I hooked a fish, a decent sized smallmouth bass, on my second cast. “All right,” I thought, “this is going to be good.” I was on a second-choice guided fishing trip at a lake on Vancouver Island. The Cowichan River I had hoped to float with a guide for trout was too low for a boat to pass. So he suggested that he take me smallmouth fishing on a lake because that had been going well. The first few minutes of that outing looked like it would prove true. Alas, it was not to be.
The rest of the day I caught two or three more decent fish and two or three tiny ones. There were none of the lunkers my guide had hoped we would find and even the smaller fish were few and far between. What had begun seemingly so successful turned out to be my second fishing disappointment in beautiful British Columbia. It was a nice day on the water, but hardly what I had expected.
Our text for Sunday, the mission of the seventy (-two) in Luke 10:1-20, was a bit like that second cast I mentioned. As the end of the text in verse 17 shows, those six dozen early evangelists were thrilled at their success, “Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!” But in verse 20 Jesus doused their enthusiasm with a simple reminder of that in which real spiritual success consists, “that your names are written in heaven.”
This mission of the seventy (-two) appears only in Luke’s Gospel. Mark and Luke have only the sending out of the twelve, which Luke records at the beginning of the previous chapter, chapter 9. There’s an almost even split in the various ancient manuscripts on the actual number (“70” or “72”) of evangelists, although the case seems slightly better for 72. Either way, the number may represent the number of nations listed in Genesis 10 (70 in Hebrew, 72 in Greek in the Septuagint), thus signifying the initiation of the Christian mission to the whole world.
There are various source explanations for the similarity between the instructions given to these 72 in verses 4-11, and those instructions received by the 12 apostles in Luke 9 and in Matthew 10 and Mark 6. Simply speaking, it makes sense that a larger group charged with the same sort of mission as the smaller would have similar directions to follow. More broadly, it suggests that the call to Christian mission is not the narrow province of a few specialists, but belongs to all those who follow Christ. But, like all those first disciples, we must temper our expectations of success.
The warnings in verses 10 and 11 about how to respond to those who reject the mission of those who go ahead of Jesus make clear that sharing the Gospel will not be unmitigated triumph. As I approached differently in last week’s text, thinking about the 12’s own cold reception in a Samaritan town, there will be times when the only Christian thing to do is move on and away from those aimed in a different direction.
Ultimately, Jesus explained in verse 20, what really matters for those who do His work is not huge numbers of conversions or of people healed and delivered from evil and sin. It is the state of our own souls in relation to Him. It’s a particularly spiritual application of His saying in Matthew 16:26 that there is no profit in gaining the whole world (even for Jesus!) if you lose your own soul in the process.
One way of looking at fishing is that it is not to be measured by how many fish you catch, but how well you fished, covered the water, and enjoyed time spent in God’s sublime interface between water, land and sky. It may not be easy to keep that peaceful mindset when the fish are not biting, but it’s absolutely essential when one is doing the work of God’s kingdom.