NOTES for Luk 10:3
Sending His disciples to preach the Kingdom that has drawn near, Jesus says to them: I send you out as sheep among wolves. A natural question arises: why does everyone around turn out to be wolves? And if so, why and for what purpose does Jesus send the disciples to preach? Meanwhile, the answer is contained in the very nature of the preaching, in what those who are sent are going to preach and about what they must bear witness. The disciples must bear witness to the Kingdom. To the Kingdom which, according to the word of the Savior Himself, is "not of this world." And for that very reason the world does not accept it.
Not even because it is of a different nature from the world, but because it is hostile to it. For the world lies in evil. If it were simply different in comparison with the Kingdom, there might be no hostility: the Kingdom's action on the world would transform it, would change its nature, and the world would become the Kingdom, opening itself to God's direct action. But there are forces in the world that oppose the Kingdom, and the world has submitted to them and come completely under their power; that is why it is called fallen.
And therefore it is hostile to the Kingdom. Not by nature, but by the present condition of that nature. And everyone who lives according to the laws of this world accordingly becomes hostile to everyone who lives by the Kingdom and bears witness to it. Here there is the same organic opposition as between wolves and sheep. Wolves attack sheep not out of malice, but out of hunger.
As, indeed, all predators do their prey: nothing personal, only the necessity of survival. And unlike Krylov's well-known character from the fable, neither wolves nor other predators look for justifications for themselves. "You are to blame already because I want to eat" is a human view of the situation; animals know no such concepts, and their instincts tell them nothing about moral categories.
And people who live according to the laws of the fallen world often react to witnesses of the Kingdom and to those who live its life in much the same way: they want to get rid of such people; they want them to disappear from the world and from their life simply because they are different. Because they bring into the world and into their own life something that will destroy the existing order of things, apart from which the fallen person cannot imagine himself. Of course, unlike wolves and other predators, people usually justify this desire of theirs in some way.
But in essence the same instinct of self-preservation is at work here, the desire to survive and not perish, which makes a wolf attack a flock of sheep. And until a person wants to change himself, until he wants to be freed from the power of the evil in which the fallen world lies, he will react to witnesses of the Kingdom as a predator reacts to prey. Not from any personal motives, but simply according to the law of this world.