NOTES for Mat 10:16-22
Judging by Jesus' words, bearing witness to the Kingdom requires wisdom and simplicity. And a witness evidently needs both, in part because the world will not accept testimony about the Kingdom, so its witnesses face inevitable persecution and harassment. What exactly does a witness need wisdom and simplicity for? To avoid persecution? Hardly: to avoid it, the witness would have to give up bearing witness altogether. The point seems to lie elsewhere: wisdom and simplicity are needed to bear witness to those who neither want nor are able to hear the testimony. For fallen humanity not only does not want to understand someone who speaks about the Kingdom, but often simply cannot. The whole nature of the fallen person resists such understanding, and even someone who is well disposed can often do nothing about it. If we also take into account pressure from others, who are usually anything but well disposed, the situation becomes still more difficult. Only the combination of wisdom and simplicity can make it possible, in such circumstances, to convey the testimony to the few who do wish to hear it. By simplicity here, as in His other teachings, Jesus means not ignorance but that inner integrity and clarity of intention without which a healthy spiritual life is inconceivable, let alone bearing witness. Yet inner integrity by no means rules out flexibility in the form of witness; on the contrary, it presupposes it. That form depends above all on whom one has to bear witness to. For in both the Yahwistic and the Jewish traditions, wisdom included the ability to build relationships with people, and therefore the ability to hear and understand another person. Without such understanding, of course, the witness will be incomplete: everyone wants to hear from a witness not only general words, but something that concerns them personally, their life and their problems. Wisdom and simplicity thus appear to be means of bearing witness in a world that is by no means inclined to accept testimony about the Kingdom. For it still needs the Kingdom, most often without realizing it. And among the witness's tasks is to help it become aware of this fact.