Go Nowhere Among the Gentiles..

[Our lessons this Sunday were Exodus 19:2-8a, Psalm 100, Romans 5:1-8, and Matthew 9:35-10:23.]

Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’

These words of Jesus from our Gospel reading today sound strange to us today, especially in light of what Jesus says at the end of Matthew’s Gospel:

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 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, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.

Why did Jesus at first limit his ministry to the people of Israel? There is a clue in our reading from Exodus: “You shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” The people of Israel had a special relationship with God, and despite their failings and their sufferings, the relationship remained. So God’s people, the people of Israel, would be the first to hear Jesus’ message.

There was probably a practical reason. The apostles, especially before receiving the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, weren’t the most dynamic men around—at some times they were pretty thick! The area of Palestine shares a distinctive characteristic of areas between larger neighbors: that got conquered from all directions! (Poland has historically had the same problem.) The Egyptians, the Philistines, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks and now the Romans had consistently overrun the area. The conquerors weren’t likely to be too interested in the message of some Galilean bumpkins (and even to many of the Jews, “Galilean Bumpkin” was sort of redundant).

Better to start off with the people who in many ways have been hearing this message for centuries, because, throughout his earthly ministry, Jesus uses language that his listeners would immediately recognize as being taken from their Scripture. When Jesus is calling for the “Kingdom of God” or the “Kingdom of Heaven”, this is familiar territory.

There’s a lesson here for us. World-wide mission is important, but we need to remember the people close to us as well. We have room here in this place for so many more to hear the good news that the Kingdom of Heaven is near. And the people around us speak the same language, have familiar customs—it should be pretty easy to do! We are called out to go to our own people, the people of our own households and neighborhoods, and to share with them the great good news that the kingdom of heaven has come near and that there are seats available for the great banquet. After all, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few!”