Sheep Among Wolves

Sheep Among Wolves, by Project 86

Lections: The Third Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 11), AD 2026 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

A comedian whom I follow had an interview recently, in which he said: “I don’t really think that God cares.” There’s so much evil in the world, so much suffering, not just amongst humans but animals too. And not only does God not stop it, He’s also the one who set the whole thing up, right? God made the devil. God made serial killers. So isn’t there a sense in which all of this is on Him?

Our Gospel reading this morning comes from a section of Matthew known as the Missionary Discourse. In it, Jesus travels from city to town, teaching in synagogues, proclaiming the Good News, all while curing every conceivable sickness and disease. And the sheer volume of need overwhelms Him. He looks at the crowds, at all the people who need help, and He says, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few! Therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out more laborers.”

Jesus is doing as much good as He can, yet even with all of His miracles, He remains but one Man. There are only so many He can see, so many He can help, so many He can cure. So, like Moses in the wilderness, our Lord delegates. He gathers the Twelve—His inner circle of Apostles—and gives to them His authority, shares with them His power, the wholeness of Jesus Christ overflowing into others.

Twelve is a number of completeness in the Bible: twelve signs of the Zodiac, twelve months in a year; more importantly, Twelve Tribes from the twelve sons of Israel. As God, in the Hebrew Scriptures, called forth a priestly nation for Himself, so here Christ now does the same. The Apostles are to go and do as Jesus does, in Jesus’ Name. They now have His authority over all lesser, unclean spirits. They are given His own power to cure sickness and disease.

In so doing, they are not to seek out monetary gain, but they are to trust that they shall be housed and fed as they go throughout the villages of Israel. Wheresoever they may roam, they are first and foremost to offer peace, to send forth their peace, and if it is rejected—if the peace of God is neither valued nor reciprocated—then they must simply shake it off. Jesus gives no warrant for condemnation or for vengeance. Just do good, period. And move on.

As always, we must recall that Christ is not naive. “I am sending you out as sheep amidst the wolves,” He warns. “So be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” Have minds as sharp as devils’, and hearts as soft as down. This cannot be read as pollyannish. Christ calls us to bravery, and fortitude, and trust: trust in His promise, trust in the Good News. And yes, this will cause dissension. Yes, some of the Apostles will suffer. But in so doing, they give witness to the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, alive within their souls.

This is our model of Christian mission, of Christian discipleship, from the lips of Christ Himself: responding to the needs of the people; trusting in God’s provision; and carrying forth the Lord’s own work of healing and restoration. Faith, then, is not passive belief but active relief. We are to teach and to cure and to feed and to restore, neither seeking our own gain nor backing down in the face of danger. In other words, we are to be like Christ, to be Christ for a world in need of Him.

Now, granted, that is a tall order. Who has ever been like Christ, in all of human history? Morally, only the Buddha might come close. Certainly I do not. Here we must turn to an ancient law of logic: that you cannot give what you do not have. Nothing comes from nothing. If I am to give Christ, I must first receive Christ. And that is why we’re here, aren’t we? This is why the Church exists: to give us Jesus Christ; and then to go out into the world in order to share Him, to give as we have been given.

The vestments, the paraments, the Scriptures, the architecture, the rhythms of the liturgy, the beauty of the music, the excitement of the holidays, the centrality of preaching, and above all the Holy Sacraments of Jesus’ own Spirit and Body and Blood—all of this exists in order to give us Jesus, to make us, together, into Jesus. And then we are to go out there and give Him to the world: to teach and house and feed and care and cure and protect and correct and always forever to forgive, to start anew.

And when we fail, falter, fall flat, what does Jesus do with us? He gathers us again, cleanses us of sin, breathes into us His Holy Spirit, feeds us with His own Body and His Blood, resurrects us from the dead, and sends us right back out as sheep amidst the wolves. That is the life of discipleship, the life of a Christian, the life lived out in Jesus’ Name. It is hard, and wonderful, and not for the faint of heart. Yet even if your heart should faint, He’ll put a new one in you!

See, that comedian I like, he has the compassion of Jesus. He might be crass—he’s paid to be—but what pains him, what outrages him, is seeing others suffer. He thinks that if God is all-powerful, then He can’t be all-good; or if God is all-good, then He can’t be all-powerful; because pain persists in our world; unjust, disproportionate suffering. Men like him look to the Cross and think, “How could God do that to Jesus?”

But such is not, and cannot be, our theology. God didn’t nail an innocent Man into a Cross. We did. We did that. The Crucifixion was our idea. And where was God while we were hammering home the nails? God was the One whom we crucified. God is the Man on the Cross, the ultimate victim, the Passover Lamb. And what does the sinless God-Man say to those who torture Him to death? “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” That, by itself, is proof to me of His divinity.

We tend to think that God’s response to violence, to injustice, to suffering simply ought to be to end it, to snap His almighty fingers and force this world of ours to be good. After all, that’s what we would do, if we were God, right? It’s a very human solution: force it. But painless violence is still violence, isn’t it? And love doesn’t work that way, cannot work that way. Love cannot force.

God’s response to the brokenness of our world is to join us in it; to suffer everything that we suffer right alongside us; to take it all within Himself, all of our pain and wrath and cruelty, and there drown it in the ocean of His love. God doesn’t sit up, aloft and aloof on a cloud, and do nothing. He plunges down here, down into the mud and the blood, and gives to us everything He has, everything He is. He pours Himself out for the world! Christ has gone to Hell and back for you.

And the fire that His Spirit lights, the salvation He has wrought, has already been kindled, and one day shall encompass the cosmos. From the perspective of eternity, it is already done. But it does not come through force. It cannot come through force. It can only come through love, for God is only Love. And love is not a bomb that you can drop nor bullet you can shoot. Love flows from person to person, voice to voice, hand to hand. It necessitates forgiveness and grace and humility and joy. It looks like a sheep amidst the wolves. Love looks weak.

But therein lies its power. Love is wise as a serpent, innocent as a dove. Love always trusts, never gives up, and overcomes the grave. Hell thought that it had swallowed Christ, but Christ has swallowed Hell! The victory has already been won for us. If Christ is for us, who can be against us? We are simply called, as Christians, as the Body of Christ, to go and share this Good News as it has been given unto us.

“Whoever believes in Me will do the works that I’ve been doing,” Jesus promised, “and they will do even greater things than these.” And we have, haven’t we? We’ve flown to the moon, split the atom; waged generational campaigns of justice and peace for human rights and dignity. In terms of sheer scale, our medical miracles outproduce the many earthly cures of Jesus. He is proud of us, because He works through us.

God is neither silent nor uncaring. He is hard at work redeeming this and every world. We must open our hearts, open our hands, that He may work through us. For we are the ones He has chosen, through whom to send out His salvation.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/

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Nidaros Lutheran

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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026