NOTES for Luk 10:3
Sending His disciples to preach the Kingdom that has drawn near, Jesus says to them: I send you 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 lies in the very character of the preaching, in what those sent are going to preach and what they are to bear witness about. The disciples are to bear witness to the Kingdom. To the Kingdom that, according to the Savior's own word, is "not of this world." And which for this very reason the world does not accept.
Not even because it is of a different nature from the world, but because it is hostile to it. The world lies in evil. If it were simply different compared with the Kingdom, there might be no hostility: the action of the Kingdom on the world would transfigure it, change its nature, and the world would become the Kingdom, opening itself to God's direct action. But in the world there are forces that oppose the Kingdom, and the world has submitted to them, has fallen 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 state of that nature. And everyone who lives according to the laws of this world becomes, accordingly, 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 do not attack sheep out of malice, but out of hunger.
As, in fact, all predators do with their prey: nothing personal, only the necessity of survival. And unlike the well-known character in Krylov's fable, neither wolves nor other predators seek justifications for themselves. "You are guilty 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 any moral categories.
And people who live according to the laws of the fallen world often react to witnesses of the Kingdom and to those living its life in roughly the same way: they want to get rid of such people, they want them to disappear from the world and from their own 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 somehow justify this desire of theirs.
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 himself wants to change, until he wants to be freed from the power of that 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.