Luke 10:1-9
After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. He said to them, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest. Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road. Whatever house you enter, first say, “Peace to this house!” And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you. Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the labourer deserves to be paid. Do not move about from house to house. Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there, and say to them, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.”
Our gospel reading for this evening, [Luke 10: 1-9] tells the account of Jesus appointing 70 of his companions and sending “them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go.” I note with interest that Jesus does not send his companions to go places he does not want to go. He doesn’t say, “You all go to Needles, Barstow, and Trona. I’ll cover Beverly Hills, the Palisades, and Newport Beach.” Like the 12 who preceded them, the 70 are an advance group, helping the towns prepare for the reconciling work of Jesus.
When we read this passage, we often focus on verse four’s injunction to “carry no purse, no bag, no sandals”. I’ve probably heard more preachers try to explain that verse away than any other text in scripture, with the possible exception of the one about the camel and the eye of the needle. I even once heard a priest in a wealthy parish use this text to talk about the all-expenses paid sabbatical trip he was about to take to Europe. “Life is a journey,” he said as he happily packed his purse, bag, and sandals for the ocean voyage.
But my missional interest is drawn less to the luggage and accessories question than it is to the things that Jesus tells them to do. He tells them to “cure the sick” and to say to them, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.”
Maybe it’s because I’m old and now spend much of my life going to doctors’ appointments, but for whatever reason I now find myself increasingly drawn to the synoptic gospel image of Jesus as a healer. Drawn to Christianity first in college, and attracted by our liturgical and intellectual traditions, I began my baptized life in a privileged, educated church culture that exalted Jesus primarily as a teacher, and I have spent most of my working life (I’m sorry to say) trying to explain (or at least say ingenious things about) Jesus’s parables and sayings. But years and years of reading the Daily Office have forced me to engage with the narratives of our first three Gospels, and when I focus at least on their shared Markan narrative it seems clear that the gigantic crowds came out to see Jesus primarily because he was a healer. To my mind, the teachings were analogous to the sermon you have to listen to before you can have the free meal at the Salvation Army shelter. But the main event, the draw, was the healing: casting out demons, cleansing the lepers, restoring sight and ambulation. The reconciliation on offer in Jesus was not abstract or theoretical. It was concrete and personal. People were restored to body, mind, and community. They might have picked up some life tips along the way, but it was the healing that mattered.
And this helps us understand why the only thing Jesus has the 70 say, after they have cured the sick, is “The kingdom of God has come near you.” The reconciliation you see at work in these acts of healing is the same kind of reconciliation at work on all fronts between God and us fragile, vulnerable, usually misguided humans. In other words: we have gotten lost, and God has come to find us.
The mission of the 70 is the primary mission of you and me and the church itself. We are not here primarily as stewards of an institution. We are here as those who know ourselves to have been lost and now found, to have been sick and now healed, to have been dead and now alive. And our job is not to make and carefully curate a museum of those experiences. Our job is to go out, as those who are sent, to enact this healing and reconciliation in the world.
We overthink life in the church. I wish I had back every hour I have spent sweating over an institutional “mission statement”. It isn’t as hard as we make it. “Cure the sick” and say “the kingdom of God has come near you” finally sum up everything we need to say about what God is up to in and through and among us.
As we come to the end of an academic year, many of you will be going out to take up your ministries in the church and in the world. As you enter these new fields of harvest, try to resist as best you can the institution’s pressure for you to become entry-level, mid-level, and then even high-level bureaucrats. The church is not the Jesus museum, and we are not its curators. The church is not the Jesus business, and we are not its managers. We are, with the seventy, those who have been sent. Our job is not complicated: heal the sick and proclaim the nearness of God’s kingdom. If we can keep our eyes and ears and hearts focused on what Jesus was actually up to, then we too will be Gospel missionaries in the deepest and best senses of the word. Amen.
