Matthew 10 - Depend on God

How much you take with you when you go away may differ according to where you’re going and how you’re travelling. Do you need to take clothes for multiple types of weather and all temperatures? How much space do you have? The amount you can take if you’re flying will be different than if you’re driving, and can pack a car with as much as you might need. If you’re walking from place to place, you may pack very little, and I suspect you will soon discover what is really necessary. However, very few of you will go away without taking anything at all: no money, no spare clothes, no extra bag, no spare shoes. Yet this seems to be what Jesus is asking of his disciples in Matthew 10.

Jesus has been preaching and teaching in different cities and villages. The crowds followed him, and he felt sorry for them. He tells his disciples to pray for labourers to send out into this harvest field (Matthew 9:35 – 38). He follows this up by sending them out to preach the good news of the kingdom. In Matthew 10:5-15, he gives them his instructions. While they are to take no money with them, they are also to work without charging. This does seem to slightly contradict verse 10, where it says that workers deserve their pay. But I think the answer may lie in ancient laws of hospitality. The disciples are to stay with someone who is good and worthy; presumably that someone will look after them while they are in that place, but they are not to charge for their work. It is not the crucial point of the passage, though. What this is saying to me is that Jesus is encouraging the disciples to depend on God, rather than on physical factors. This is supported by the verses following (Matthew 10:16 onwards) when Jesus warns the disciples that they will be handed over to councils, governors and kings, but at that moment they are not to worry about what to say, for the Spirit will give them the words. This seems to point to what happens after Jesus’ resurrection, rather than in that initial sending out while he is alive, but the point is the same: depend on God.

But what does this mean for us today? Presumably Jesus isn’t sending us out without any support whatsoever? Thankfully, no I don’t think so. Also, the disciples were not told they must not have money, or spare clothes, but that they were not to take them on this particular mission. Jesus was sending them out to spread the word of the Kingdom, but it may also have been partly training; helping them to get used to depending on God first and foremost. So I think this is what it is saying to us today. How much do we depend on God and how much do we place our security, our lives, on the things we own or the income we have? This is not to say that we shouldn’t own things, or have an income; just that we should depend on God, first and foremost.

It is a question of both/and rather than either/or. It is often difficult to distinguish how dependent we are on outside things until they are taken away from us, and if we have a steady income, a safe place to live, which hopefully we do, then, of course, some of our safety is going to come from that. God can give us these things, so the fact that we have them does not necessarily mean we are placing all our dependence on them rather than God. But it might be worth taking a step back every so often and asking: what are we depending on?

One way of doing this might be to ponder what we would take with us if we had to leave our home in a hurry. You can’t take everything, and you only have this one opportunity to leave. What would you not be able to live without, and why? The latter is important. You might decide that you would have to have your phone with you: is that because you are addicted to social media, or is it because it keeps you connected with friends and family or because your apps help you in your faith? If you had to reduce your possessions to one small room, what would you need with you – and why? There are no right or wrong answers here, and there is no one way we need to respond. Jesus is not asking us to give everything we value away; he is asking us to put God first, to trust God for what we need. What that looks like will be different for all of us, and will change over our lives. We are not asked to get it perfectly right, but rather to engage with the question as we continue our journey of faith as disciples of the living God.