Matthew 10:40-42 Commentary

The lectionary gives us a whole sermon to focus on what translators like to label as the “Rewards” section of Jesus’s mission instructions. What a misleading title! I mean, it makes sense why we like the title: who doesn’t like a prize? And we’ve also been chugging along for a few weeks now listening to these mission instructions talk about how hard and challenging it will be. Focusing on the “rewards” of being faithful to the call is meant to encourage us. And without a doubt, Jesus talks about rewards here (even though he doesn’t ever really say what the rewards are…)

But focusing on the rewards too much means we run the risk of missing what Jesus is actually saying to encourage us to stay present to our calls through hardship. This is yet another one of the Bible’s texts where God is promising to be with us. “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me,” Jesus says. Not only him, but the God and Father they wish to love and serve with their whole heart, soul, mind, and strength.

By welcoming God’s messengers, servants, prophets, those in need, we welcome God. But we also need to receive the welcome to complete the circle of reciprocity. Using Jesus’s set of instructions in this whole chapter, we remember that Jesus told them to go without the normal supplies so that they could receive. In a way, he was telling them to humble themselves. Our humbling usually involves acts that relate to letting go of ego and a drive for control and self-sufficiency. Jesus even calls the disciples “little ones”!

So we trust that we will get what we need, we humble ourselves by putting ourselves out there, exposed in a dangerous world, doing the good that God has called us to do. We remember that we serve in the name of Christ and that our work is received in the name of Christ. We welcome and receive, and in the process, mirror Jesus Christ.

And all of a sudden, it should hit us that this is not a new set of commands for Jesus’s disciples, but a reality that they have already begun to live with him. Jesus isn’t asking us to do anything that he hasn’t already done. And he does it for his own reward, which is us—his beloveds—with him forever.

After he has died, resurrected, and ascended to the most high, it will be through this mutual giving and receiving that the body of Christ will live in fellowship with one another, for the good of the world. As we follow in Jesus’s ways, we bear his image and give him glory—another way that Jesus describes his reward in Scripture.

What might that mean for what our own reward? I think we’re meant to understand that our reward is being part of God’s goodness growing. That as we give and receive in ways that God wants the world to be shaped by, we are entering into the mystery of God’s love. Because of the Holy Spirit, our good works become a means of grace: a way to simultaneously give in Jesus’s name as well as receive from him our reward. In giving and receiving, we know that we are like him and with him because we are living as his hands and feet in the world. That’s why we build up treasures that are in heaven, where Christ our head is, seated at the right hand of God. That’s why we become each other’s treasures, because we are each the treasured beloved of God.

This is the rewarding and rich life Jesus wants for us. Not the prizes, not the awards, or the recognition of names on plaques or buildings or statues, but something that much more satisfying (if cliché): the satisfaction of job well done because it brings joy and goodness into the world in Jesus’s name. This is both an internal and cosmic reward.

Textual Point

It’s been a few weeks since we read the opening of Jesus’s mission instructions, but we can remember that Jesus closes his instructions to the disciples with the same theme he used there—of being welcomed and receiving hospitality. This structural way of closing out the speech is intentional and helps us to focus on the reciprocal life of giving and receiving God has designed—that it too can see us through any kind of circumstances.

Illustration Idea

Mother Maria Skobtsova (1891-1945) is just one of many examples from the history of the church who followed Jesus’s command to be present—even in danger—to the needs of others. She was an Orthodox nun who served the poor in Paris before becoming part of the resistance movement in France during World War II. Skobtsova was arrested and executed by the Nazis. She wrote poetry and theology extensively and often focused on the call to serve others because everyone is “an icon of Christ.” But she also recognized that that meant the opposite was true as well: she imaged Christ to others. “I am your message Lord,” she wrote, “Throw me like a blazing torch into the night, so that all may see and understand what it means to be a disciple.” May the saints never lose their reward.