves were not remotely unified? How could such disparate people as the disciples and the other early followers of Jesus ever become one?
Jon M. Sweeney is the author, with his rabbi-wife Michal Woll, of the book soon to be published called Mixed-Up Love: Relationships, Family, and Religious Identity in the 21st Century. He recently had an article in Christian Century (Nov. 13, 2013). He described being at a Passover seder dinner with his wife and several other couples. After the meal was finished, one of the Jewish men noticed that every couple there was of mixed religion; one was a Jew, and one a Christian. He asked the Christians why they were there. One by one they gave their answers.
When it came time for Jon Sweeney to speak, he said, “Do I have to be here as a Christian? I am married to this beautiful woman…. I’m not here wearing a sign. I’m not here tonight as a ‘Christian….’ Can’t I just be here as a human being?” Later he wrote, no longer addressing the seder group but us, the readers, “As I see it, thinking is important in a religious life, but not belief. Belief is only one result of thought, and in my experience, belief can actually suspend thinking. Probing, struggling, even arguing with God and with the texts of our traditions is honoring God in ways that I used to understand only belief to be.”
Jesus didn’t send out the disciples, either in Matthew 10 or Matthew 28, as trained experts on Jesus’ primary theme of “the kingdom of God.” Instead, he sent them out to proclaim the message and to hope for the best, to prepare people for the word of God as verbalized and incarnated by Jesus of Nazareth. The last two verses of Matthew have the risen Christ saying this to the disciples, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Mt. 28:19-20).
The Twelve were intelligent, but they were not learned. They hadn’t been schooled in the intricacies of Judaism. As for Christianity, none of them ever knew there was a Christianity. They thought they were inviting Gentiles into Jesus-type Judaism, and Jews into a new kind of Judaism which had been explicated for them during their three years with Jesus.
It was a great gamble for Jesus to choose the particular Twelve he did choose. They represented far, far more in potentiality than in actuality. Actually, they were most noteworthy for how ordinary they were. None of them, not even the Prince of Apostles, illustrated enormous promise during the three years of preparation they spent with Jesus. But afterward, after the crucifixion and resurrection and ascension, however any of us understands those realities, the Eleven (Judas died on Good Friday along with Jesus) became giants of faith and faithfulness. They who at first appeared so limited turned out to be so astonishingly adept as apostles of God through their Master, Jesus Christ.
When I was a teenager, I remember a preacher somewhere giving a sermon illustration I have never forgotten. I don’t recall from whom, or where, or when I heard this, but the story has always remained with me. After Jesus ascended into heaven following the resurrection, he was met by the angels. They were eager to find out how it had gone for him, and what had happened during the years of his public ministry on earth.
“It didn’t go very well,” Jesus admitted openly. “I started out preaching and teaching in the Galilee, and soon afterward I chose twelve disciples in particular to accompany me. We went many places, and I did and said many things. But an opposition grew, and my enemies became more numerous and determined. In the end, the Twelve and I all went up to Jerusalem for Passover, and there I was arrested and tried for sedition, and I was crucified.”
“Did your disciples do nothing to try to protect you?” the incredulous angels asked. “Nothing,” Jesus quietly answered. “Then who is charge now?” the angels inquired. “They are,” said Jesus. “They???” exclaimed the angels; “The ones who fled for their lives?” “Yes,” Jesus answered, again very quietly. “Well, have you no other plan?” asked the astonished angels. “I have no other plan,” Jesus firmly told them.
The future of Christianity is in our hands. Jesus has gambled on us, on you and me. There is no other plan.