P ♰ C

by Jean Allen

Are you ever afraid Jesus will ask you to do something you’re not ready for? The disciples may have been a little dismayed that Jesus was sending them out to cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers and cast out demons. Easy stuff, right? Jesus had anointed them with the authority to do those things but they must have felt overwhelmed to be given this authority. At the very least, they must have worried about the Jews they encountered asking, “Who do you guys think you are??” Their worst fears probably centered around trying to do these things, completely failing and looking like idiots.

Jesus would have known their fears and he would have known he was giving them no small task. But he did take into consideration that they were neophyte labourers in this metaphorical harvest. In the text he says, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans but go, rather, to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” These instructions weren’t instructions indicating exclusivity; they were the mercy of Jesus. We know from later texts that Jesus did, indeed, include the Samaritans and Gentiles in God’s plan of salvation, so why did he seem so exclusive in today’s reading.

Jesus knew his disciples would be nervous and overwhelmed by the task he set them so he didn’t want to have them face extra difficulties. The Samaritans were viewed by the Jews as racially impure and had religious differences as to where God’s Temple should be: Mount Gerizim vs Jerusalem. There were many points of conflict and sending the disciples into the midst of religious controversy that even scribes and Pharisees could not settle was beyond them. The disciples were uneducated, simple men. Jesus had a way of cutting through peripheral religious issues to reach a person, Samaritan or Gentile, but this was beyond his disciples. Later, yes, but not now.

Jesus knows what we can handle even if we don’t.