The kingdom of God has come near to you.
If the kingdom of God is the world as it is in all its creational, fundamental reality, the always and everywhere, universal truth of the world, then the kingdom being near to you is both good news and bad news.
The kingdom being near to you is good news to the poor, those without power and autonomy; it is bad news for those invested in the status quo, who are content with the way things are (Luke 1:33, 4:43, 6:10, 7:28).
And so it is for those Jesus sends out. He knows that they will enter towns where they and their experience of the radical restoration of reality—the kingdom—will be welcomed, and those where they and their truth-living and truth-telling will be rejected.
That rejection, Jesus says, will be more than a rejection of them as individuals or followers of Jesus; it will be an existential rejection: Whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me. In rejecting the truth that the kingdom of God comes near, they reject the true, divinely interconnected reality of the world. They reject the whole of reality.
Reality, the world of truth, is peace. The task of the seventy-two is to announce peace; peace first, before anything else. First, because peace is not simply the absence of conflict, it is the bedrock of reality, of how the world functions. Peace is the essential quality of life from the beginning, in Eden, the garden of plenty, where humanity and divinity live and talk together (Genesis 1:1, 2:9, 3:8). The task of the seventy-two is first to speak reality and truth: peace.
And if a person of peace is there, your peace will rest on that person.
If a person—fully present, alive to the reality of the kingdom come near, living fully and truly into the gift of their life—is there, then, of course, peace will rest on that person. Peace is not the passive absence of violence but the dynamic nature of the divine; of reality (Psalm 4:8, 29:11, 85:8). Peace is actively present with/in/on a person in harmony with reality.
…but if not, it will return to you.
It is very possible to live as if conflict is the foundation of life—to live always on the attack, to assume the worst, to exist in a state of fear, to not live a life of openness. However, peace is not destroyed, it does not evaporate simply because it is rejected. Reality is reality, regardless of how much of a fantasy world we pretend to inhabit.
So, whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you.
The seventy-two represents us all—in ancient Judaism, the number seventy or seventy-two represented all the nations of the world. All of us must go out into its streets and remove ourselves from a town—or any environment—where there is no welcome; where the ancient and deep impulse of community-making is hobbled by anger or by its root, fear. Anger contorts and consumes us; fear cowers and cripples us. They so warp our experience of the world that we live as if violence, not peace, is the truth of the world.
Yet, even in a town, a people, and a culture so broken and warped that they call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! (Isaiah 5:20): Even here, there is dust that clings to our feet. Even in a place groaning under a stunted, warped worldview, dust is everywhere. And dust is the very stuff from which the divine formed and forms mortals and breathes into them the breath of life (Genesis 2:7).
Yet know this: the kingdom of God has—even here, perhaps, especially here—come near. It can do nothing else; the true reality of the world is present and active always and everywhere.
The seventy-two need no purse, no bag, no sandals because they are not professional travelling philosophers, kitting themselves out for a lifetime of town-by-town engagements. They do not bring a set of religious precepts, a new doctrine, or a novel philosophy with which to engage the population in discussion and argument. They have a simple and radical proclamation: The kingdom of God has come near to you.
The proclaimers are to remain in the same house, and they are to greet no one on the road. Their task is not the making of community but the urgent announcement of the true nature of the world; it is to live in and speak out the already existing reality of creational human community. The kingdom of God—the world as it is in all its real, divinely created, divinely animated essence—has come near.
The harvest is plentiful because that is the world’s fecund, dynamic reality. What began in the productive abundance of a garden where every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food grows (Genesis 2:9) always goes on in the production of enough to feed a multitude with extravagant abundance left over (Luke 9:17), and a hundredfold from a few seeds sown (Luke 8:8).
This is the truth of how the world was created to be and is, if we are only willing to see it (Luke 2:30, 20:23, 24:31), if we only have ears to hear (Luke 8:8, 14:35).
But the labourers are few.
There are few who do see and hear, who do live in the abundant reality of the divinely animated, intimately interconnected world. So, the seventy-two are urged to pray—to pay attention to and tune themselves in to the deep rhythms of the world as it truly is—seeking and longing that all flesh shall see the salvation of God (Luke 3:6) that all flesh shall experience the true abundance—the deep graceful gifting—that is their life (Luke 12:22-25).
The Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go.
If seventy-two is all nations, then Jesus sends all people—all flesh—to every town and place—all to all. We are all labourers and harvest. There is no in-group and out-group, no hierarchy, no division. All of us, labourers in creational reality and, at the same time, harvest of joy for all. Each of us is giver and receiver of the great goodness of the created garden of the world (Genesis 2:9), of the food that all ate and were filled (Luke 9:17), of the always plentiful harvest.
Even if there are towns that resist peace and even if the labourers are few, the harvest is and always will be plentiful. The rain falls on the just and the unjust and the sun warms the whole planet (Matthew 5:45). The dust of the ground (Genesis 2:7) is always ready to spring into life and produce a hundredfold (Luke 8:8)—this is the true way of the world.
Go on your way... like lambs in the midst of wolves.
There is a vision in the Hebrew Scriptures where lambs and wolves live and feed together (Isaiah 11:6, 65:25). The true nature of the world is peace that is so structurally all-present, so pervasively stitched into reality that it will even reshape the instincts of wolves and lambs—and of all the dust-made seventy-two.
Rejoice, Jesus says not in power or authority but in universal truth: your names are written in heaven. Your name is known in the presence of the divine; you are identified in the universe of peace. Who you are in your essence is truth-teller and nourishment for the world.