Matthew makes a transition to this segment of his book by telling how Jesus is hard at work in all the cities and villages teaching, proclaiming good news, and healing. Yet, there is far more to do than he can possibly get to by himself. He needs “laborers for the harvest” and finds—or creates—them in his inner circle of twelve disciples.
So we suddenly have precisely twelve disciples? That seems abrupt. We heard about the calling of Peter, Andrew, James and John back in chapter 4, just before the Sermon on the Mount. And we met Matthew in 9:9. But who are these others? The story makes it sound as if there’s been a clear organization here for some time.
Yes, and, interestingly, the parallels to this passage in Mark 3 and Luke 6 make a smoother transition by treating this as the moment when Jesus actually picks the Twelve out of a larger community of disciples. But it’s not altogether clear how well organized this group was during jesus’ ministry. There’s some confusion of names in the lists we have. For example. Matthew and Mark agree in calling one of the Twelve “Thaddaeus,” though some manuscripts have “Lebbaeus” instead. Luke, on the other hand, has neither of those names and has someone called “James’s Judas” in the list. (In English, we usually call him “Jude” to save him the embarrassment of being confused with Judas Iscariot.) Another oddity is that, although all three gospels name Matthew in the list of the Twelve, when Mark (2:13-17) and Luke (5:27-32) tell the story of Jesus calling the tax collector, they give that man’s name as “Levi,” not “Matthew.”
(In case you’re wondering what John does with all this, the answer would be “Next to nothing.” He refers to “The Twelve” four times and says that Jesus chose them, but never offers a list of them.)
To sum up, then: The Twelve may have had some variability in membership, but all four gospels agree they were specifically chosen by Jesus. What’s more, all four emphasize that within this inner circle was the man who would betray him. And Matthew makes the additional point that that tax collector whom Jesus called away from his tax table became one of them. It’s hardly an accident that this gospel bears that disciple’s name.
Do you mean that Matthew wrote it?
We can’t know much about the actual authors of the gospels. The names by which we know them now can only have been given later on, after they had all been gathered up into a single volume entitled To Euanggelion, “The Gospel.” Each of the four was then distinguished as “According to Matthew,” “According to Mark,” and so on. No doubt there was a long tradition before that about the origin of each; but such traditions may tell us less about individual authors than about the Christian community where each gospel emerged and to whom they traced their knowledge of Jesus.
In any case, the name “Matthew” offers us a particular perspective for reading this gospel. It bears the name of a religious outcast whom Jesus included in his inner circle of disciples. And that matches up quite closely with all that we have read in chapters 8-9: our author is particularly interested in how Jesus repeatedly violated the boundaries of conventional piety for the sake of declaring God’s love.
But then the scary “instructions” about Christians not having any money and so forth? They make me anxious every time they get read in church. Is this really Jesus’ rule for Christian life?
Not exactly. It’s essentially the way he himself lived. But these instructions are directed to a specific group who are being sent out on a particular mission. In verse 2, Matthew refers to them as apostoloi, from which we get the English word “apostles.” But it doesn’t mean “apostle” in the modern sense—a kind of grand title granted to only a small selection of saints. It means something on the order of “agents, emissaries, people entrusted with a specific mission, representatives.” This is the only place Matthew uses the word, and it applies specifically to the mission of the moment. They are Jesus’ delegates in the towns and villages he can’t reach. And if they do their job faithfully, Jesus says, people will generally receive their message as good news and their power over demons will be welcomed and they will themselves be welcomed and housed and fed. After all, this is how Jesus himself has been greeted.
But not by everybody!
Exactly. And that’s why Jesus goes on to say, “If they don’t welcome you, it’s not your fault.” Some people, as we know, have decided that the good Jesus does is really a form of evil and that they must oppose him. The people who can’t recognize good when it happens to their neighbor, Jesus says, will be condemned as worse than Sodom and Gomorrah—towns that were destroyed by fire from heaven in Genesis 19 because of their savage treatment of strangers.
Why does he tell them to limit their mission to “the house of Israel”? He hasn’t seemed particularly hostile to Gentiles up to now.
No, far from it. It’s interesting that he also forbids them to visit Samaritans, who claimed to be as much Israelites as Jesus’ own people, the Jews. When he says, then, that they are to go only “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” he’s using language that his countrymen used to define themselves over against the other inhabitants of the area.
That gives us a clue as to what the prohibition is about. He is aware how deep the prejudice against other ethnicities runs among all the inhabitants of the area. Gentiles and Samaritans, as groups, were apt to be as suspicious of Jews (and of each other) as Jews were of them. He himself has crossed the boundaries a couple of times (the centurion and the Gadarene demoniacs in chapter 8). But he is not going to make his green recruits deal with these complexities so early in their work. Later on, he will countermand this order. But, for now, he will not make their mission more difficult than it already is.
Because not every one will be happy with it?
Yes. In fact, he sends them off with a warning: there are wolves out there. You’ll have to be “wise as serpents”—attentive to your surroundings and careful about how you proceed. But, at the same time, they have to remain true to their commission, which is to do good, not harm—”harmless as doves.” That’s a hard bit of hybridization to bring off.
And then he launches into a discourse on the dangers they must expect.

Next up: JESUS’ MESSAGE WILL PROVE DEEPLY DIVISIVE (10:16-42)