Lectionary Reflection for Proper 9C on Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

You may get to the very top of the ladder and then find it has not been leaning against the right wall.
—Allen Raine

CHOOSING THE RIGHT WALL

Every religion is built on a vision. Faith is essentially a story which presents a collection of ideas about the nature and activity of God (or some kind of More), a dream of what a world of universal flourishing looks like, and a set of rituals or practices to train us in the attitudes, speech, behaviour, and relationships that move us toward a flourishing world.¹ In Christianity, that vision has often been summarised in two short teachings of Jesus: the Great Commandment to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27 CEB) and the Great Commission to “go 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 obey everything that I’ve commanded you” (Matthew 18:19, 20 CEB).

Unfortunately, these two aspects of Jesus’ teaching have not always been held together very well. The call of mission and evangelism, of taking the Gospel to the world, has often been seen as a way to love God, but love for neighbour has somehow been overlooked. The mandate to “make disciples” has usually been interpreted as making converts and then forcing them to conform to Western cultural standards of worship, dress, behaviour, relationships, economics, and politics. As any honest history of colonialism shows, the Christian and European quest to “make disciples of all nations ”was so intertwined with imperial and economic goals that any semblance of love for neighbour was completely lost.² But the impact of the colonialist, white-supremacist vision of Christianity is not just a thing of the past; it remains destructively alive and well in the fundamentalist evangelicalism that drives the Republican Party in the USA and that influences much of Christianity across the world. Somehow, the vision that shapes and motivates many believers today has become a ladder that is up against the wrong wall. It may feel like the Christian faith is making progress, but what it is achieving contradicts the message and mission of Christ that we find in the Gospels.

The Great Commission and how we’ve misunderstood it has not only taken priority over the Great Commandment; it has resulted in a Christianity that is too often distorted and destructive, and a world in which religion in general has often become polarising and violent. Those of us who claim to follow Jesus have tended to make assumptions about the meaning of the Great Commission and have imposed our cultural values and expectations on the text. But we have ignored how Jesus himself began implementing his mission with his disciples. In the Gospel reading from Luke 10 for Proper 9C, we get a compelling window into Jesus’ understanding of how his message and mission should be shared with the world—and his approach can be summarised in one word: hospitality.

Matthew Fox argues that it is far healthier and more helpful to consider holiness in terms of cosmic hospitality than to follow the usual interpretations that employ terms like ‘perfection’ or ‘separation’.³ But somehow we have struggled to embrace hospitality as a defining feature of Christ’s message and mission, and as the central image of the reign of God and the Great Commission. The lack of hospitality in our society, and in far too many faith communities, is easy to identify. On a global level, the “Big, Beautiful Bill”, which Donald Trump’s administration is trying to push through, and which is supported by MAGA Christians and politicians who claim to follow Christ, seeks to create tax cuts for the wealthiest and lay a much heavier financial burden on the poor.⁴ This follows on from cuts that have already been made to USAID, which helped millions of the poorest people on the planet.⁵

But on the local and personal level, this lack of hospitality in Christian circles can be seen in less visible but equally harmful ways. For example, in one church I served a few years ago, our liturgy encouraged us to greet one another each week in one of the eleven official South African languages. But some of our members refused to do so in any language except English or Afrikaans. The unrecognised truth that is revealed in these realities is that when our Christian faith fails to make us more hospitable, it fails to be Christian.

THE HOLINESS OF HOSPITALITY

In Luke 9, the writer tells us that Jesus set his sights on travelling to Jerusalem, and then offers examples of how people on the way responded to Jesus. The first part of the journey was not encouraging: a Samaritan village refused to receive Jesus, and three possible disciples were unable to make a decision about following him.⁶ But then the narrative turns to Jesus sending his disciples to the villages he would be passing on his way to Jerusalem. This was the second time Jesus sent his disciples out like this. The first was in 9:1-6 when he sent out just the twelve apostles. This time, the group was bigger because the mission was expanding. As Michael Card notes:

The number [of disciples] comes to us from Genesis 10, a passage referred to as the "Table of Nations." The list represents all of the known nations of the world. In time the number of the nations became a symbol for the Gentile world. So Jesus' appointing of seventy (or seventy-two) disciples to be sent ahead points to the universality of the gospel, a central theme in Luke's Gospel.⁷

There is also an echo here of Moses’ appointment of seventy elders who would share in God’s Spirit and help him to lead the people of Israel.⁸ Because he was on the way to Jerusalem and the end of his physical presence with his followers, Jesus was preparing them for the time when his authority would be permanently transferred to them.