NOTES for Luk 9:1-6

Sending the apostles out to preach, Jesus tells them not to make distinctions among the houses where they will have to stay, and not to hide from anyone the message they bear. Even rejection itself was not to be perceived by them as a failure of the mission, for their task was to bear witness to the Kingdom, and the rest was left to the free choice of those who heard.

Such an approach could seem somewhat unusual in those days. The institution of messengers, and the word "apostle" properly means messenger, had a quite specific meaning in the life of religious brotherhoods of the Gospel era. Such messengers were the connecting link among the separate communities that belonged to the brotherhood. Since the brotherhoods had no rigid hierarchical structure and were community movements, the role of such messengers was very important: they became living witnesses of important events in one or another community, events about which the members of that community considered it necessary to inform their brothers from other communities.

Preaching to outsiders, as a rule, was not part of the task of such apostles-messengers; special missionaries existed for that. But Jesus, while calling His disciples messengers, at the same time also proposes that they be missionaries, and more than that, that they be missionaries first of all, and that they consider the whole people of God, the whole Synagogue, as their community. Such an approach was unusual at the very least. But the witness of Jesus' apostles was unusual as well.

Ordinary apostles-messengers bore witness to something significant for their own religious brotherhood, usually in the context of that brotherhood's religious life, and each brotherhood's religious life had its own features. But the apostles sent by Jesus were to bear witness not to religious life, but to the Kingdom which, according to the Savior's word, had "drawn near." This approaching Kingdom was what Christ's apostles were to testify to, and to testify in such a way that its nearness would become obvious to everyone who wanted to see.

For such witness the community truly was the whole people of God, because the matter was not some specific religious tradition or religious practice, but something that concerned everyone who belonged to that people: the Messiah and the Kingdom, the things of which the prophets had spoken. And Jesus tells the apostles not to make distinctions and not to hide the message from anyone, so as to bring into the Kingdom everyone who wants it. For the issue is salvation, and God wants to save everyone, regardless of the religious tradition to which that person belongs.